I keep going back and forth on this based on how reliable my partner is and how quickly fights descend into chaos, but as far as the different enemy types go I don’t feel like they really make much of a difference by themselves. You’ve always only had two options for dealing with enemies, which is blocking/parrying or dodge rolling away, and I find that these new enemies don’t really change that dynamic in any way other than you’re dodging rolling even more. The game already had a generous amount of un-blockable attacks and 360-degree attacks you had to dodge roll to get away from, so adding several more enemies who have ranged un-blockable attacks doesn’t actually make you play much differently. At least for me.
The other thing that makes me feel like it’s lacking something is how abilities are, as usual, cooldown based. You have less skills compared to the single player, but your special abilities and ninja tools all work on cool downs that can range from 30 seconds to a minute and a half. Without those abilities every class is pretty much using swords like usual, with everyone wacking away on the same enemy. The archer naturally does more damage with bows, so she can at least fall back on that to differentiate herself a bit, if she can get some space. But the assassin works best on stealth-based damage and once combat starts you can’t really lose aggro and do stealth attacks again without using one of your cooldown based abilities. So it just feels like the class differentiation dissipates for too long too often.
Where things do change up however, and this is a bit of a mea culpa on my part, is when elemental attunements get involved. Now one thing I’ve learned is that the levels are changing based on difficulty. As you go up in difficulty the levels are changing their enemy types and layouts, and levels can integrate more mechanics than they did on the normal difficulty. So a level that previously featured only Soul-Linked enemies (you have to kill two enemies quickly or they revive) now might feature Soul-Linked enemies who are also elementally attuned (they take little damage unless you’ve attuned you’re weapon at a corresponding elemental shrine).
It’s that elemental attunment thing that can change the flow of combat, because there might be three elements in play but only two players in story mode, so you’re constantly trying to kite enemies around as you and your partner attune with different elements to fight the strong enemies, all the while meanwhile dodging a large horde of enemies. Those are the moments where it really feels like you are your partner have to work together.
The higher difficulties are also adding in more Oni type enemies, who have stronger attacks and way more health, so those encounters are also tending to require you to work with your partner to belt out damage and kite enemies around as someone gets overwhelming by a large group. So depending on the moment I’m sometimes liking GoT Legends more than other times.
I’m still impressed Legends is a thing though.