Yes, I know what I'm asking is basically sacrilege in the 'Soulsborne' community but I've played quite a few Souls games and I am kind of over the whole 'challenging myself' thing. Part of the reason I was originally drawn to the Souls franchise was the difficulty but now I just want to play Fashion Souls with a cool-ass character in a cool-ass world doing cool-ass shit. The game has so much lore and such a beautiful world and just so much creativity in general that the difficulty seems like a distraction from enjoying it.
I've heard using summons is a good way to alleviate some of the difficulty. Are there any other effective ways?
Simple, just get a mod that slashes all enemy damage done to you by half or even less.
I've noticed most of the difficulty in Soulslike games comes from the fact that enemies can do quintillion billion damage in rapid succession at anytime while you're forced to roll around all the time and can only strike when they let you; and your damage always pales in comparison to the damage they can do to you.
If you're going to 1-hit, 2-hit or 3-hit a player to death, what's even the point of keeping a Life Bar? Just keep a Hit Bar instead.
inb4 "git gud": i beat all 3 souls games without mods so get fucked.
Mods are a suggestion I hadn't thought about much. Sometimes I do forget thay I'm on a PC.
that's the joy of playing games on PC - you can modify it to your liking
Because different equipment and stats can make you tankier
i guess, but then you can't do fashion souls and the game would feela bit more boring to play because you're limited on certain equipment to keep you from dying in 1-2 hits.
also the fact that you'd become slower (full havels for example, while making you tanky, also makes you slow af).
I wouldn't say you're functionally limited, unless you want to make a min-max build of sorts.
I've only played DS3, but I assume the following is the case for the other games too. The stat patterns are what you expect from a game with RPG characteristics. Choose attack speed or attack damage and lightweight armor with little protection or sturdy but heavy armor.
You only become slow if you maximize your equipment load. If you keep it under 66% (iirc) then your roll is the standard one and has i-frames. This means that you can become tankier if you choose a light weapon, like an one-handed sword or a dagger.
There are 3 kinds of rolls, actually: Fast Roll, Medium Roll and a Fat Roll.
The roll you're talking about is the "Medium Roll", which you get by keeping your equip load within 30-70% in both DS2 and 3. In DS1 though, it's within 25-50%. Yeah. Very strict.
And in DS2, you'll need to waste your levels/souls on ADP (Adaptibility) to increase your Agility stat so that you have decent enough iFrames because some bastard thought it would be genius to make iFrames a fucking stat and give you shit iFrames regardless of your rolls at the start.