Good game, but needs some serious rebalancing in areas. Poise has to be looked at or else Vitality may as well be a dump stat at this point. Plus entire weapon classes are basically useless with the infinite poise monsters seem to have. Finally, enemy difficulty is all over the place, even compared to pre expansion DS2, with those fucking trees in the swamp being harder than most boss fights. Some boss fights are ludicrously easy to cheese past (any demon thing can be cheesed with starter bow), while others are dumb luck (giant lich thing). Magic is fairly meh and basically unusable against bosses, but Spook, Heal Aid, and magic shield do give great utility for minimal stat investment. Its worth getting at least a basic bow, as it trivializes 1/3rd of the game.
All that said, its way better than BB and the exploration aspects blow DS2 out of the water (though the zones are less epic in scope, there are tons of nooks to explore). I think once this gets the DS2 DLC treatment it will be the best in the series. As it is in its current form, its easily still GOTY material and has enormous replay value, due to different weapon styles and NPC quest lines.