It's balanced. You just need to be mindful of the new difficulties. Always raining, -15% stamina regen from wet effect. Running out of stamina is deadly, draugr archers are far more dangerous than skeleton archers. Poison without the resistance mead is going to hurt badly with forest level food.

A good strategy for any new biome is to try getting the new food rolling ASAP. In this case, turnips. Once you are rolling sausages and turnip stew with deer stew it becomes a lot better. (protip: I don't find the blood soup worth it using blood bags and lasting 5 less minutes than deer stew for only 5 more hp).

Upgraded bronze buckler can parry anything in the swamp, stamina management and patience will make it seem easy. Try not to aggro too many things at once, and when you get to 1v1 new mobs try to learn their parry timings. Abominations are a total joke when you know how to parry them.