I am new to the game and just fought the boss in the sewers whose name escapes me (Big guy, big sword, spiky shield). While I surmise that parrying becomes a strong mechanic later with modifiers, and while it has felt like a good risk/reward against regular enemies, it was a completely frustrating and almost useless mechanic against this, the first big boss fight.
Parrying his attacks locked me into the animation as long as the boss, and if I tried to do anything other than running away after a successful parry, I’d end up getting hit. Meanwhile rolling through his attacks let me attack several times before he moved again. Parrying also didn’t seem to offer any other sort of advantage, like building up the stagger meter.
As someone who chose to use heavy armor and focus on parrying as a defensive mechanic, this made the boss fight incredibly frustrating and ended up with me feeling I had to “cheese” it by just rolling through the boss over and over instead.
I don’t mean that parrying should make the boss auto-stagger or anything else that’d trivialize the fight, but it would be nice if parries at least rewarded you equally to rolling and let you get a hit or two in.
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Yeah parrying against elites or bosses is waaaay more punishing in early game than it should be, especially with two-handers. I get that they it would break co-op to keep it as it was since 3 - 4 players would all charge attack, but this breaks solo play. I always hate when games tack on multiplayer late in development.
Currently, multi-player has a much better cheese: all players run in heavy and shoulder barge to stun-lock enemies. I suppose this is meant to be some sort of balance? Just a wild guess, I could be way off base.
Yeah this is the problem, multi-player exponentiates the amount of balance work because you have to figure all the combinations of co-ops and their possibilities, then make sure the balances and fixes there work for solo. No way they have enough devs/time to make sure both solo and co-op don’t override/detract from the other. Elden Ring got co-op years after release! They shoulda got solo right first and did multiplayer after 1.0 but I’m guessing they needed money/eyeballs right now.
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and to be fair, it worked. co-op got them the eyes. hell i only played it because of coop and then really wanted to play after i heard it was gona have pvp.