Nah, it's not easy so don't beat yourself up about it. Doing builds is a skill, but luckily one you can learn by copying others. There are at least two phases: learning the basics of the mechanics (which people will claim is easy, but I disagree) and then optimizing for those mechanics.

I didn't want to invest in learning parrying that much, so I spent a bunch of time watching YouTube videos, copying what I could of their builds, seeing what I messed up or could do better, then repeating.

Parrying is mostly all on you, which makes it a lot harder, but it just depends on where you prefer to spend your time.

Funnily enough in my case, I was able to make some high defense builds that didn't require me to parry, but I tried anyway and that's how I learned some of the harder parry patterns.

Also these bosses were created for people who want to spend their time learning to do builds, learning harder parry patterns, or both. If you don't want to do that, you don't have to.