I completed ng+ and the descent now, and I really enjoyed it! sorry if I seemed overly negative, I probably wouldn't have written so much on the negative points if I had completed ng+ first, the range and power that aether gives you let you fight much more safely and makes the descent extremely doable, and the ascended virtue probably makes it doable with some of the other mantras.
Making ng+ and the descent put more pressure with corruption and tying its progress to how well you completed fights was a really cool idea, a great way to incentivize exploring combat more and playing quickly, like a speedrun mode but that gives more direct feedback to how well you're doing and a short term goal of lowering corruption.
thank you for making such an interesting game!