Not sure where you are up to, but usually you can just pull 1 or 2.

They did add a lot of fake difficulty, but you get used to it. Just go for reposte and backstab so you get iframes, or trigger their attack animation then walk away and hit 1. That's pretty much all you have to do in dks2

In some areas it's more common than others. I'm not really a fan of it, but whatever I guess they wanted to make the game more difficult without making it harder...