Dark Souls 2

Yeah Alonne was not that bad, really. Fume was harder, by far. And Magic Smelter was build restrictive for two main reasons: First, he has ludicrous resistances to everything (but merely average Dark Resist) and his attacks (as Budos stated) had more autocorrecting aim in them than the prior version. His passive AoE was not as rape-tastic as the fire version, but between the ridiculous reach he has in the second stage of the fight and the massive damage (especially poise damage) his AE does, you were pretty much left with two choices. Either you do what I did, swapping in Hexes and drag in two fresh NPC phantoms to keep him busy, OR you take a fast raw weapon and shield while slotting nothing but MR gear. The first solution basically was sort of too easy once I figured out his agro tracking sucked balls and I could just sit at max range and spam Dark Balls at him until he fell over. The second approach (which I did try) resulted in me getting close but eventually getting stunlocked by his AE and subsequently raped by his 3 mile long sword swings.

They basically took everything stupid about the Fire Smelter fight (rapes mele without help) and made it worse. Only this time, the summoned NPCs are actually better to have in the fight than another live player. If you are going to fuck mele in the ass with an entire fight then you probably should not jack up all of the resists through the roof, as well. Fume and Alonne at least both brought new wrinkles to the "knight guy with big weapon" fight, but Smelter2.0 was literally a complete copy with the knobs turned up to 11. The entire DLC seemed to be wall to wall monsters with really high resistances, actually. The boss fights in the previous DLC were much better. Having said all of that, I liked Iron King for the dungeon crawl aspects a lot more and really enjoyed exploring the entire area. Still missing one bonfire in Sunken, but like hell if I have any idea where it might be.

The basic nuke is a pretty solid spell, but you need to have at least 30 in both Int and Fth to get real mileage out of it. I can understand the lightning nerf, as it was drastically better than being a sorcery guy before the nerf (speaking solely as PvE here), but what they did was overboard, at least once you hit the DLC fights. It is more or less their own fault for copy pasting big dude in armor fights all over the original game, who generally have shitty lightning resists. The mele buffs are ok to use, but by the time you have the stats and resources to benefit from them you might as well be just spamming dark storms, anyhow.

Its all moot, anyhow. Archery is the new Lightning Spam.

One thing that does annoy me greatly, design wise, is how some of the super buffs eat up so many attunement slots. If all you wanted to be was paladin dude with some combat buffs, you are still stuck with limited charges and having to have a substantial investment in both Faith and Attunement to even get access to the spells.

The magic knights are bad if they swarm you (very likely after the "thaw") and the thawed minion things have some pretty massive poise damage. But aside from that, the trash is not too tough and seems to be worth a lot of souls.

Reward off of the first boss kind of sucked, though. He can be poisoned and most of his attacks can be dodged by rolling toward him. BK Halberd really does a number on him. He telegraphs all of his spell castings and there is ample time to flask, so not too rough once you get the reads down. Figuring out how to draw out the backstabbing phantom was the trickiest thing for me to figure out so far. Lots of interesting areas to explore and amazing visuals in this one. Seems like most things in this expansion are weak to dark, fire, and poison so far. They didn't get as crazy with the resists (except lightning) this time around. There are phantoms that urn spam, so stock powder for this one.

Have to wait and see what the ending is like, but so far I think I liked Iron King a little more than this one, but not by much.