I don't really understand what's wrong with the combat ? people say it's bad, it's wrong or whatever but fail to give a solid reason why it's bad ? or what's wrong exactly ? I am having blasting fun with the combat so far. Yesterday I fought 3 high level enemies (9 - 10 levels above me) and it took over 15 mins to do so with a lot of reflex testing moments and couple of deaths but I didn't had single feeling of frustration at any single point. I think we are playing different games or some of you are spoiled by the bulky slow combat of Dark Souls/Blood Borne. Get real guys there is nothing wrong with the combat except the fact that you are failing to grasp it.
The combat is bad because it doesn't require you to think and combat is extremly easy . You perform a few strikes dodge , perform a few attacks , dodge and repeat it until all enemies are dead , all attacks are strongly telegraphed , it is very easy to dodge them . Some enemies don't even require you to dodge , like hapries , you just shoot them with crossbow and when they hit the ground you hit them until they die . A player doesn't get punished for using same strategy for all of the enemies , if you are unsure about your enemy , just dodge more and hit less . Humans block 98% of your attacks and you can't do anything to break their block unless you spend a lot of points into sword tree , such mechanic makes your offensive capabilities obsolete , the game tryes to tell you something about stamina bar and how enemies will fight worse if you deplete their stamina , but it doesn't work , if you hit humans about 8 times they will stop blocking and you can land one strike and than they will block again , some of the humans counterattack instantly if you hit them while they are blocking , they will also dodge if you are try to counter , there is no way I can bypass their defense by using a sword without specific build isn't it stupid ? If you fight a crowd you just dodge more and hit less , but the idea is the same , hit , dodge , hit , dodge . When I was in the final part of the game fighting cyclops , I just spammed quen and recklessly attacked them until they break my shield , just what I was doing throughout the whole game . Enemies are just HP sponges , the best example of it is the first griffin fight , it took me quite long to kill it , not because of the difficulty , but because it had a lot of HP , at least later you can craft archgriffin potion to deal with this problem . So , the combat system requires you to repeat the same actions for every enemy in the game - it's not fun , the combat system is not good , it's a no-brainer , tedious no-brainer . You can add here problems with balance , but that is a different story .
