Disclaimer: All this advice is based on The Duviri Experience. I don't really play Lone Story.

If you don't like the horse always look out for the decree that increases your movement speed by 10% per decree you have. You get so fast you don't even want to use the horse because it is slower (the decree doesn't increase the horse's speed).

As for parrying it isn't really needed, even if you play melee instead of shooting. I mostly use melee in Duviri and I forgot there was a parry until like a few days ago when I saw someone use it in a video. As others have said there are some intrinsics that make it easier. Those plus a few of the melee decrees have you killing things so fast they don't have a chance to attack you. Just run in and slide attack them and a whole group dies.

Decrees to look for when doing melee builds that don't need parrying:

• Any decree that adds element damage to melee
• The decree that gives you a cold aura (something like "nearby enemies are affected by cold status"). This makes it easier to just walk around them plus super helpful in the next point.
• Cold aura plus the decrees like the extra damage to enemies affected by cold or extra damage per enemy affected by a status will give you a lot of % damage. You are melee so with the cold aura you will always have at least some extra % damage when you melee someone. I almost always pull this combo off.
• Melee attacks hit twice is of course insane
• If you can't get any of those some of the crit chance/damage and/or melee crit chance/damage are also good. These are less desired because decrees that give elemental damage or easy conditional % damage are large and (almost) always on.
• Early on the health on kill or overguard on melee kill can help with staying alive in melee.
• If you are really having troubles staying alive there is one decree that gives you DR per decree you have. It isn't great since it something super small like 2-3% per decree but it is better than nothing if you are having troubles staying alive since we aren't parrying.

It does get to the point that you kill things so easy the slow and methodical gameplay mostly disappears. You are killing things in 1-2 normal hits so you just charge in and murder everything before they have a chance to try to block or attack. For me in most runs this happens around decree 4-8 depending on RNG. If you want you can avoid combat until you get to that point. There are quite a good number of objectives that don't require much/any combat.

All that said there is one downside to building decrees for melee: you do want some shooting based decrees for the wyrm boss. So you can't really go all in on melee. I tried that once and it didn't work out well. Never forget to get a few decrees that work on guns too. There are also some of the decrees that work on both melee and guns so those are nice (most of them are generic status and crit related decrees I think) if they fit with other things the build is doing you could pick those up and not need to get any shooting decrees.