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In Dark Souls 1, it was sometimes difficult to follow up after breaking someone's guard.
Oftentimes your reward was a single R1. If you were quick enough, or knew ahead of time,
you could circle around the enemy player for a backstab. This was pretty tough to achieve
with heavy weapons on slower builds - and you'd think that those setups would fare best
in a guard crush situation.
Dark Souls 2 has a new form of critical attack that seems to address this issue. When a player's
guard is broken, they're put into an animation that's highly reminiscent of being parried
in Dark Souls 1. The attacking player can then hit R1 to initiate a critical attack.
This makes it much easier to take action when guard breaking an enemy.
Just to confirm, guard breaking can be done both by simply attacking a player's shield
and through the use of the new forward-R1 kick replacement.
When discussing this with Peeve, he brought up another good point. It's now much riskier
to expend all of your stamina on an opponent. In Dark Souls 1, you could back away - at
most taking a small amount of damage if you were guard broken during your retreat. In
Dark Souls 2, if you attempt to block an attack with no stamina, you risk taking a highly
damaging critical attack.