Yeah, I feel you - I'm a huge Souls fan but you're not really wrong on anything there. The basic combat loop never really expands beyond rolling through an enemy's attacks so that you're behind him and hacking away. Sure, you can play with magic builds but honestly they're even duller, and ranged is... kind of a meme. And yeah, it's intentionally incredibly vague.
Souls took me a few attempts to get into, then once it clicked, I never looked back, but I'm also probably more forgiving of very repetitive combat than others due to being a WoW player. It's part and parcel.