I dropped ADP to 20 and then initiated the ultimate test: NG+ Smelter Demon.
I almost beat him without taking a hit but then got careless right at the end and whiffed it. However this is really making me agree with the "ADP is not as important as you think" crowd.
Actually, I can readily eat some crow. On my first character, ADP was the first stat raised to 20. After getting tagged again and again by the Heide's knights, I just said "fuck dodging" and just easily circle strafed them and would just block most other enemies, since them recoiling was usually an easier way to counter-attack than trying to dodge then attack. There would be certain times throughout the game where I would end up feeling the need to dodge, and half of the time it felt like it worked.
Problem is, what you see on screen doesn't match what the game registers sometimes, and those knights are especially awful in that regard. I just spent a good two hours testing
agility levels from the lowest (85), to 93 and then 100. Would have tried more, but didn't have effigies on those characters. I can say without a doubt now though, that agility does in fact do
something to your dodge.
At 85, I could dodge the giant sword wielding knight by rolling into his vertical slash at nearly a half a second before it would hit the ground. Any earlier and I'd get tagged as it's coming down close to the end of the roll, any later and I'd get hit as I'm trying to start the dodge animation.
At 93 it was a bit more lenient and I could actually do a complete dodge revolution inside of the sword (not with a 100% success rate); which is something I couldn't do at 85 even once. I also never got tagged with any of the horizontal slashes at all, whereas I did occasionally at 85.
At 100 it was almost night and day compared to 85, although it only felt
slightly looser than 93, but it was easier to repeat the complete revolution forward into the sword. Now I'm wondering if the breakpoints are every 5 agility until it caps at whatever.
Anyway, those knights are particularly dumb when it comes to feedback. So many times my 85 agility character would roll to the side and so obviously cleared the sword by quite a distance to the side, yet then he would stand up after the dodge finished--and the sword was a character's length away--and go into the being hit animation. It's even worse with the horizontal baseball swing that starts from down back and goes to up forward. When those swings happen and your character "fails" a dodge, you'll roll through it, only to "get hit" after the sword is already at its apex.
lol Actually, ADP was the ONLY stat I raised for the whole of the forest of giants...didnt raise VIT til much later. I went from a sluggish mess to that of a sprite without leveling ANYTHING but ADP. There is no amount of arguing that will beat the science behind this experiment. 
