Board Thread:Dark Souls II/@comment-25430895-20140428154415/@comment-16047389-20140716140104

An overextended health bar is the worst way to add difficulty to a fight. Neither Vendrick nor Smelter Demon are actually hard, they just have more health and defense than what is reasonable. Both have incredibly predictable move sets and strategies, but do massive amounts of damage with single hits. Giving them the amount of health and defense that they both have, doesn't make that moveset harder to work around, it just draws out the fight until the player either screws up a roll or becomes impatient and starts taking more risks to get in more hits.

The best fight in the game is Darklurker. Rather than drawing out the fight with an unreasonable amount of health, the Darklurker utilizes abilities that require the player to pay attention to their surroundings and the specific moves the boss is using. Rather than simply chipping away at the boss' health over the course of 5-10 minutes, the Darklurker fight can be done relatively quickly, assuming you pay attention to all incoming damage and avoid it accordingly.