When I first played through Elden ring, I enjoyed it for the most part but there were many problems I had with the game which I hoped that something like this could fix. I was wrong. I guess in that way you could say this dlc was a disappointment, the game still has balancing problems and forces you to explore and do random things in order to have fun later. The new leveling system showed some promise, but even that felt like a half-baked system that hid these collectibles in obscure areas on the map that just artificially lengthen the game even more; and there's apparently FIFTY of them.
Even after all that, I have still rated it so high because in some respects this is fromsoft's best work yet. I have never had this much fun fighting bosses in a souls' game. (particularly Messmer, Bayle and the Dancing Lion) They did feel unfair at first but were a lot of fun after finding enough of these stupid scooby doo fragments. However, they reuse some minibosses (much like the base game) which is just so confusing to me as all they do is be a little annoying and not much of a challenge.
The world itself albeit smaller than Elden ring's, felt so much bigger. They do something clever with the open world idea and made it denser vertically and across the game you keep seeing areas much lower than where you currently stand and can't get to yet, so finally figuring out the way down and exploring such bizarre locations was really cool. These locations are really interesting and way better to explore than the ones in the base game.
I also should probably mention that I've yet to beat the final boss yet. Even after talking up all of the bosses in the dlc, this guy is just TOO much for me; especially with the massive performance issues during it that my pc has a lot of trouble handling.