So finished my run, figured I'd post about it a bit.
First off, the new content isn't much. There's a new area but not much to do there other than the bosses, there's a few new materials but they're fairly common and you don't need that many of them either so it's kinda whatever in that regard. On the new bosses, a lot felt too easy. I think the first 2 they added in act2 felt pretty good, but the act IV/V stuff was pretty weak. I one shot several of them including the new "final 4" boss and the few I didn't only took a few pulls, a far cry from 1.0 struggling with Adam and the holy guy and the last boss. This is on brutal btw. A few had interesting gimmicks though so they were still enjoyable, but some were boring(poison sword guy and assassin slasher girl).
Part of the issue with the difficulty of the new bosses is likely the powercreep. While the QoL changes were great and didn't affect balance too much(it is significantly easier to get a perfect jewel or weapon for act V stuff but that's not a massive difference, I didn't even bother reforging my weap cause I didn't want to farm), the various additions and reworks for other systems make you way stronger than in 1.0, which made everything easier. You get the spell school passives for free for every school, the reworked passives are a lot stronger, the reworked Bloods are also stronger AND you can combine two bloods by getting all the bonuses from the primary + T4 and T1/2/3(your choice) of another blood which means basically 1.5x blood power(I ran Rogue main with Brute sub for the parry chance and weapon leech to make me more survivable), the new weapon coating are borderline OP on their own(procs that both do decent damage and provide powerful effects), the new elixirs aren't too strong but stack with the old ones for additional free stats. If you combine all of that it leads to just being a lot stronger. That's not necessarily bad for people who struggled with the game before but even on Brutal it's very noticeable, especially later in the game(ironically the early/midgame is somewhat the same so I'd say it's actually somewhat harder than lategame).
New weapons were a mixed bag. I played exclusively with the new daggers which I really liked, great weapons for brutal, low animation commitment, can setup large bursts of damage, ranged. Probably one of the worst weapon for sustained damage but works very well in Brutal since you can't just facetank stuff so you often have forced downtime. Twinblades are also good but being melee that has its own issues. The primary does good damage and procs stuff easily on cd since it double hits, 1st skill does strong damage although it's terrible as a movement skill due to the delay, the displacement skill looked utterly useless in PvE and seems mostly a PvP thing. Claws felt pretty bad, the movement skill is quite solid and the gap closer skill was fine, but the way it's balanced around hitting enemies constantly to build up stacks just didn't work well for Brutal, maybe if you're much better at the game to keep full uptime, but the payoff didn't seem worth the trouble.
I wouldn't really recommend a new playthrough currently if you've played 1.0 already, and I'd say probably better to wait for a hypothetical 1.2 or 1.3 or something. Game is still fun though, combat still feels great, I do wish they were adding content faster(same as Last Epoch issues, one patch in a year feels pretty underwhelming).
