Hi Jeff,
The light was VERY strong, mostly impossible to get highlights and shadows, I mainly sacrificed the shadows
I took a load of photos on Saturday which included black & white water birds, swan, Canada Geese and Coots so the contrast was extremely high.
V118 coped very well.
First the highlight recovery magenta box works very well; it is now a little different from v117 and by checking with the shift key you can focus down on the brightest area of an image, even a to box a few pixels in size.
I've also found, although not specifically for v118, using the red box (camera black point) can relieve black areas and get a little more detail - check rgb values with mouse RH button. It may cause too much contrast to be lost but worth a try sometimes. However ODR will often help to recover that. The other option with a magenta box is to have an ODR box on a very dark area - experiment!
The HDR slider in v118 work very nicely and seems pretty foolproof.
I recommend you watch and listen to the video more than once to understand how DODR works and be prepared to experiment with images so next time you can do the job more quickly.
That's my take on V118 so far, you may have taken to it straight away, but for others I hope my comments are helpful. I have now processed over 150 images with v118!
Terry