Adaptability is good

ADP and agility were a good idea and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

It soft gates the single strongest form of defense in the game behind a stat and that's very healthy for the RPG side of the game. It is, in a subtle way and whether people realize it or not, part of the reason why DS2 has gained a cult following who genuinely like it the most and emblematic of the design philosophy that made this game so divisive.

Unfortunately, people hated ADP, because what makes people feel good in the moment and what's healthy for game are often not the same. The failure of ADP and the precedence that it set is the reason why roll spam now reigns supreme and every game needs to be faster and more relentless than the last to try to compensate.

The dodge roll is the ultimate defense. It works on everything. It negates all damage. Anyone can do it. And, in all of these games except for DS2, it's always available to you at its best.

For the player, it is a universal defensive solution. It's always the first thing to try, the first thing to practice, the most obvious form of skill expression. It's so good that it can easily make any other form of defense feel superfluous, at best, while also being the one that every single character has perfect access to. It can be hard to justify using, let alone building around, other defensive options. That's a problem.

For the designer, it's undoubtedly the most important defensive tool to design around, and it fills a very important role by ensuring that no character is ever truly defenseless. That's why the roll always needs to be an option. But when the roll is always good, it becomes the de facto solution for every problem, and forces all of the design to center around it to the detriment of everything else. That's a problem.

By locking iframes behind agility, DS2 is the only Souls game that genuinely gives rolling something resembling an actual trade-off. It's still the theoretically perfect defense, and technically, anyone can still do it. But its level of raw, universal utility now depends on how much you're willing to invest at the expense of other stats. That's good.

So why did ADP bomb so badly and get such a bad reputation that uniform iframes are now sacred and every game had to try harder and harder to fight back against the only form of defense that matters?

I think there are three main reasons:

Half-baked implementation and signaling, different demographics, and plain old gamer shortsightedness.

The implementation problem is simple enough. It was new and unexpected for iframes to work this way, and since exact hitboxes and iframes are obscured from the player, you can't expect them to figure out why they're getting hit when they thought they dodged. They're inevitability just going to think your game is jankier than it is, and understandably so.

ADP could for sure have used some more explanation, but I think the real culprit here is actually agility, specifically.

The iframes should not have been lumped in with agility, which obfuscates the main thing you care about behind a big, arbitrary number. They should have been their own standalone substat. That stat should have reflected your roll iframes, and only gone up when you gain an additional iframe. It just has such a profound impact on gameplay while also being literally invisible to the player who can only ever roughly estimate it from how easy it feels to dodge things, it couldn't afford to be that vague.

The different demographics problem is also pretty simple.

Souls games are RPGs. They're also action games. And if you play Souls games primarily or entirely as action games, agility is a lot more questionable. It adds unwanted variability to a core mechanic. Mechanics are for practicing and mastering, not for building and progressing! To make you spend levels on upgrading your roll, and especially to allow people to make theirs even better if they want to, is anathema.

But... that's why a lot of us who love DS2 are in it as much if not more for the RPG side of it. The way I see it, ADP is another avenue for me to shape my next character. And, unlike other games in the series, this one actually has a strong enough incentive for me to try other methods of defense sometimes, rather than just deciding what armor I'll be wearing and what weapon I'll be swinging between playing around the exact same dodge rolls in the exact same way every single time.

And finally... shortsightedness.

People don't appreciate healthy mechanics. People like mechanics that feel good to them, and then decide that if the mechanic feels good, it must be healthy. ADP didn't feel good, so it was bad.

ADP dared to make the players feel like some aspect of their character was less than perfectly under their control. It reminded people that these games are RPGs, and in RPGs, the build and playstyle of your character can and will at times be more important than your execution in the moment.

It was different from not having the STR to wield a weapon, or the INT to cast a spell, or the VGR to take another hit, or the END to make another roll, because it presented a scenario where it was easy to blame the game for your own failures, both on a mechanical level and in failing to play to your character's strengths. Sure, there was always the option to simply execute well enough to compensate, but it's easier to tell yourself that you totally deserved that roll and the game is stupid and broken for not giving it to you.

In a way, ADP being considered so definitively the greatest of DS2's crimes is perfectly on point, because ADP only sucks if you're unwilling and/or unable to play ball.

And that's why we get to enjoy the much superior gameplay where every fight must have a 17:1 roll to R1 ratio.

Thanks for coming to my ADP appreciation talk.