Bloated Abominationās chain slap sequence does way too much damage for being an attack that immediately stunlocks anyone whoās not wearing plate into all the hits.
On normal difficulty, on a leather character at 54% physical DR, the bloated abomination chain slaps come close to deleting 85% of my HP just on its own disregarding other enemies, and this wouldnāt be bad if the first hit didnāt immediately lock you into an unbreakable stun status where you are forced to take in all the subsequent hits.
The same happens with the pickaxe prisoner, and now the Prisoner Witch since her poise was massively buffed and she cannot be effectively interrupted out of the attack sequence on solo play.
The pickaxe prisoner spin also staggers immediately any non-plate and forces taking the subsequent hit.
Rematching the Egg if you get hit by his spinning swing sends you into staggered into cloth/leather. Same happens for any Echo Knight swing like the triple stab or when he does multi-spin after his charge stab even if you parried the charge stab since he now recovers almost immediately and goes into the spin while your rune attack punishment is still mid-animation.
In general on solo play, enemy poise is way overbuffed, Echo Knight is effectively now unbreakable on solo while on coop it is still trivially easy to stagger him (the reason parry was nerfed and poise was buffed, though for some reason you didnāt restrict these balance changes to coop to not break solo play experience).
Baseline player poise is nonexistent outside plate. A single enemy swing hit or two will stagger or break poise altogether if itās an elite enemy. Rune attacks with long animations since the buff to enemy poise now are worthless as they get interrupted all the time by enemy swings since rune attacks no longer stagger even regular mobs.
As a result the rune attacks that now get used are quick frontloaded rune attacks that donāt have much animation commit, and rune attack variety has been reduced as a result.
With the buff to enemy poise you also get a lot more input reading dodges from enemies just arbitrarily wasting your hard earned focus. You wait for an enemy to finish an attack animation to use a rune attack during their rest period, and they just dash dodge out of it halfway through the animation. And they do this repeatedly.
The Prisoner Witch is back to being insufferably spammy with her teleports and itās outrageous that an enemy that can apply such overtuned burned damage can take 2-3 2H weapon swings to the face and still continue to chain cast, or that I can finish a full wand attack or staff or dagger sequence and this mob has not been staggered during the attack.
Ranged, mobile high threat mobs that accompany elites and other dangerous enemies should be easily disposed of and interrupted once I put in the work of closing the distance to them. It is ridiculous that enemies with this much pressure damage and the ability to dash half a room away two or three times in less than 10 seconds wasting precious player stamina sprinting to them are able to just keep attacking despite being hit.