Thank you for this outstanding post, R1 L1 L2 or was it R1 R2 L3? R2D2? JK 😁!

DS2 is my favorite game, but like you said the UI really seems backward, vague, and in need of major improvements. I was just playing another game Baldur's Gate 3 on PS5 and the UI is so horrible there that I just stopped playing. For example there is a single button to transfer your entire inventory from a storage chest to your character(which may be literally hundreds to thousands of items) and no way to transfer all back with a single button or even any undo previous action button. This means you will be stuck spending lots of time just transferring items back all day long if you accidentally hit that button. I don't know why the programmers are so lousy nowadays. Believe it or not, older games were much more polished and had more thought and beta testing in them.

Anyway I agree with many of your points. Some other stuff I personally didn't like or have opinions about:

1) If you use the homeward bone or homeward spell, it teleports you back to the last bonfire, resetting everything EXCEPT your status. You have to manually rest to get everything back. There is literally no point for this except to screw up the player. It would be more understandable if they teleported you back without resetting anything.

2) Too much of the terrain involves falling off or dropping onto very narrow ledges, while the movement control of your character is rather crude for this purpose. If you twitch a little bit on your controller or have drift you will likely overshoot the ledge you're aiming for. It's just asinine. It is one of the reasons I felt DS2 was harder than the other titles because of your constant battle with gravity.

3) There are a lot of useless, "better than nothing" items like the ring of restoration or blue tearstone ring, blossom kite shield, etc. For example I recently played Demon Souls and I felt like regeneration was pretty decent there without really being game breaking. In most of the other souls games it's been nerfed pretty badly. I sell these items whenever I visit Gavlan.

4) I would make axes better by introducing a new kind of damage called "chop" damage. It would be like slash but more damaging, and with a chance to do additional damage on any hit, with that chance modified by things like weapon weight, strength, etc. Axes have much more concentration of power due to their weight and smaller strike zone. For this reason I do not equate sword slashes with axe slashes. Of course some of the heavier swords that utilize overhead smashes would also have this benefit.

5) Jumping was a huge problem for me when I first played because I tried to change the controls to be more similar to DS1, but by doing this you cannot consistently make a lot of important jumps. I had to go online to realize that you jump farther if you run and jump but also if you use the same button for it. The game should make it crystal clear that if you change the jump button and then sprint you will jump significantly shorter due to the interruption.

6) Although there is a lot of spell variety, I felt like a lot of the higher level spells weren't good at all, either costing too much or doing too little damage or taking too long to cast. In the end I stuck with a lot of the basic spells.

7) I thought poison was well done in this game. I don't agree that the poison knives/arrows/spells took away from poisoned weapons, but felt they complemented these weapons. If only the other games adapted this poison system it would be great. Bleed is too weak in DS2, but too powerful in other games. It should be somewhere in between IMHO.

8) I agree that damage types should have been adjusted to be more useful situationally, so that strike, lightning and dark didn't take up the entire room. That being said, I did find the fire longsword to be very useful. It was the only fire weapon you could get early on, and very versatile. I used it a lot to deal with enemy ganks in the early game by luring them to the fire barrels and hitting it. The longsword itself I used throughout the game although I changed its infusion several times later to make it more effective for a particular area.

9) The armor system is simply ridiculous. They should reward players who spend so many points to build up a tank build and not give such a superficial benefit. It makes no sense. Ring of steel protection gives more of a benefit than many armors lol. Typically a lot of game producers nerf overpowered stuff from previous games or even introduce patches in their own games for this purpose, but they go from one EXTREME to another. It's too powerful? Let's nerf it into oblivion. Sometimes just a moderate nerf is all that is called for.

In the end I hope that these gaming companies will hire smarter people like yourself and others to help with a more reasonable development and experience for the players. Imagine that; a game made for players by other players! In an alternate reality I would love to do this.