I'll post the things I've noticed and confirm/deny what I can from my experience. Game released 4PM PST on Thursday for me, and as of the time of this posting I have 20hrs played and have only Gwyn left to kill. I will also deter from any comments that may have spoilers.



Greatswords are indeed nerfed, they attack significantly slower than before, and elemental weapons(Lightning at least) have lower AR(my Lightning Gargs Halberd only has 280 AR for physical and lightning instead of 320).



Blocking is far less convenient now than it used to be, most shields only gain Stability every OTHER upgrade level instead of every time now. On top of that blocking as a whole seems to take far bigger stamina hits than it used to. (Can't compare to new content but some things there hit REALLY hard on stam even with a +15 eagle shield, 95% aside)



Certain spells do less/more damage. CHSM/HSM for sure do less, as I needed to hit 50 int with TCC in order to get all 5 hits to total over 1300-1500 on some old content(this is with BDR/CoD btw). Haven't noticed to much of a change in Pyromancy, but it did feel like Chaos spells get more bang for their buck from Humanity now(got a 1017 Chaos Storm PER HIT with 2 Humanity and +5 asc flame).



I haven't been able to experiment with everything, but some Weapon specials feel like they've been retuned that used to be useless, i.e. Dragon Weapons. The only thing I've been able to test much is a certain weapon that I won't talk about for obvious reasons, but its 2H+Heavy attack hit for ~2200.



DISCLAIMER: Maybe it's just me IDK!

I noticed a few bosses doing things I've never noticed/seen before.

Sif stabbed me under his belly once during the fight, and usually responded to me rolling under him by IMMEDIATELY jumping away when he finished his attack. I felt like I was being forced to go toe-toe with him instead of hiding under him the whole fight. Nothing wrong with that but heads up.

Bed of Chaos done a rain of fire, almost like a fire storm but from overhead a couple times. Blocked hit with dragon crest shield took a full stam bar and about 400HP ontop of it.

Some people co-oping with me learnt that Quelaag responds to gang banging by spamming her explosion and tail shake(where she throws fire off her butt) until the offenders are dead or back away. She spammed the explosion a few times during the fight, and by spam I don't mean done it fairly close together. I mean we descended on her to thrash her face and after a couple back to back hits just done like 3 in a row lol.



Also I encountered NO lag issues during co-op/invasion the entire time. This is likely due to the fact it's being hosted on a PC or steam's servers so probably won't apply to the console DLC. Also on PC those 20-30sec loading pages are 2sec or less it almost made me cry lol.



I want to talk about so much more, but I can't without talking about new areas/gear so I'll stop here. I'm at work and its way early so if I remember anything else I'll update but atm that's all I got without spoiling anything.