The dlc is a lot more punishing for melee players than the base game. The horned warriors and dancers are especially annoying to fight. The first boss was quite difficult but I beat him after the fourth try. Can't wait to cleanse the rest of the shadow realm from the hornsent menace.
I think the game just wants you to be as animu as the opponents, ie, use ashes of war with very strong gap closing abilities, or some ranged hit mechanism. The amount of time I used the R2 of Winged Stance that launches you in the air into the enemy might be 1/3 of the amount of times I did normal R1 on the weapon, kek. Something about its animation also got me hit less often than I should have whenever I felt more rushed to finish an area out of boredom and got greedy and spammy.
Many of the newer ashes of war are strong gap closers, this one's just an example, you could use Blinkbolt, Flame Skewer, Savage Lion's Claw or old classics like Giant's Hunt, Square Off r2, Lion's Claw etc.
There's also plenty of unique skills that behave like that in the somber upgrade weapons.
Don't get me wrong, I still think most of those enemies are shit design, I abhorr that shit too but you can make it more palatable by abusing the retarded AI, you're not playing PVP, just backing away from enemies to give some space between you and them and activating gap closers with weapons that have good reach tends to make short work of them. The only thing it doesn't work on is overly agressive bosses, like Radahn, or Putrescent Knight (agressive bosses will always knock you off if you try to take the initiative instead of hitting them at the end of their attack chains). But magic most likely doesn't fare better against those guys anyhow, when backing off to heal I barely have the time to drink a pot before they reach me, so I'm pretty sure you can't just pew pew them from a safe distance either.
After finishing this dlc I must say, it really isn't up to the old standards. Too much empty crap maps, it seems to take a long time to complete so it might give the illusion of being big, but I think Miyazaki wasn't lying when he said it's about the size of Limgrave, there's just an excess of nonsensical verticality making it extremely tedious to traverse and find your way through. I once spent an hour traversing every corner around a map area trying to find the way to get into that place, only to fail, abandon, then many hours later, come to the place I couldn't get into by pure accident all from getting into a ladder in the shadow keep... From's games always had a few areas that were well hidden like secrets but this DLC doesn't really "hide" its stuff (you know the areas exist and they are shown on a map) so much as make the routing of almost every place completely unintuitive, if it was just an area or two I wouldn't complain, just like I didn't complain about the bizarre ritual to get to Archdragon Peak in DS3 (how did people originally find out about THIS?), but in this DLC it feels like almost every map was designed that way, and the game just expects you to hunt every pixel and corner, which is absolutely not fun, particularly when those maps have very little content of any value to do.
You know, most souls games, including most of Elden Ring (which I did multiple NG+ of to get all the main endings), I could fit the main routing in my head pretty easily just playing normally and sort of half speedrun the areas just from my memory. This DLC, on the other hand? I just finished a day ago and I barely remember how I got access to many areas of the map, it's all like a blur in my head right now. If I replayed right now I would feel half lost, thinking "I want to get to this place, which I remember having X boss and items, but I don't remember how to get there".
It's really not defensible. The main game had a switch that allowed you to see underground maps that properly differentiated the mapping of areas that were at a wholly different "level", and that's despite its world being far less reliant on verticality than this one's, whose map might as well be toilet paper for how useful it is in guiding you.
I originally didn't want to play this DLC, but I was bored and there's a lack of good games this year so I ended up buying it on impulse. I almost regret playing it, I think I spent more time bored than having fun with it. I don't even hate the bosses unlike many of the complaints here, except for Radahn, which is drastically overtuned (running on a NG+ character and being at level 15 scadutree blessing, I felt like I was hitting like a wet noodle, and that's on a character build that did a pretty decent, noticeable amount of damage on all other bosses of the DLC. No, by the way, I was not going to hunt for the remaining fragments, fuck that shit seriously it's not my idea of having fun in a video game.).
It's just, I spent too much time, as I predicted, looking at a horse ass, and not that much time actually doing shit that is fun doing. The legacy dungeon encounter design was also surprisingly playing it very safe, most of the encounters being 1vs1 against a few strong enemy types, and 1vs many against /really weak/ garbage. I've actually found a few encounters in the open world, on torrent, more violent and threatening than in all of the legacy dungeons. Like that moment you enter a room full of Kindred of Rot with that very nasty ranged, tracking attack in the northwest area. That really took me by surprise, and I did get killed because I was too used to zipping through everything with torrent in the open world and didn't think anything could kill me until I passed by that place. When I went back, I dismounted and properly engaged with the enemies, and that moment felt more legacy dungeony than most legacy dungeon content of SotE.
I would even go as far as to say the only good legacy dungeon content in this DLC is Enir-Ilim. The level design is nothing special in terms of layout/secrets, but the encounter design is at its most threatening, and I finally felt like I was playing a souls game again with clever enemy placements and groupings, with one part in particular that feels especially designed to mess with people who want to just run past enemies. Unfortunately, it's very short and leads to the most annoying boss of all From games.
The shadow keep is a better dungeon in terms of layout, but in terms of encounters it's as good as a lullaby at bringing you to sleep, except for the water quarter that hides a couple ulcerated tree spirits recycled straight from the main game. You will indeed wake up from your sleep during those encounters, and then go back to the dream world again.
