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I could write a paragraph on my thoughts of Vigor in TW2 (Good & Bad), but ultimately it was clunky in some aspects, but "bar watching" or labeling it as a "chore" is total crap. All it took was the occasional glance in combat to check how much you had, after awhile you could usually you could keep track of it anyway without looking, and that was all part of mastering the game.
To me, there almost always needs to be a penalty for blocking/parrying, or else it just makes many combat encounters boring and way too easy. God of War had this issue, Assassin's Creed has this issue... There's no penalty and so all you do is hold down a button and you literally cannot die. I have 0 issues with the change away from Vigor as a separate point based system, but you NEED some kind of payment for parrying/blocking in an action game like this or else it'll become like the pre-patched Quen in TW2 for TW3, which becomes a some super dumb easy way out for tons of encounters in the game.
Dark Souls has endurance consumption, Batman requires timing, Witcher 2 had vigor... You need something.