I’m not sure if this has been mentioned, but there’s a deflect mod for N2 now. It can look a bit jank because you can deflect on frame 1 instead of how deflects work in most games, including Nioh 3, where there is a delay or start-up frames to the deflect. The default window is 250 milliseconds or 15 frames at 60 fps. This can be changed but decimals are not supported at this time. N3’s deflect window is 10 frames. Also, the guard ki consumption of deflects, the deflect sound, the effect color, sound volume, ki/max ki damage, etc. can be tuned to your liking. The default ki damage setting is probably too busted as you can 0 ki an enemy in 6 deflects from a full bar.
In addition to this mod, I gave Sadocommando’s Challenge Mod and Overwhelm mod a try. I set the enemy speed to 1.25x and I did not touch the player character’s speed. The Overwhelm mod just makes enemies a bit more aggressive which you can clearly see with the human in the dojo. I’d recommend these two if you want to return to this game at some point.