Same feeling here regarding playthroughs. Lightning feels bad until you put it on a wakizashi and then you’re like, oh this is what staggering feels like. Put it on gloves and you’re like, this is hot garbage. Wakizashi is 20 poise damage, gloves are 10 I believe. And I think one hit from the wakizashi stuns, 5 hits from the gloves does nothing.
Endless winter + Icebreaker makes game go boom. Don’t need RoD. You basically never run out of focus-although I like shattering with rune attack for more damage. Gameplay too easy.
2-handed sword was good until the double bird bosses at end. Then it felt bad. Adding kickflip trivialized the encounter though…
Poise damage should scale up with bigger, slower weapons.
The whole wand/staff thing is likely going to change as they are moving the basic rune attacks to stamina.
As for cloth vs plate…I think plate should effect weapon attack speed. This should be true for staves and wands. There needs to be more differentiation between the loads/encumbrance. I’m not even really a fan of that stat nullifying wearing plate.