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.
In Dark souls 1 did invaders not invade you to attack you at range while you were dodging traps in Sens Fortress, or try to lure you to the Darkroot Garden ladder to kick you off of it, or block the archer path in Anor Londo, or shoot you off the bridge in Oolacile Township, or move swap a rapier with the dragon tooth, or dead angle WOG you, or TWOP you, or DMB Power within R1 spam you, or etc, etc, etc?
If they lure you, don't follow them. If they range you, use a shield, dodge, stand behind a tree, move in a zig zag. You're the host, they have to come to you to get what they're there for if you make them.
Yeah, what OP mentions has been 95% of all my invasion experiences across all of From's Soulsbourne Ring games. If anything, I much prefer how invasions are handled in ER vs previous iterations. No more being a new player doing some solo exploring and getting invaded by someone using some cheap, OP build that one-shots you. Now it can only happen when you're doing co-op with 1 or more players, putting the invader at an inherent disadvantage (unless the host intentionally opts into it solo).
Don't get me wrong, invasions can be super fun in any of their games when the one invading isn't being a cheap asshole. Sadly, especially now that ER has brought the franchise into the larger mainstream, those experiences will be rarer and rarer. The other week, my buddy and I were prepping for the Gaius fight and got invaded by a legit player. That was the first time either of us had had one in years, we even didn't gang up on the invader and tried to keep it mostly 1v1 (he/she eventually started targeting both of us regardless so we both went to beat down town on them).
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.
Maybe i did not have this many bad interactions in DS 1 - 3. At least it was less L2 Spam with some endgame weapon. Sure there was the occasional invader that was overpowered but the majority was fighting on common ground. Nowadays it seems like who can press L2 mlrw often and tank ghe hits.