It used to be grim, red and creepy. Yesterday I started the game after a long break and… What is that Hello Kitty sky? Yes it IS beautiful, but… The old storm was much cooler! The red light around, low vision distance, screaming elder things jumping out of the crimson fog… Is the change intended? Pity I didn’t take any screenshots inside the storm before the update
I think the point was to make the center of Siptah a more tolerable place to build. So they toned down the storm, removed building damage and took out the siege beasts on official servers. The toned down storm might also improve performance, but that is just a guess.
Performance hasn’t improved on my server. Actually, since the update the server is using more RAM than before. About 1GB - 1.2GB more, putting the server at about 11.4GB at peak. Haven’t noticed any client side performance gains either.
I agree though, the new maelstrom looks silly. A faint breeze in comparison.