Played through Crown of the Ivory King, which is the third and final DLC in Dark Souls 2. I liked the level design here, and the enemy variety too. Revisiting the initial location after it got unfrozen and seeing all the changes was interesting as well.

The first area boss, big kitty Aava, was tougher than I thought. I brought two summoned NPCs as a distraction, which helped a lot, since this beastie was pretty fast. My slowpoke build doesn't do so well against such enemies, but I could still dish out some serious damage when the tiger was focusing on the NPCs. Eventually, we secured the victory, and put the king's pet down for good.

Afterwards, I freed all the white knights and went to fight the Burnt Ivory King. The pre-battle skirmish was a bit too chaotic for my taste. My knights vs. his knights, but his greatly outnumbered mine, and they also used fire magic which could one shot me. I had two summons and four white knights on my side, and once his black knights were dispatched, taking the king down became a lot easier. The huge reach of his magic sword caught me by surprise a few times, but I was still able to dodge most of his attacks. It helped that I was using a lightning infused weapon, which turned out to be his weakness, and he went down on my second attempt. Anyway, the actual boss fight was fine, but the skirmish with his knights got boring on the retry.

Lastly, I couldn't find the optional third boss on my own. After looking that up online, entering some coffin apparently takes you to the Frigid Outskirts, but I never noticed it. Doesn't seem like I missed much, as it's just fighting two tigers at once, and the runback is supposedly the worst thing ever. Think I'll just skip that and go straight to the end game. With all three crowns in hand, I got Vendrick's blessing, so I'm ready to finish this.