I feel like this is going to be more opinion than anything else. I'm mixed on the speed changes, I like how the enemies have such a large range of speeds. A lot of the enemies maintain the same speed as the others, but some are just ridiculous (ie the dogs, and the little creeps in Undead Settlement). But especially as a Greatsword user, it forces me to time my openings better, which is the reason I use a Greatsword, to be more strategic in my openers. Also, to compare having to walk with your shield up in DS3 to DS1 is laughable. DS1 was notorious for it, the difference is, with a new game you don't already know where they are.
It may be, but it seems like enemies in general attack faster than you can swing. In Dark Souls 1/2, you take a hit, sure, so you swing back and can at least hit them this time. In Dark Souls 3, you take a hit, try to swing, nope, staggered, try again, nope staggered. Every single one (especially the dogs you mentioned). I was in Irithyll yesterday, farming souls, when one of the sword wielding people runs up, does a spinning attack, so I dodge, and it does it again, so I dodge again, and again... and again. It did it 6 times in a row forcing me to dodge constantly until I ran out of stamina and finally got hit! Why is that!? Why does a monster have an attack where the ONLY solution to evade it is "dodge 6 times in a row!"
If you ever take a hit in Dark Souls 3, the ONLY solution is, "Roll away, then re-open, because there is no way in hell you are getting out of the stun lock otherwise"
Haven't played far enough to comment.
Eh, you can look at the wiki. The big difference in DS3 weapons seems to be the introduction of more special weapon movesets like the Farron Greatsword.
It's the same as every other Souls game, you have to upgrade the weapons enough and the scaling will go with it. All of the base normal weapons in DS1 and DS2 had garbage scaling that goes up as you Reinforce your weapon.
But the MAX scaling for most weapons at +10 is C. There are a few exceptions but they are RARE. Even a +10 Greatsword with a Heavy infusion (Removes dex scaling, increases STR scaling) is ONLY a B. In other souls games, you typically got B/A as your final scalings with the occasional S.
Point is, Str/Dex matter less now unless you go for the S rank weapons. So basically, for STR, FUGS, for Dex, Chaos Blade.
Once again, this will be taste. I felt like it was too easy to gather souls in the previous games, it takes work to level up now and makes it more of a priority to "git gud" instead of farming souls to level up to cheese it.
Yeah, but I made it far enough in the game to nab the FUGS, problem is, I was only level 43. So here I am, non-stop farming souls to get my STR up to the 50 requirement. I'm constantly helping players with near-end game bosses and only getting 8k souls per kill. It costs 18k souls to level at this point.
Haven't gotten far enough to comment, but none of the games are particularly long. Ik Dark Souls 2 is quite a bit longer than DS1, but Dark Souls 1 was extremely short if you know what you're doing.
True, but the Dark Souls 1 shortness was usually from skipping zones and finding gigantic shortcuts, not really about the number of zones.