I picked up the Lost Valley and Druid/Barbarian/HOrc DLCs during the sale and tried the new campaign with another party of dwarves,
Hill Dwarf Druid Acoylte (Spirit Circle) w/ pet spider
Hill Dwarf Sellsword Wizard (Court Mage)
Hill Dwarf Lawgiver Cleric (Sun)
Hill Dwarf Lowlife Cleric (battle)
The DLC campaign is much less linear than the first one, which I liked; but there were a couple issues related to that. I seemingly locked myself out of a bunch of quests for three different factions by doing quests in the "wrong" order which there really isn't any way to determine
a priori. The relatively limited scope (escape the valley! rather than save the world from the extradimensional lizardfolk!) was nice and most of the writing was passable. The item availability was totally random which was frustrating since I couldn't craft anything out of the masses of components I had. I eventually crafted
1) the item which speeds up crafting
troll
2) +1 Hide armor of Jive-talkin'
Meanwhile I had recipes for all sorts of things I couldn't make (+2 Battle Axe, +1 Scale Mail, Spear of Necrotic Doom, etc..)
There were many useful items in my run, but it seems to be pot luck. I found two sets of dwarven plate early on and took the heavy armor feat at level 8 for my two clerics to make use of them. I eventually found a strength belt and some gauntlets of ogre power so each cleric could have one and a couple decent weapons, but this was pretty much at the end of the game (level 9 for me without those quests...). All and all, I'd give the DLC campaign one thumb up; it's entertaining but I wish they'd put a bit more effort into it rather than even more classes/subclasses.
Now as for the "Primal Calling" DLC, my dwarven druid has a long list of grudges;
1) The spirit animals are garbage; they have no AC, no ranged attack and you get stunned when they inevitably die. The spider also does only poison damage, which many enemies are immune to.
2) No magical clubs
3) No magical wooden shields
4) Wizards and Sorcerers are walking around in scale mail in this game, but druids are stuck in garbage armor
5) Every useful spell in the druid list requires concentration
6) Fucking somatic components! Shillelagh can be cast on a club, but only if you have a free hand; flame blade can be summoned into a free hand, but the other hand must also be free to make the magic signs. Battle clerics totally ignore this due to effectively a free Warcaster feat, Wizards don't give a shit because they have melee and ranged cantrips, lesser clerics and paladins can draw an ankh on their shield and ignore more than half of it. Meanwhile druids have two 1-handed magical weapon spells but can't just draw a tree/Sierra Club logo on their shields like their better-armored counterparts!
(I finally snapped and turned off somatic components; this stupid class turned me casual!)
