Once I tried playing this game on DOMINATING. Never again.
Finished my DOMINATING playthrough just now. A few spoily remarks below are in ROT-13.
Most of the fun for me was seeing the new things and having the "are you fucking kidding me???" moments. There were quite a few of those and I loved them all. Silent Isle, the guards around the Hanging Rat, gur arj yhexref gung unat bhg va gung pbaarpgvat mbar, the Lunatic shopping mall, ARKE power station, the Tchort fight. More I don't remember offhand. Very cool to have these crazy scenarios to work through. I spent most of an afternoon on the Lunatic shopping mall.
The revised Eye of Tchort is pretty awful. Maybe too much, if there is anything that might be too much I think this would be it. I did get used to it, though. Really glad I [possibly significant spoiler even for experienced players] qvqa'g unaq bire qrgevghf gb gur gpubegvfgf, I wasn't thinking about long run consequences at the time, but boy that was a good call.
I liked that I was pushed to use some new tricks. I never bothered with the doctor's pouch on a non-psi char before, it was my default belt here. Never used riot armor before (well, excepting CAU), made and used some here, quite handy. Ate a lot of burrower burgers that I never bothered with before. My build was energy weapons, and usually I stick tightly to my build concept, but here I used chem pistols and an assault rifle in places. Threw many, many, many grenades. (One thing I should have done differently is take Grenadier earlier.)
Other people have said that DOMINATING feels like playing the game for the first time again. I had a little of that feeling. Wasn't always sure what the solution to a problem was, or if my character would even be able to find one. And there was quite a bit of straight up new content, too. Great stuff.
All that said, DOMINATING is a little too hard and grindy for me to want to play on it regularly. Awesome place to visit, don't think I want to live there. From what I've heard, the new Hard is notably harder than the old Hard, so it may be my sweet spot. I'll try that out on the next (chem pistols) playthrough. I will probably try a heavy armor playthrough on DOMINATING at some point, since I feel like no-stealth tank is a substantially different experience than my usual stealthy approach. I'll be interested to hear what others say about heavy armor on DOMINATING in the meantime.
Thanks much to Stygian for making all these new stuffs available. This was a fun way to spend my holiday time off. Looking forward to the expansion.