2H great axe 40Str, paper tiger edition!
Wait, I have that! I went through my inventory last night and I have a claymore, greataxe, and a rusted anchor for some reason. Oh and a weird Sword of Thrones thing that is far too heavy and has too high a stat requirement for me at the moment.
All are str weapons, but I keep umming and ahhing about whether I like the moveset enough to commit shards to any. The claymore has a sweep and a poke, which is nice, but the rusted anchor is a giant rusted anchor
The greataxe feels a bit too built around vertical strikes from my initial playing around with it. I always like heavier weapons to mix sweeps and forward strikes.
Will have to try a few out in some battle scenarios tonight.
The problem is more about the difficulty of a lot of other games regardless of category being too easy. Go here to do something basic and kill x to return to y location with it all mapped out and a shiny reward and xp. People like being rewarded for as little effort as possible. It makes games like this too jarring as you're often punished without reward.
The thing is, whilst this game still has some brutal parts (tree sentinel, I am looking pointedly in your direction...) there are also a lot of ways that it lets you mitigate the difficulty once you pick them up.
The horse lets you book it out of situations you lose control of, and mounted combat makes most open world battles much easier. It also means you can leg it fairly safely through high-level areas in search of treasure. You can summon npcs and spirit ashes (or other players), which make almost all of the dungeon bosses a lot easier (to be honest, the wolves trivialised a couple of bosses for me to the extent I regretted using them). Your healing flasks refill quite generously (even those little groups of three or four trash mobs hanging out by the side of the roads count as a group to give you a charge back). You can fast travel from the start so you don't have to repeatedly traverse dangerous areas once you've found the sites of grace.
I think it
feels intimidating, though, and I can definitely understand why some people don't like the oppressive and often stressful atmosphere it creates. I have certainly spent several minutes at a time sitting on my mount just staring a new dangerous-looking enemy in the distance and asking myself if I
really want to go over and test my skills against it.
