-Vendrick was lame. He has all of three attacks/combos that he uses and one that I saw all of once...which happened to be completely useless. None of his attacks are all that difficult to dodge, but almost every hit is guaranteed to one shot you. Basically the fight becomes a long, tedious affair of hugging his left buttcheek for 5-10 minutes (depending on how many Souls of a Giant you acquired) in order to force him into a loop from which there is little chance for escape. It's a brawl with a big buildup that falls completely flat.
-Darklurker was decent, if a little too punishing. I tried and tried to fight it melee only, but once it undergoes mitosis all bets are off. Attack stacking abounds, and Dark Souls 2 doesn't grant player characters ample combat aptitude to deal with such. Pretty much was forced to use my pyromancy, which made the second part of the fight relatively unsatisfying. The fight would have been much better if the Darklurker's attack damage was toned down significantly...if I'm wearing armor that's highly dark/magic-resistant and equipping +2 rings in those defense categories, losing ~85% of the health bar (15 Vigor with a Third Dragon Ring) is a little excessive. Less damage means that taking a cheap hit in the second phase might not necessarily result in instant death, allowing players to fight the battle without having the rely on dishing out enormous quantities of damage. Darklurker is a really interesting boss design, shame to see it marred by silly damage amounts.
Really, the entire game, PvE and PvP, could benefit from lowered damage amounts. Longer fights with more room for interactions seem better than DPS/stunlock races.
-Licia "The Nameless Ursuper" of Lindelt was really fun. Pretty much the toughest human opponent you're liable to face. Because she's human you can cheese her with things like chain-BSing or powerful spells on knockdown wakeup...but if you elect not to do such, you can savor a fight with a tough-as-nails Faith-user that brings out all the stops. Good fight with a lot of fun that can be extracted from it.
-Ancient Dragon is fucking awful. I thought the Memory of Jeigh was the worst area in Dark Souls 2, and that was the Bed of Chaos of this game. Nope...Ancient Dragon. Yeah, it's a completely optional fight, but also complete bullshit.
It's an enormous enemy that basically has five attacks. One of the attacks is a stomp with an egregiously bad hitbox. A meter away from the dust cloud created by the stomp (seemingly a shockwave effect)? Too bad, you're taking the hit. The other is a grounded fire breath sweep that is pitifully easy to dodge and punish. Sadly, it only seems to use this when you enter the fog door. The other three branch from when it takes flight. It can either do an enormous AoE fire breath attack that covers a huge portion of arena after it goes through the windup animation. To dodge this, you have to start running towards the tail-end of the dragon as it takes flight and follow through with this animation to safety. It can also take flight and then immediately crash down for massive damage with some more atrocious hitboxes. And a third attack is the same enormous AoE fire breath, but with practically no windup. I suppose this attack is simply there to fuck players over.
Oh, and every single one of these attacks will probably one-shot you. Theoretically, the stomp/crash moves could be blocked, but I seemed to get dead-angled every time thanks to the fabulous hitboxes, with active frames that linger too long to simply roll through. But the fire...oh no, don't think you can simply Flash Sweat, Flame Quartz Ring +1, and wear a bunch of high fire-resist gear...you're getting one-shotted by another attack with godawful hitboxes.
The boss also has an inordinate amount of defense and HP. It seemed impervious to Bleeding or Poison and I could scarcely bring the thing to half health before it decided that it was done toying with me and either activated the swift AoE death breath or activated the regular AoE breath attack in such a position that the only place I could possibly dodge was off a cliff.
Tried to do some co-op with other people, see if they had any idea how to handle this beastie. Nope, 32 times laying down my White Soapstone Sign and nary an experienced hunter. Half died at the onset of the battle, and the rest succumbed to one of the cheap-ass, aerial fire-breaths before we could even take the dragon down to below one-third health.
What a shitty piece of design. Yeah, I'm certain there is some way of easily looping the AI, and that builds that aren't Dex/Pyro might have a better shot at dealing damage, but I can't really see how any fun can be extracted out of this encounter. Absolute shit.
(but i like the mask more with the complete set [finally got everything yesterday, yay!], finally some "proper" samurai-inspired armour 
). btw, you can rank up in the covenant by killing him 
(he counts as any other bellkeeper kill)
