The main issue with Elden Ring is that it's still using the same fundamental combat mechanics that were around in Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1. Although this isn't a bad thing in itself, the Souls combat is fundamentally actually quite simple. You just dodge attacks and then whiff punish during the enemy's recovery window. It's a formula that's been around since the days of Punch Out and probably even before that. It's a fun and solid basis for a combat system, but there's actually not many skills being tested besides hitting the dodge button at the right time and the attack button at the right time.

Consequently, in order to make the combat/enemies/bosses more difficult, the only things that can be done to increase the fundamental difficulty is to make dodge timings more difficult/less intuitive and punish windows shorter. This increase in difficulty was actually done quite well in Bloodborne, where fundamental difficulty could be increased but still have a game that's intituitively fun, but by the time of Dark Souls 3 and especially by Elden Ring the limits of this increase in difficulty were being reached, and so the only way to milk out any more difficulty from this simple combat system is to make attack timings weirdly-delayed and have all enemies do insane shounen-anime combos every 5 seconds while we're still stuck with the Demon's Souls moveset with some slight differennces. Is it difficult? Yes, and it's technically still "fair" as well, but it's not fun, and that's what matters.

Good review, I'll probably watch some more gameplay footage of this DLC but I'll pass on playing it, since this DLC seems to only double down on the problems I had with the base game. Also for any "git-gud" fromsoft midwits targeting me, I 1cc retro arcade games and bullet hells for fun, so know your place.