The XP changes sure were a jump scare. I log in and look at the season end date, and see it's a week to go, and i'm suddenly aware that i still have pages of battle pass to get (not the shiny styles, who cares).
It's a really stupid decision to reduce the XP gain options for BR in a vain attempt to get people to play the lego modes etc. As all that happens is people find exploits and work arounds, and your modes end up un-played anyway, or even worse; stuffed with bots and people occasionally wiggling their character around.

Musou/Story mode is way too long in this one, we go from like 7 stages per character, to just shy of 20. And given the length of the levels in the DW series, this is far too long. I know you can switch characters, but they have to start at level 1 if you decide to switch mid story.
I also dislike the dueling system, this is more of a personal peeve, and i know some people like the whole risk/reward of it. But i think as an experience it boils down to your opponent blocking and countering while you end up with a draw and your morale goes down anyway. The only practical choices are characters with throw attacks, and there's not too many of those.
I think the story is improved here from 3, the voice acting isn't quite as bad, and having things played out linear, with breaks for narration improves on the mystifying nonsense of the 3rd game's story. However it's still kind of messed up. A pretty standard playthrough of Shu resulted in defeating Wei first, and being greeted with a "Fall of Wu" scenario, and the first battle of this set of levels was a battle against Wei at Fan Castle, all the while Wu is led by Sun Jian who's supposed to be dead at that point, it's not really that much of a leap ahead in telling the story.
I think visually it's duller than DW3, there's this very brown looking quality to it, everything just feels dusty and dull.

However, if it seems like I'm being overly negative, I actually do like DW4, these are the only criticisms i have, and they're not deal-breakers. The weapon system here is the best in the series, the character designs are much better, there's story modes for the non-three kingdoms characters built in. The OST is really great, with a nice blend of chinese traditional instruments and metal riffs. The challenge level is just shy of DW3's perfection, but it's pretty good regardless, the style of enemy AI is alive and kicking here. There's a fun little addition of character creates and custom bodyguards.

Overall, i rate this just below DW3.