>>713789892The game has some questionable design decisions making it sometimes idiotic hard.
For example I cannot stand the stamina design as bosses will throw long attack combos at you. If you try to guard them they will break your stamina, dodging is safer but can burn your stamina as well, zoning sometimes works but running also costs stamina. Perfect Guard wont drain your stamina if you can land it but the timings within the combo can vary and if you get hit you lose stamina as well on top of the HP. This can lead to a lot of situations where you find yourself waiting for your stamina to recover. Usually you want to reflect all attacks as this will leave enemies wide open to the point you can stunlock them yourself till your or the enemies stamina is burned but getting reflects consistently is not easy against some bosses.
Another thing is that gear is very important in this game. Some sets can straight up double or triple your damage. The best sets come from bosses either as direct drop or you craft them with the material also dropping from the boss. The craftable sets either unlock the boss itself but for most earlier ones they come from side missions which also drop the gear and materials but some of them are only available later. Thing is while those sets are very strong I doubt a lot of people want to farm them especially when the boss took them an hour to slay in first place. To level your gear you also need to do a side mission that only becomes available after 2/5 of the game so a lot of people may miss it.
I guess a lot of people struggle with this if they ignore the side missions and simply go from mainquest to mainquest. The game actually rewards you for trying to be a completionist as all collectibles tend to do something.