YMMV / Dark Souls III Cinders

• Demonic Spiders: The Outrider Knights are more sporadic than before, and what's worse is that they respawn.
• Game-Breaker: The Obscuring Ring in the game is considered to have heavily broken PVE, because how similar it functions to the Ring of Fog of Dark Souls. When combined with the Slumbering Dragoncrest Ring, you basically obliterated about 90% of the game as it suddenly turns into a series of duels that can be done at your leisure. The downside is that in order to get this, you have to offer 10 Pale Tongues of Rosaria's Fingers, which means breaking Sirris' questline.
  • In a similar vein, the Shadow Set. While its defenses are subpar, it also offers the same effects as the Obscuring Ring provided you wear the full set, and unlike the Obscuring Ring, it can be found at the Consumed King's Garden, and provided you underwent through some Sequence Breaking, it can be obtained as early as the start of the game! Ver. 1.33 nerfed its usefulness, with the aggro reduction to 50%, but is still viable until one manages to get the Obscuring Ring.
  • Floating Chaos. While a decent defense utility Pyromancy in the vanilla game, the modder decided to give it a buff by increasing the speed and number of orbs fired. The problem? It may have worked a bit too well. Even merely one use of it, provided the right place, it can stunlock enemies to death, and perform major damage to others. The catch? You still have to get it from Livid Pyromancer Dunnel, who also uses that spell. Best hope you got your fire resistance up.
  • Summoning Solaire or El Crabbo trivializes pretty much any fight since they are both nigh-unkillable tanks who Draw Aggro to such a level that enemies will literally not pay attention to you at all until you hit them. This even makes the Trial of Perseverance (essentially Horde Mode against 10 waves of enemies) a breeze, since the enemies will all crowd around your hapless punching bag and you can take whole groups out at once with a BFS or powerful AoE spell or whatever, or run around picking off stragglers one by one if you prefer. By the end of it, you'll have at least 100k souls, plenty of upgrade materials (your reward for finishing each wave), and plenty of your chosen convenant item. Did we mention that the item to summon Solaire is just sitting there in front of Ludleth, so you can do this immediately after starting the game?
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The Company of Champions covenant name is not displayed correctly, as it uses the weapon class name instead, leading to some shenanigans.
  • In some versions of the mod, quitting the game in Wolnir's boss room under certain conditions would, for some reason, put you in the Untended Graves Fire Keeper tower upon reloading, allowing you to grab some late-game loot long before you're supposed to have it and making Champion Gundyr entirely optional to fight. The catch is that the tower is home to a hostile NPC, and you spawn in right next to her.
• Nightmare Fuel: Ver. 1.29 added a cosmetic effect to the Harald Legion set, in which the player now has their head replaced by a mass of humanity. The implications is that the armor sunk so deep in the Abyss, that even wearing it causes one's own humanity to overflow.
  • Ver 1.32 replaced the Tower on the Wall bonfire with an Early-Bird Boss version of the Ancient Wyvern. This can be a very rude awakening to those who have played the original game. Ver 1.33 thankfully replaced with a lesser, but still dangerous enemy.
• Once Original, Now Common: Cinders was one of the first major mod projects for Dark Souls III, and its balancing tweaks, progression changes, and new bosses were revolutionary for the time. However, as modding has progressed and more advanced and polished mods like The Convergence and Archthrones have been released, Cinders truly shows its age. While it was the first to implement new bosses to the game, they were ultimately reskins of existing enemies and bosses, including four reskins of the Dragonslayer Armour. Later mods have been able to port in bosses from Sekiro, Bloodborne, and Elden Ring, and even mix together movesets to create entirely new bosses, leaving Cinders having rather lost its luster in comparison.