Hello, probably a bit late to the party, but wanted to leave my 2c, fresh out of my experience. SOME SPOILERS AHEAD!

First of all, thank you so much for this, it was exciting, challenging (and frustrating) and offered some cool "WTF" moments, that being said, it has issues! :). Tried Tactician but felt it relied too much on save-scumming, and had to restart on Classic mode mid way into Act 1 to have an actual chance at it.

The new content setting is very cool. The story (via the books) had me gripped and i was really excited about it, some of the characters are very well set. Top shell stuff. Oh, besides some dude in a pamphlet saying "I'm getting too old for this♥♥♥♥♥♥, which i had to read on Danny Glover's voice and really broke the immersion, but alas :).

I also have to say i didn't complete the new content, it got too frustrating at some point so i decided to move on, but had a good time overall, and spent probably around 100 hours on the new content alone, let alone the rest of the playthrough. I'll focus mostly on the end game aspect of it.

First off, it's heavily unbalanced in regards to some classes\archetypes. My usual Double Wiz, Tank, Archer setup got humilliated very early on, and i was 'forced' to run a rebalanced Rogue to achieve success. The Rogue (even with crap gear as i had just gotten him, no crafts and whatnot) with simple buffs (Oath, Bless, Crush on enemy) would absolutely stomp, nearly killing bosses in 1 turn on his own, actually succeeding in some (will detail after), whereas i would spend multiple turns scratching the bosses with the old setup. I understand the scaling issue between spells and weapon, but it's just too harsh. Besides the Rogue, it felt that having a very high level and focused Witch was also mandatory.

Some of the new abilities are awesome on their effect, others are amazing on their animation, but i felt a big part of them are just negligible and easily forgetable. I gave all (or most) a fair shot at trying them out, but only a few popped out, nothing wrong there.

As for the new content. Trash packs are out of whack. In particular the 6 void thingies in most towers, or the 3-4 vampire packs are crazy. 1 shot potential, with what feels like 100 aps, constant revives and full heals on each other, crossing the entire map and still having ap for like 5 attacks, skellie archers also pumping too many attacks. Hell, they were vastly harder than most of the tower bosses.

Towers :

Shadow - Good concept, well designed fight, perfect theme. Not having reliable AoEs, in particular entire room ones (Earthquake worked well before i had to change my setup), it was a bit frustrating trying to find him or wait for a 'close spawn', but he was overall easy (after tweaking my group. Had to improve my tank a LOT to sustain the hits though.
Astral - Also very accessible, but his spawn was one of the 'wtf moments' of the experience, really, really cool :). The room itself was a bit painful on the eyes though, too bright\white.
Abyssal - Didn't really get to experience him (would probably be different without having the rogue), since he was 1-turn killed by the rogue. Seemed to have every school of magic on his attacks, but apart from that i couldn't say anything else about him.
Primordial - Ugh. This was absurd. I didn't understand the cause of the heal (seemed to absorb the other primordial dudes, and i tried ignoring them (assuming he'd eat corpses), tried killing them (assuming he'd eat them alive), tried killing them far (assuming there was a range), tried avoiding the heal with Decaying Touch (didnt work), tried burning him to see if the poison would instead detonate, tried a myriad of other silly things in regards to multiple debuffs, forms of cc attemps, nothing worked. So i resorted to brute force killing him before the heal came out, always leaving him between 10-20%. After half a dozen hours i just gave up figuring it out and i just save-scummed my way into a brute force kill (would also be impossible without the rogue's output damage). Not sure if i was just dumb or if you need some particular ability, or if i simply didn't notice a relevant aspect of the fight.

The altar dude (Aspect of Carnage) was a nice surprise and will smash a below average setup, but after tweaking it turns trivial. Good stuff though.

I did attempt Ossurot (?) a couple of times (the 4 vampire fight before him is absurd, again, they all have one shot potential, multiple heals, revives, and even killing 1, often 2 of them on the first rogue turn, they'd just get revived and the fight was just too long, too hard and too frustrating. Harder than most of the tower bosses). I didn't spend much time on Ossurot and decided to tweak and respec the party once again, and that was when i quit.

The new content requires so much tweaks here and there, optimizing certain aspects, getting some specific abilities, but respecing on DOS is a huge hassle with losing every ability, and after a couple of times it's just too much.

I cleared the entire map, the towers, the altars and from my end, i think i was missing Ossurot and going inside the Tower of Ascension (i think it was called), no clue on how many fights inside, or if there are other areas, so not sure on how much i missed. Oh, also bypassed a council fight with 4 bosses inside a locked room, meant to go at them later and never got to it.

Then decided to complete the base stuff and got ravaged on the final 3 fights. The void dragon in particular was a very painful affair. Very. Very. Very. I was level 25 by then if i'm not mistaken.

As for base game fights, some are overly hard, near impossible. The goblin village and the Silverglen escort saving the NPCs (which don't scale properly and get focused on and getting 1 or 2-shot) are prime examples, whereas others are close to trivial like the Twin Demons Forged by Fire or the Troll King.

Almost forgot, at some point the amount of loot dropped is out of hand, having 10-12-14 epic\divine\legendary items drop after each big pack or boss is too much, and just going over so much trash loot got bothersome aswell. Almost felt like Diablo 3 loot system, but that's probably a base game aspect, not sure if you tweaked it.

So, i'd give it a solid 8 out of 10. The game rebalance is cool (even if some scaled up fights just turn incredibly hard.

Will definitely return and give it another go in a few months. Too excited to spend a million hours on DOS2 now :)

Sorry for the insane wall of text, got excited about it, but i'd just want to say thanks once again for what is an amazing project and looking forward to experience what you come up with on DOS2.

(Is there any sort of guideline or guide for some of the end game stuff? Information is really scarce in regards to the epic encounter stuff (base game and new content alike) and i felt like i missed some important aspects about it or am just too dumb to figure out)