I've played the whole game 100% longsword, but I never bothered to get the parry because I was spending my points to get the +5 stat nodes in other trees. I got dumped into the bride's lair the first time with low health and no heals so she killed me, but I thought she had a cool moveset, so I decided that would be the fight that I would learn the parry timing on. I seriously expected it to take a couple of hours.

So imagine my surprise when I downed her first phase on the first try, only using one heal. I will just tell it like it is: the parry window in this game is so disgustingly wide that you could drive a busload of obese Reddit miladys right through it. As long as you press the button kind of, sort of, vaguely in the vicinity of the time the attack hits, it's a clean parry. I had seen people say parrying made Honglan easy and I just assumed they were good at the game. No. Parrying is actually so objectively easy that if you *can't* do it, you are genuinely terrible at soulslike games and should not play them.

I would say that realistically, the window is about 5x as long as Lies of P or Berserker Khazan. And the thing that's even more absurd is that in those games, a perfect parry would just do chip damage to the boss's guard meter. Here, shockingly, a *SINGLE* parry (with an extremely wide window) allows you to semi-stagger the boss, counterattack them, and maybe even knock them down. It is absolutely absurd.

This almost ruins the game for me, because there's very little accomplishment in beating it when a basic ability is so blatantly overpowered. It needs to be nerfed massively so that you can no longer disable/counter the enemy from a single parry. The parries should only do chip damage to the boss's guard meter, and it should take about 20-30 perfect parries (with the window cut in half from what it is now) to stagger a boss.