The Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree Steam reviews have dropped to 'mixed,' as players point at the performance and balance issues on PC.
“Right now even with 60 vigor you get one-shot by nearly every enemy that’s not pure fodder (like the classical wandering nobles in the base game),” Steam user ‘Flippikus’ writes. “And the Scadutree fragments that should make your damage and defense increase (exclusively while in the DLC) don’t help that much and are mostly locked behind bosses.”
The negative reviews, which also continually praise the world’s design and art direction, can’t handle some of the other choices, especially the boss fights. “Bosses in this DLC are exceptionally weak. While visually they are fantastic, their balance is totally off,” ‘Chanddy’ writes. “The combos they do are really annoying to learn [and] way too long – sometimes chaining up to ten different attacks before you get even a brief second opening to return damage.”
In terms of performance, players are upset that Shadow of the Erdtree is locked at 60 frames per second, with micro-stuttering and a lack of ultrawide or DLSS support as well. These things can be fixed or added down the line, but as of right now, it appears that the expansion isn’t incredibly well optimized.
I've got 50 vigor and haven't been one-shot by anything yet. Can't say for sure about fragements 'mostly' locked behind bosses but I was quickly +4 just from wandering around the first map area. IMO they shouldn't quote salty complaints like Flippikus' because it waters down the real problems Fromsoft has and always had had porting their games to PC.
I love all their games and am a pretty big fanboy but also love PC gaming and it's clear From is a console company. I think they'd just release on Playstation if it were up to them. But if they're not going to resist the siren call of the PC money, they really should hire a team that knows what they're doing. I know there's some stereotypes that there aren't great Japanese Windows devs - really don't know if that's true but even if it is, From is a AAA company with AAA sales and can afford proper devs for PC releases.
I believe part of the issue is you can only really level vigor to 50 before it stops mattering, but the enemies will do more and more damage based off your total level. So if every stat is 50, you’re way less tanky than if you were level 150 with some normal stats.