“Objectively” is a strong descriptor lol. Strictly speaking for melee players, it might carry more weight if a golem flew around like a dragon and had as many offensive ways of quickly dealing with a pesky tarnished pipsqueak, but they don’t. Dragons also don’t take nearly as much critical hit damage, and because of their mobility take longer to stun in the first place.
FTR golems get stunned by dps, not poise damage like most enemies, so quicker hits work better at building up the invisible stun meter. Torrent can reliably avoid the fire stomps by double jumping just as the foot hits the ground. When the golem high jumps just run away and double jump when you hear it land. Return to circling around its feet to attack. It only does its most obnoxiously damaging AoE stuff shooting fireballs all over the place when the player goes out of range of its kicks.
Pretty much every boss in the game has far stricter (or more fucked up ie Margit, Godrick, etc.) timing requirements to dodge their attacks. With 60 VIG and decent fire resistance armor the golem shouldn’t be one shot’ing unless it somehow lands directly on the player. I think the ones you throw pots into might be tougher in a way since they like to spam fireballs more often being the only thing that can really hurt the player up high.
What makes them difficult is how long they take to kill, and how quickly they can turn that allotted time into a
waste of time.
Against my better judgement, my ego refused to let this Golem win, and I tried again this morning (fuck's sake this is self-inflicted torture.) I was doing really well, managed to knock him down for the first time in a dozen attempts, got my critical and everything. Fast-forward several more minutes as I'm working on knocking him down for the second and last time, he did ONE stomp (not on me, mind you), killed Torrent, I fell into the residual flames
with full health, and fucking DIED. 15 minutes!
15 goddamn minutes wasted!!!
At least with dragons, you have a health bar you can see and appreciate your progress. The Furnace Golems and the invisible meter that actually matters, the fact that you have to stun them TWICE before getting ONE critical chance, and that you have to do
that twice to finally kill them, and all of
that requires perfect execution... I can't. I just fucking can't. I seriously give up this time. It noticeably changed my mood; I was angry at everything for hours yesterday, and I'm not going to allow that to happen again today or ever, not over a physik tear or ash of war I'll probably never use. If they're all optional, I'm option "NO."