I have been using coated strings for many years purely out of necessity. Living in humid conditions in the summer is a nightmare when you have acidic sweat and you play guitar… Non-coated strings are usually dead for me within a day or 2.
In the past I have experimented with various brands of coated strings, all of them have their own positives and negatives.
The D'addario XT feel very natural under the fingers and to me they don't feel like stereotypical coated strings. They just feel like a fresh set of uncoated strings. I didn't notice any increase in string tension with these XT strings, whereas if i think about Elixir Strings (all the types they make) those feel significantly tighter than other brands of string. So for me the XT feel very comfortable to play!
The downside is that they simply don't last as long as Elixir coated strings. I had one guitar that I strung up with XT and another with Elixir Optiweb. Both were played pretty much equally and the Optiweb stayed fresh for around six months, whereas the XT were feeling a bit gritty eventually after a couple of months.
Now with that said, I really don't think it's a huge big deal to have to change one set of strings after several months of use… So I consider these XT to be excellent strings, even if they don't out-live Elixirs. To my ears the XT sound brighter and more present than Elixirs anyway. Depending on your taste, that can be good or bad.
