This fact makes me feel so much better about having trouble with this game. I beat dark souls one in every possible way and my first playthrough was pretty much effortless but dark souls 2 has kicked my butt in every possible way I can imagine and it has been a massive blow to my confidence in my gaming skills.
Is dark souls 2 really that challenging? I beat the first one easily with the exception of the karma demon,blight town, sens fortress, anor Londo archers, and Gwynn. Getting to the boss was actually harder for me than fighting them. I keep hearing of dark souls 2 being dumbed down from the first one.
Dark souls 2 uses far more unfair tactics that will really whip you if you're not insanely careful. This will mostly involve some ungodly number of enemies swarming you in certain areas and slaughtering you if you aren't prepared to handle them with some aoe attacks. Also your health gets lowered each time you die until it's at 50% which means that most enemies can just kill you in a couple hits and most bosses can one shot you unless you use a human effigy which is a limited resource early on. Also, they nerfed the living hell out of every school of magic. All these things combine to make it a completely different game from dark souls 1 and a much more unfair one in my opinion.
Why.?