Most are bad at the mechanic and that’s why they don’t like it and complain.
I was in similar boat too, even voted in this poll “I very rarely or never use the parry mechanic” just like you. I tried once, failed and never bothered to properly learn it till endgame, because campaign was easy enough. When i started doing endgame, friction began to appear, so i decided to learn parrying. Now i feel comfortable parrying enemies with weapons, but still have a bit of trouble finding parry windows of unarmed enemies. Im sure i will learn it too when i dedicate some time to it. So i’ve changed my vote to “I parry very frequently” since then.
The problem with most players is that they think learning parrying on one enemy will instantly make them parry gods that will always successfully do it on every single enemy the game throws at them. And they couldn’t be further from truth. Every enemy, every attack has slightly different parry window you need to learn and you do it by practicing. You cannot be a master of piano simply because you practiced some violin a while ago. Same goes for dodging, but it has much much much wider window.
It is inconsistent because of player that is using it. I don’t think it was meant to be consistent, what would be the point of implementing dodge then. But it is crazy powerful mechanic that players should learn, how and when to use it.
Im not so sure about that… Attack animation speed is not that important if you know enemy moves and actively think about fight instead of auto piloting or heavily relying on your eyes and reflexes to parry just a millisecond before impact. For example if you know enemy has super fast sword swing attack, instead of using your eyes only to try to react when blade will be close to your neck, you should recognize earlier what kind of attack will happen and simply press parry button right before the swing happens. It’s a matter of recognizing what attacks are being used and their timings, nothing fancy, “simple” rhythmic game.
Oh god, please no. I’d rather see some checkboxes “make enemies ai 80% dumber / slower” in the world settings to satisfy casuals instead of destroying perfectly normal mechanics. Isn’t this exactly how shields work (you rise them up to mitigate some amount of damage)?
I agree that plague bubble attack is a bit annoying, but mostly because it is super long attack. I’d prefer if boss just placed all 8 bubbles randomly all at once. Or maybe make them more like Shaper balls in path of exile that follows you and “explode” with delay on touch, reduce their damage a bit to allow stacking them somewhere in the corner.
When it comes to blender attack i have a nice diagram of angular velocity and arc length in rotational motion for you:
… What? What is the difference between focus builds vs melee? Melee builds cannot use focus or what? If you’re not using runes that’s on you my friend.