Starting this game I found attacks to be very confusing on how they worked. The game doesn’t give you much and most people are led to believe dodging simply has i-frames. Even experienced players had a lot of mixed opinions on how hurtboxes worked leading to even more confusion. With a little more digging and a mod by Ferrasick called Hitbox Debug Draw I was able to get more clear information on what was happening**.**
Two hurtboxes exist for a lot of attacks. Red hurtboxes are often smaller than the green ones and if the player stands in them when they appear the player will ALWAYS take damage. Green hurtboxes are bigger than the red ones and again will hurt the player if they stand in it. The difference is when dodging through green hurtboxes it completely disables them from hurting you. This is why at times attacks feel a lot longer when you don’t dodge. It also made the belief of i-frames confusing as sometimes you could go “i-frame” attacks and other times you couldn’t.
Most enemy’s hurtbox are triangular prisms that try to mimic the area they swing in with 1 red hurtbox and 1 green hurtbox. These hurtboxes being used on most enemies leads to inaccurate visuals which makes it difficult to understand how to dodge their attacks. However Bulwarks have a more polished and accurate approach to their hurtboxes. A red and green sphere hurtbox follows the length of their attack. The only exception is their shield bash which still uses a triangular prism and is fast and hard to avoid. Most bosses oddly enough only use spheres and rectangles for their attacks and a good amount of boss attacks only have red hurtboxes making it hard to avoid their attacks.
Dodging works not because of just I-frames but also because it breaks the enemies tracking. If you try to dodge an enemy’s attack too early the attack will still track and hit you. Time it just right and the enemy will target where you last were when you started the dodge. This can make it entirely possible to dodge attacks with even the heaviest weapons. Side dodging most attacks is often the quickest and safest way to dodge an attack when there are a few enemies. The way that some enemies track you leads to a long distance needed to be traveled backwards to avoid the attack. Ragers and specifically groups of them are best avoided by back dodging as they often track poorly after the first miss.
I am by no means the best at dodging so I can’t tell you what attacks are avoidable and the best way out of them but by seeing the visuals of each enemy’s attack I’m sure it will help you best determine how you want to avoid it. Weapons with more mobility can more safely dodge backwards while usually slower weapons need to side dodge.
My Personal Opinions
Despite this information I still find hurtboxes to be frustrating. A lot of the issues I had mainly exist due to inaccuracy on visuals where they show you that back dodging is the best way to get away from an enemies attack but in reality that hurtbox is actually longer than it is wide. Even attacks that are very wide still are the same width as every other attack using triangular prisms which is just confusing. Its a game where precision is rewarded but you aren’t able to accurately assess how to dodge attacks because they don’t match visuals.
I do think the red and green hurtboxes encourage you not to dodge straight at enemies but some of the red hurtboxes are too big for some enemies. They also had a very good system going with bulwarks and I can’t help but wonder why they just gave up on that system which doesn’t seem that hard to do in my experience. Some of the boss attacks just feel unfair to avoid as they are only red hurtboxes but they are also kind of big hurtboxes as well.
On the bright side I am happy to get this information out here as it is important to me and it will help correct info on dodging and help players better grasp situations that don’t make sense or seem unfair.
