Has anyone EVER actually used the Parry function? As much as there is equipment to find that is fashioned around parrying enemies and recovering health from "Revenge Attacks", the window of parrying enemy attacks is so dang precise and without any kind of visual/audio indicator it's pretty much impossible to do it in the heat of a fight when you're ganged up by a ton of enemies attacking you, rendering the entire mechanic kind of impractical. Furthermore, there is absolutely no indication of an enemy becoming revenge-attackable unless you move into melee range with them and apply some guesswork based on their percentage of health lost.
For me personally the meta seems to fully upgrade any thrust weapon and spamming the attack button while in mid-air.
Really wish heavier weapons actually had any purpose other than having bigger hitboxes and lower DPS than the faster weapons, like making you take less damage from attacks while guarding or actually making the parry time longer than 0.5 seconds so parrying attacks would become much easier.