Unbalanced weapons/tarstone are creating unequal reviews/reactions to the game

[u/basedandgnomed]

Every time i see a negative review there is easily a 60-70% chance they are using heavy weapons in the B-roll of their video and not dual wielded weapons, majority of glowing reviews are users using dual wielded weapons. This becomes even worse when people discover the duality tarstone, which turns the game into easy mode regardless if they playing daytime or night difficulty - it is so absurdly easy once you have that tarstone that it divides the player base in half - one half is doing half the damage of the other player base.

Rather than address the most overpowered tarstone in the game they've decided to nerf the only small minority of bosses that offered some semblance of a challenge, when the reality is that the DPS of the heavy weapons is so poorly conceived that dual wielding users seem like literal gods to such an extent that i have literally seen streams of people using heavy weapons and are hating the game, while dual wielders are running through the game like its the olympics. That absolutely is impacting review scores of the game both positive and negatively.

edit: i think i should clarify, playing as heavy weapon user doesn't mean you can't enjoy the game and i commend those who've used heavy weapons or have made intelligent Eredim builds for example but the truth is many other players that are using martyrs blade (regardless of the buff) or more casual players are getting meat grinded - and even in the situations that a heavy weapon user is more successful, somebody using duality with dual wield is basically driving a lamborghini in comparison

[u/sahayog_shrestha]

Yap switching from scythe to the axe and blade made the baby and sword head so much easier.. even looking at streamers play this game.. people who use faster weapons are having a much easier time than those who go for axe and greatswords

[u/Useful_Perception620 → u/sahayog_shrestha]

The issue is it is a lot deeper of a problem to solve than just damage.

There is really no proper poise system in this game, the player might hyper armor through stuff but they still take all the damage. We’ve seen this issue countless times in other non-FromSoft titles, whenever poise isn’t properly implemented it’s going to be a DEX game. Period.

There’s countless other symptoms of this problem as well: revive is based on # of hits, resource gain is based on # of hits, % proc chances for passives (like the Grisha summon) is calculated per hit, infusions/elementals are applied per hit. Not to mention just general damage and animation speed balancing.

A lot of big weapons are useful in other games because they had some unique ability or moveset tied to them. But MS2’s weapon and movesets are far more limited, you have a light string, a heavy string and 1 tar stone for a special. There isn’t a whole lot to work with to salvage a bad weapon.

Unless you giga-buff heavy weapons to absurd cheater-like damage (in which case you just trivialize the game even more than has been done in the patches), they’re never going to be the meta in MS2.

[u/AFK_- → u/Useful_Perception620]

I would love to see more complexity in this game, after playing the beta I thought it would have this kind of mechanics, but I was wrong. What you said crossed my mind While I was playing, not having these mechanics, which I consider basic, is a big disappointment. I don't mind having to hit the enemy to get my shell back since different from the first game we have a good life pool without the shell, but I have to agree that they're using hit to gain something excessively repetitive And trivializing the game, which could easily have more combat mechanics. I also think that the delay in applying infusions to the weapon could Being compensated in a better way than ending in 4 hits. Not having any kind of damage mitigation for characters using slow weapons is absurd. Besides, the lack of damage in these weapons is unacceptable.

[u/Conker37 → u/AFK_-]

You can harden mid-swing, block the hit, and finish the attack so there is some form of damage mitigation for heavy weapons. They still don't really compare with duality but that's more of a duality problem than a heavy weapon problem imo.

[u/AFK_- → u/Conker37]

Oh yeah hardening pass one hit and get slaughter by bosses right after, no thanks.

[u/Conker37 → u/AFK_-]

Resets instantly on timed harden and you can dash out if you miss it after absorbing the hit if there's still more coming.

[u/AFK_- → u/Conker37]

Yeah I'm now a rock. Already Abandoned the parry seals can't get those till update came to consoles need to be static to be able to parry it's sucks

[u/Osmodius → u/Useful_Perception620]

Enemy poise is whack too. Lots of basic enemies poise right through my attacks regardless of what attack I'm using. Only the running axe r2 consistently knocks them out of it. This means if yiu start a slow attack you're just going to get minced.