Dark Souls III’s online community is wondering how FromSoft will fix many perceived problems, and it appears from patch 1.10 they’ll have to keep waiting.
Patch 1.09 caused serious consternation amongst an online community that only considers about half of all the game’s weapons to be viable, and pure sorcery/miracle builds useless (they’re helpful with weaponry, and pure pyromancy is still somewhat viable). The update rebalanced some weapon types to make them more balanced, particularly in PVP (PVE is a whole other story), and it helped make some weapons better scale with intelligence/faith to make those builds more useful.
The problems came from some unexpected nerfs to the already struggling sorcery builds, faith builds only really being given more weapon options of gimmicky weapons, and, most dire, the Hornet Ring getting buffed. The Hornet Ring powers up critical attacks (front- and backstabs), and 1.09 strengthened them even further. This means that either fishing for parries into frontstabs, or circle-strafing into backstabs, are even more so the easiest means to a victory.
On the heels of patch 1.09, patch 1.10 is just exasperating: The only thing it does is
- Fixes an issue that allowed players to float in the air when using the Tears of Denial miracle
…and “server maintenance”. Not only does this not do anything for balance in a game whose community this far from release is largely multiplayer, but this only hurts speedrunners who relied on this glitch to skip portions of the game. It’s understandable why this could be seen as a serious issue for Dark Souls III’s campaign, but that argument holds up less when the community is so largely focused on PVP and speedrunning at this point– and when this issue was seen as so important, it deserved its own patch.
The good news is, patches have been coming out on a monthly basis, if not faster. Those concerned can hopefully expect more rebalancing soon.