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Gundyr in Dark Souls 3 arguably acts as a better nemesis than the final boss, Soul of Cinder.
Iudex Gundyr acts as the 'tutorial boss' at the end of Cemetery of Ash, the game's first area. In the late game, the player can size up against Champion Gundyr, a powered-up version of the boss found in the Untended Gardens.
Although Iudex Gundyr is a straightforward boss, he can still be trouble for someone new to Souls-like games. Beating Champion Gundyr with fashion and tack thus becomes the player's very own rags-to-riches mini-narrative, as u/Rude-Listen demonstrates in his journey to learn to parry.
One slick trick to be found in the clip is a parry action performed while the ashen one is physically facing away from Gundyr's attack. As the user u/taclovitch clarifies:
Sometimes. Weapons whose scripts include “force parry” are directionally agnostic, but ones without it (e.g. the worst parries in the game) *do * factor in angle and direction, which means the parry hitbox has to actually touch the attack hitbox (which makes things like behind the back parries impossible and makes you very susceptible to dead angles).
Does lock-on really affect parrying in Dark Souls?
The direct technical answer is no. There is no game data in any of the three Dark Souls games to support the fact that lock-on affects parrying in any way whatsoever.
However, the real answer is more nuanced, as expected of the complex Dark Souls combat system. Lock-on has no direct correlation to the parrying animation. A successful parry depends as much on the actual act of parrying as it does on the tool used for parrying.
There are two things that toggling lock-on directly changes, the more obvious one being the camera. As a running joke in the Soulsborne community goes, the camera is the most challenging enemy to battle in Dark Souls. This rings true for many boss fights in particular.
The lock-on feature centers the camera on the enemy and tracks their movement while maintaining that position. In the case of bosses with giant models, the issue is that the camera locks on at the center of their model.
How to do a successful parry?
To pull off a successful parry, one needs to predict the attack timing by gauging the phase and type of the telegraphed attack animation. In many cases, like with Gundyr, no lock-on can give the player a broader perspective to get a better read on this attack animation.
The other direct change Dark Souls lock-on makes is to player attack behavior. Attacks will always track the target being locked onto. In some cases, this can be a desirable quality-of-life feature. But with slower weapons like greatswords, turning off lock-on is essential to redirect the swings as the enemies move out of their initial positions.
This is most relevant in PvP skirmishes, where the slow wind-up of heavier weapons can be significantly abused to either cheese for an easy parry or circling around it. It is, therefore, almost customary for strength-focused greatsword and ultra greatsword users to eschew the lock-on feature for a strategic advantage.
