You're right, I forgot about skulls being good for that because when I play I usually try to put as many skulls as I can handle on legendary. Plus my attempts at LASO. I always play with grunt birthday party to have better feedback on if I got the headshot.

Now that you mention it, skulls are actually a way better idea than just user-adjustable difficulty sliders. They might be the best version of user-adjustable difficulty.

I like oblivion, but it's pretty bad with level scaling and having to know mechanics well to optimize your character. To compensate it just has a bunch of sliders you can change yourself at any time.

This bothers me because it feels kind of bad cranking down the difficulty at certain parts because your character build just doesn't suit that quest. It takes too much trial and error to balance the sliders for not only you as a player, but also the character you built at their current level. There's a quest where you're trapped in a painting and fight your way out of it, but you lost all your equipment temporarily. My build was made around the equipment bonuses i had, so that quest was impossible for me. It was annoying I had to change difficulty for only that quest.

Meanwhile halo skulls you can turn on and off for certain missions, it's definitely a better mechanic because it actually changes enemy behaviours and isn't just flat percentage change of attributes.

Ideally souls game would have a good difficulty adjustment similar to that, but with game crunch and how bad they are at doing stuff that should be standard like accessibility options, I wouldn't have hope for that.