What? I used the drangleic sword most of the game and then a great club at the end
I pretty much exclusively used boss weapons because I thought they were so much cooler than the boring generic weapons. Smelter sword, curved dragon gs, both Fume Knight swords dual wield, etc.
The fact that you can heal yourself by damaging the bosses is a huge difference in the few Bloodborne boss fights I've done so far. In Dark Souls if you get hurt too often, you need to find an opening to heal.
Torches used to be far rarer in DS2 vanilla - like all the pre-spawned ones were there but there wasn't 200 of the torch carrying dudes that drop them with a 20-30% rate. It wasn't too rare to be running 25-30 min of torches at most in vanilla - going over 1 hr was an outlying case then.
That, plus you also need to do a visceral to get it all back; normal attacks only chip away at the yellow part in small amounts. And you lose it all instantly if you get hit again. Trying to rally on a boss is great when it works, but it is very risky and almost always better to just drink some blood.
Vanilla DS2 had the lighting engine they downgraded between beta and release and it never really got dark enough to need a torch anyway. Pretty much only needed it for that one shitty zone with the wooden platforms.
I don't even use the ring - mix in a little magic, keep stuff upgraded, don't use things with stupidly wide sweeping attacks like halberds... wowsers I never even weapon swap besides when I go to a completely different mode.
