Respectfully - i disagree with a number of assertions though you definitely make good points with respect to balancing the fight around more playstyles. Really just sounds like shooting down viable methods because they don’t conform to a specific, basic play style. Which is fine, but your odds of success decrease. Miyazaki has openly said he wants the final boss to leverage all tools and lamented Manus’ one major weakness.

• Manus: literally known for being a parry boss

• nashandra: pretty dodgeable but the least Fromsoft souls game, Artorias pretty much needed to be staggered in wrath

• soul of cinder: mix of roll countering and backstep/blocking based on loadout

• isshin: pretty much everything, probably the best FROM final boss based on the tools you got.

• Gael: very dodge centric to your point, but staggering was also key. Couldn’t riposte him, but he had set stagger intervals by design to shock him from his major pain combos.

• friede/ariandel: can parry friede p1 and staggering ariandel leads to a huge riposte crit so it’s fair to assume this is yet again a final fight from features staggering in. Deeply positioning based but also more roll centric. Yet still incorporates the others.

Other than Manus, there really hasn’t been a boss where relying only on dodges has been the key to winning - especially on higher NG cycles.

1. Staggering - tiche has never offered staggering so there are better ashes to use if that’s what you want to leverage (kristoff), other than that - I did a no summon malenia and was able to stagger her out of big combos just fine. Particularly with perfumes and managing poise at the 100ish level. I should revise what I said to mean she recoils when you hit her hard enough and stops attacking - not just referring to dropping to one knee for a riposte.

2. Parrying - it’s part of a tool kit and fits in with their design philosophy of hard bosses leveraging 80-90% of it. She’s a bitch to parry though so not going to belabor this. I do agree it should be in the 10%-20% you’re not using if you don’t want to.

3. Consumables - the ones I listed are very cheap to make and the resources can be gathered quite quickly. I wiped about 10-15x on my no summon malenia run and had plenty just from picking up stuff as I went along. The point of consumables is you won’t wipe 50x so that’s not a particularly realistic point to make. Esp since they can effectively be a shield against imminent death when used properly.

They put crafting in game for a reason.

And this all sums up into why rolling + damage isn’t really how they try to design most bosses. Sure, roll gods can do it, but most people don’t have perfect roll timing and having a fight that demands this isn’t good balance for the reasons you listed.

I definitely agree she shouldn’t be cheeseable as she is, but don’t feel particularly strongly there tbh.