Your initial post, regarding disqualifying others from even commenting, just seemed like a textbook example of the arrogant attitude among the series' fanbase, that's often criticized and seen as a turn-off.
Oh please. We were discussing baseline difficulty of bosses, not choices of playing styles or whatever. Like I said, I coop all the time and have nothing against it, but saying "this was easy, btw I had help" always get my eyes rolling.
Your post is a textbook example of people whining about so-called "arrogant attitude" when it was nothing of the sort.
If saying something reasonable and uncontroversial like "you cannot accurately determine a boss's difficulty without having fought them solo yourself" is so toxic, then, whatever, man, I'm sorry you're so easily "turned off"... xD
The thing about co-op in Souls is the boss AI isn't really good enough to handle it. So having summons can often make a lot of bosses completely trivial because you can just wail on the boss or pew-pew spells from afar whilst the boss is all over your co-op buddy/NPC.
I did TONS of co-op/pvp in DS1 especially, so I'm not knocking co-op and never do I tell people how something "should" be played - just saying it does effect the difficulty because the AI can't really handle it. At worst all you have to do with a co-op summon is tank Estus a hit or two or fall back until the boss attention is on your summon again.
Exactly. I've solo'd
and coop'ed every single boss in the series (except those you literally can't, like Darklurker). Even Orphan of Kos or the Nameless King are fairly easy with coop help. Poor Lady Maria becomes a joke.
There are a
few bosses were coop partners do not help much or can even hinder (Ancient Dragon, Aldia, defiled Amygdala), but they are rare, and that's because their attack patterns do not rely on aggro but on AOE and coop buffs their HP.
How cool would it be if in future games, coop would
add new attack patterns to bosses? I think the only thing I saw that came close to that is the two tigers in DS2, I'm 90% sure the second one comes down much faster when fighting in coop than solo, regardless of the damage you deal the first one. But other than that I never noticed the boss AI changing at all. That'd be so awesome, like if they tried more AOE attacks or hell even summoned an additional enemy and such (which I normally don't like much but in a 2v1 scenario it's only fair!).
