I finished the main game and stopped playing as I had no motivation to play DLCs.
Coming from Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3, DS2 felt and played really different. Everything were slow, both your and enemies’ actions.
The game infuriated me, I didn’t feel this much irritation while playing the other two games. Sure, there were times when I became upset with the latter, but they were short and quickly passed. Not with DS2, it was a pain playing this game.
There were too many normal enemies, and they chased me from one room to another. The run back to boss room was especially annoying, especially because your character weren’t invincible while trying to pass fog doors. I have so many occasions getting killed by mobs while waiting to get back into the boss room.
The archers and mages were crazily accurate, they could head-shot me from the end of a room.
Dodging still got me damaged. I was confused by this, until I did some research and found out about the ADP stat. I needed to increase agility to increase the invincible frames for dodging.
Drinking Estus was painfully slow, and every enemy would attack you the moment you tried to drink. ADP stat again would increase the speed, I didn’t know about this until I googled. No more in the game said anything about the relationship between drinking speed and agility stat.
I do not believe I will ever come back to DS2 to finish the DLCs. Finishing the main game was more than enough for me.