Over the course of Dark souls 1, 2, 3, and bloodborne, the games slowly conditioned the played to play more and more aggressively, ditching the shield and armor in favor of faster rolling and dodging attacks to wait for an opening.

Elden ring however, has pulled a complete 180 and decided "Nah fuck that shit you gotta MAKE your opening."

I spent the first 30 hours of my playthrough trying to play this game the way the other games conditioned me to. I had some trouble in the very early game adjusting, coasted through for a while, and hit a wall.

That wall was the infinite stamina enemies. We all know them (Damn you Crucible Knight!). And because if you're trying to play like the predecessors conditioned you to (Dodge through attacks, wait for your opening to strike) then you will literally never find your opening and just die.

The game pushed me too far and I lost a lot of enjoyment. To get meaningful progression I turned to Cheese to get through the majority of difficult content up until the end of Caelid through summoning and Rotten Breath for Scarlet Rot and then just waiting for them to die. This portion of the game was genuinely not fun.

Then I found jump attacks. These fuckers on basically any weapon become the introduction for your opening. Boss swings, you jump heavy attack and stagger them, repeat. Unfortunately I figured this out literally right before Radahn, so I literally had to scarlet rot and run around on horse waiting for him to die (And I had to die trying this more than 5 times, thats how bad this fight was)

Eventually, I figured out "Screw this, I'm taking a shield." The early shields in this game are absolute dog unless you know where to get a good one, but by this point I knew where.

I completely respec'd my character (Mostly out of necessity, I was playing arcane with dragon spells and the arcane weapons literally didn't work) into a strength one and took a greatshield.

I absolutely BREEZED through the game with heavy poise damage attacks and a greatshield to block with. Barricade Shield a spirit ash made almost every boss fight absolutely trivial in comparison. Being able to create my opening with heavier weapons, and having a good shield to block with when needing to be defensive made the game actually fun again.

Even now that I've respec back into arcane again, I still have an upgraded brass shield (Totally worth it btw, it's not even max and it's gotten 10 stability, you get 1 stability from every 2 levels on a shield if you didn't know) with a freshly nerfed barricade shield and I'm actually able to properly progress. Problem enemies that usually become extremely difficult because of attack spam and large HP is what Barricade shield is for, and just having a good weapon that isn't spam reliant and a shield is enough.

For those of you struggling to keep up with the game, give up that two handed dodge roll mentality. Grab a shield, give it some upgrades, and maybe pick up a heavier weapon to partner your DPS weapon with. You cannot wait to find your opening in this game because you'll never find it, you have to MAKE your opening.