I wanna say that if the shield doesn't have a parry or an actual attack (so basically most medium shields), it lets you use weapon arts while one-handing. Found this out with one of the kite shields you pick up early on, but swapped to the Grass Crest Shield a while back and haven't looked back since. A lot of weapon arts are insanely useful in PvE: the quickstep on the dagger makes the swamp much faster to traverse and is also apparently loaded with I-frames. I've also found the guard break on any shortsword to be amazing against any humanoid enemies.
I'm 5 bosses in so far (just got past the Abyss Watchers) and I like it quite a lot, though the game does seem to be riding on a lot of nostalgia. The combat is fast but doesn't feel unfair, and a lot of the really punishing areas (the swamp) can be handled by just advancing cautiously, like every Souls game before it. I'm liking the boss design so far, and even though the trend of two-phase bosses is getting a little predictable at this point, they've managed to shake it up with each boss fight so far as opposed to a straight "I buff my weapon at half health" à la Ivory King or Fume Knight from DS2.
The level design is a little linear but they are giving us choices (most recently I had to choose between Farron Keep and the Cathedral) and as long as they continue giving me those choices, I won't have much to complain about.
I will say that the game does crash quite frequently for me on PC, and that I think it's more a matter of my laptop getting pretty old and not having the best specs combined with DS3 not exactly being optimize for PC gamers. The crashes are erratic and don't seem to be associated with anything in particular - sometimes the game will last a good 45-60 minutes straight and other times I'll get back-to-back crashes within five minutes. All of my graphics are turned down, I've updated my drivers, I've tried a whole bunch of stuff. Still hasn't really affected my enjoyment of the game, though.
Looking forward to tackling the Cathedral later tonight with my newly made Farron Greatsword, which has one of the most ridiculous and fun movesets I've seen in a Souls game
