I have been playing the Souls games since Dark Souls, back in the day on the XBox 360. The Invader mechanic was always a nice touch to the game, most of the people tried to have a fair fight or at least they tried to fight you.
But now, since the DLC, all invaders we get are people trying to lure you to dragons or in a boss room or into another group of enemies because they only understand their L2 button smashing build and can’t figure out how to fight properly without abusing some mechanic. Yesterday three people tried to one-shot me with the (thankfully now fixed) Perfumer Bottle Ash of war. Today someone started to shoot at me from afar with a canon and just ran away until he had enough help to finally kill me and my friend. It is just so damn boring going against one trick ponys… Where are the fair fights? Where are the manners? Where are the skillfull invaders that show me how a weapon is used beyond its ash of war?
It is so frustrating, i loved getting invaded in base Elden Ring, always tried to have 1:1 fights with fairness for both sides. But this now is just dumb.
Thank you for reading my rant.
Yea, I haven’t seen many honor duels in the wild since dark souls 1 because they’ve pretty much included some form of dueling mechanic since the Dark souls 1 DLC onward. It especially never happens in Elden Ring because as you noted, invasions typically go through to someone with a summon, so honor fighting is pretty much immediately thrown to the wind out of caution.