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?
Thop's Barrier kinda gets overshadowed by the other parry ashes, Carrian Retaliation makes a glintblade phalanx when parrying spells, and Golden Parry does an aoe parry that makes spacing less important.
Still a really useful ash for learning to parry though (anecdotally, I've been playing Dark Souls since the awful PC port of DS1 but only got my head around parrying thanks to Thop's Barrier).