As from dlcs go I actually had a much harder time enjoying this one over the others. Areas felt incomplete and empty, lots of main game copy paste content or even dlc copy paste content like the stupid hippos. The tedious easter egg hunt for skibbidy fragments and weird power scaling. And the atrocious final boss.
Overall I still enjoyed it and the map was beautiful to look at and fun to explore but it feels like a concentration of all the main games flaws. There's very few fun things to find in the world lots of crafting trash and upgrade materials, surprisingly few useful spells weapons or armor some just flat out worse than whats available in the main game. The skibbidy level scaling felt strange, i struggled with the dlcs bosses until i hit skibbidy level 17 and suddenly they melt within a few hits, i don't really know how many i need for each fight.
The boss fights that are there are solidly enjoyable, messmer is probably the most fun one to fight. The furnace golems are the STUPIDEST thing from has ever made, painfully tedious and very frustrating copy paste trash thats just a waste of time.
Final boss i had to respec cos no matter what i tried i got minced in the second phase. What worked? Fucking fingerprint shield and pokey stick. The most unenjoyable gameplay method of sitting behind a shield and its really effective. If i don't use that i need frame perfect dodges and perfect focus for 10 minutes or longer with bo opportunity to make mistakes. First phase was fine but wtf am i supposed to do in the second phase? Be perfect?
agree with a lot in this thread. I enjoyed the bosses a lot. the map being so obtuse to explore pissed me off, could have more or less been fixed by doing multiple map layers like in the base game imo. "how do I get down there" was in the base game once as an intentional puzzle (the Caelid chasm) but it got really tiresome having that feeling over and over again in the DLC. I'm not a patient gamer, blundering around the map doesn't interest me as much as just getting to the next Thing so I ended up looking up various routes pretty quickly. collecting the upgrade materials is pretty boring and formulaic. I had an intentionally OP build going in so the difficulty overall didn't bother me that much, felt in line with going to the DS3 DLC. overall it did not enthrall me as much as the DS1 or DS3 DLCs. I think that kinda goes for the game as a whole though I can say now in hindsight.