Bayle is awful

(Disclaimer: First SOTE playthrough so I guess take this with a grain of salt(?) but I don't know how you could defend this honestly. I'm not talking at all about the difficulty of the fight, I have no issues with a boss being hard and I'm handicapping myself with low blessing level and no summons so it wouldn't be fair to do so anyway.)

Seriously what are these hitboxes : | ...

You know normally I think complaints about the camera and hitboxes are hugely overblown in this game, the camera is fine in basically every fight outside of ancient dragons and fire giant/astel being a bit iffy or Rykard during that one attack and hitboxes are only an issue every now and then where there'll be one hit you took that you disagree with.

But Bayle? First boss to have *consistently* bad hitboxes and tied with ancient dragons for worst camera in the game.

Hot take but I actually like fighting the Drakes and I think the camera is perfectly serviceable in them but Bayle for whatever reason doesn't let you target his good leg or his arm... like why??? You can never hit anything without unlocking but the second you do that he jumps away and does some other attack off screen.

Even worse are the hitboxes, his hitboxes are so bad his attacks clip through shields half the time, I've been running a block build and it just isn't viable against this guy because his attacks randomly ignore your shield. I even had one instance where he somehow in just one head swing broke my guard (with the guard break sound effect) and hit me for full damage while knocking me down (with the "uuuuuugh!" voice clip) and lost both stamina and health? What? It's so bad it genuinely feels unplaytested. sometimes when you're running from his breath attack one lighting spark will randomly jump off to the side partway through and hit you even though you were clearly far ahead of the attack, how is that fair?

Absolutely horrid fight, worst in the game by far. Didn't think you could beat Rykard but here we are I guess. Almost all of what I see about this fight is praise, why do people like this?