Game's still challenging after the enemy rooms were toned down since last DD, but there's more breathing room to mess around - at least in the first few rooms. For now what seems to be working best in my experience was 2 steam with 2 lightning for that AOE damage (I assume later with different enemies having different weaknesses it could mix up more). Partly that I never really used the scythe other than for smashing barrels, even if it does more damage, though when I tried runs when I focused on melee they ended much quicker than my usual pistol-focused runs.
I feel like DoTs are still just as strong against you as before, now they're just less prevalent and you have more opportunity to negate them somewhat with healing barrels, but you're still left of the mercy of the map generation.
Even with the slow-down, doing alchemy mid-combat kinda messes up the pace of the game - I'd prefer having something like quickslots where you can pre-define mixtures instead of always having to clear and then re-mix when you want to change your damage type.
The number for elemental damages show up bit too close to the physical damage number, making the two obscure each other which made difficult to figure out what's working when I was experimenting with different elements and combinations.
Having enemy corpses stay around is nice, but I'm not a fan of them slowing down the character.
Only found two bugs in the demi: when you die, the player character's cape kinda "freezes" and moves almost detached from the character during ragdoll, and when you open the mix menu quickly after starting a run the camera can glitch out (which can vary between just going slightly-off center to moving down into the floor and keep going in the blackness below).
The new stat menu is nice to look through, even if just for the information's sake, and the general presentation is still looks very slick and well made. The gameplay needs some work, and more enemy variety and stuff that not yet implemented (like different equipment, scraps and upgrades) will definitely help, but I see the potential!