Disgruntled Opinions Incoming
Im gonna rant about Darksouls 2 for a minute so if your easily offended by gripes with a game stop reading now.
just to preface this i do not hate dark souls, its still a very fun game with lots of challenge and story depth for those looking for it, but its got some problematic shit.
Easily my biggest problem with Darksouls is the way shields have become so watered down that the heavy builds are a less of a viable option than it used to be. With parrying being harder than ever to nail down and many enemies and bosses that mostly ignore shields of any size. the anti-shield parry also seems really unnecessary, the kick already made hugging your shield a bad idea and acted as a short stun.so the shield parry just serves to further remove the heavy class and shields from competitive play.
My second gripe is that pvp is utterly broken and has been for both games. there is nO lag compensation and with shields being only a liability someone who only wants to play PvE or heavy builds will find themselves in a generally weakened state against invading players. glass canons always seem have the upper hand because spells are easy to dodge and getting behind heavies is easy. and back stabs and front stabs are never not a death sentence. Heavy weapons generally slow swings make timing crucial, and timing is completely thrown for every fight because of various latency's. personally the idea that people who want to can invade your game at any time and destroy you is really shitty, they are ignored by enemies, and are always someone who is prepared to be fighting other players. sure invaders are a part of the a theme but the theme is that people are horrible and i don't need to pay 60 dollars to experience this.
My third gripe is the durability, this has probably all been said before but all the boss weapons low durability made it pointless to upgrade and use them because you cant use them for very long before they are useless. the upgrade system itself has less impact but near the endgame its easy to upgrade multiple weapons and at least a single armor set. honestly the best fix i can think of for this is having upgrades increase durability, not even a whole lot but it would make most weapons way more viable.
My final gripe is the controls im heavily disappointed that they didn't nail down the mouse and keyboard controls despite a month long wait. while still far better than the last games, still has a significant problem where you are not able to use lung attacks or shield bashes (apparently there is some delay when using the mouse and keyboard in junction so activating those two skills are nigh impossible with the mouse) and there is a weird problem where if you tamper too much with the mouses key bindings the whole control scheme breaks.
You may notice most of my problems center around being heavy or defensive, being a tank was a completely viable build in Darksouls 1 but in 2 i constantly found myself having to strip down because dodging was the only strategy, i can understand needing to adapt to bosses but why was all this heavy gear even here when the only valuable heavy items where weapons, most of which having low durability.
Being a heavy in general seems to be a bad idea. the benefits of being heavy, Being able to hit and take damage at the cost of speed, really don't seem as prominent as the last games with poise being less important and armor rating seems to have severely diminishing returns and at a certain point in the game there are just too many enemies who can slam through your armor regardless. heavy weapons still hit plenty hard but unless you slam adaptability up to at least 20 your gonna have a hard time using shields, 30 if you want to actually remain effective.
it always makes me sad when RPGs bother to have branching skill paths and half of them end up being sub-par.
