Well, i knew it would come to this. The later bosses are already tiring me out.
It's not really frustration, since I've been on this same step back in DS3, but I've come to the conclusion that the later bosses are, simply put, shit.
Not thematically, oh no no no. Micolash is a madman done right, his arena is spooky and that mirror hoping is great.
Lady Maria is the best Hunter vs Hunter fight in the game and her story plus the clock tower are amazing.
I mean mechanically shit. I'm refering these two because it's also the one's I'm stuck. Or was. And I don't frankly like the way I cleared them.
Micolash was shit because his first phase is a spamfest of Augur with unbreakable poise, which is tedious to jump around instead of simply breaking his poise, demoslishing his HP and getting on to the second part of the fight, you know, the part that should be interesting. The chase was quite fun and you have to figure it out a bit. But then you get to the actual second phase and it's the same as the first, but now he can kick or Call from Byond to insta-kill you.
I'll admit, I'm slightly salty because he ACFB right when I dropped down into his arena and insta killed me. Three times in a row.
But what ended up pissing me more was the kicks. You can't take a step back from you, ACFB insta kills you. You gotta stick to him like flies to shit, but if you get hit by a single Augur, you're fucked. You'll never have time to heal. You can try when he's auguring, but he'll finish it with enough time to kick you while you're still healing. If he does that and takes a step back, tough luck pall, here comes the ACFB and you're dead. Otherwise, you're lucky: you can keep fighting.
With Lady Maria, it's a diferent problem. Believe it or not, I think she has too much HP and doesn't leave you enough openings. After her, I'm still missing the Orphan, Mergo's WetNurse, Gherman and no moon presence because I fucked my cords. But I can already tell it's going to be the same problem because I also had the same problem with DS3.
Early game bosses are the best thing ever in all Soulsborne games because you can use the whole moveset of your weapon to great effect. Light attacks for short openings, heavy attacks for larger openings. But late game bosses are suposed to be "hard" and that means that the window you got to attack them between their own attacks is so short that comitting a single Charged R2 attack is suicide. So are jumping attacks (long recovery in case you miss) backdash attacks (they leave you vulnerable and in the path of the same attack coming at you) and transform attacks (that take a fuckload of time to go off, unless tronitrus)
So now you got a boss that has a fuckload of HP and the only thing you can safely use against them are light attacks. Spam that R1, but not too much! You'll need your stamina to perform at least 2 dodges away from the boss when he's no longer stunlocked (if he stunlocks at all).
This is not hard. This is not something that makes me feel like I achieved something. This is tedious. The fight against Lady Maria was simply dodging for half an hour with a poke here and there. Once you get the timings for the dodging right, it only improves your survivability. Your ability to deal damage to her stays the same because no matter how good you can dodge, her opening windows stay the same.
The only thing that changes this is the parry faggotry that takes longer to learn than dodging and is as much as playing roullete.
Guess I'll suck it up the rest of the game anyway. I came this far, why stop now..