Recently, I’ve been doing some parry-only runs, and I’d like to share my thoughts on a few elements I found disappointing.
There are several ranged enemies that have no parry-able moves at all. In a parry-only challenge, this forces the player to simply run past them. When they appear in a pack you have to dance around, trying to eliminate the enemies that can be parried while being shot at the entire time. This often results in a melee enemy launching an attack at the exact same moment projectiles are flying right at you. That leaves you with a choice: go for the parry and eat the projectile, or wait for a better opportunity that sometimes doesn’t come anytime soon.
Ideally every ranged enemy should have at least one or two melee attacks that can be parried. A good example of such is the fire mage in Nameless Pass. While he’s primarily a ranged caster, he has two melee attacks that are parry-able. It would also be a good idea to implement deterministic ways to trigger those attacks - similar to the torn tentacle fatty mob, which always performs a tentacle backswing when the player stands directly behind him.
While regular mobs can at least be skipped, the Caretaker cannot. In his second phase, he only spams magic attacks, which are not parry-able. Being forced to switch to a more traditional playstyle during a parry-only run is disappointing and breaks the identity of the challenge.
The last issue is the Winged Brood boss at the end of the current campaign, specifically the first phase. The fight begins with regular harpies spawning extremely quickly - much faster than I remember from the launch of breach update. This rapidly turns into a 1v8 situation, and almost every action game with dynamic combat - including this one - struggles with that. Each enemy runs independent AI, resulting in nonstop staggered aggression where they attack one after another. This leaves little to no safe parry windows, since the parry only triggers on the first attack that connects. For example, if three enemies initiate their attacks within roughly 100 milliseconds of each other, the parry will only work on the first one that lands, the other two will simply result in getting hit.
In practice, the fight either devolves into an hour long dance where you wait for a single safe parry opportunity, or you stack health and play hyper aggressively, rushing directly in front of enemies to bait attacks as quickly as possible before more harpies arrive and create an overwhelming swarm.
