Played a bunch since the breach update dropped and the combat doesn’t feel very intuitive.
Here’s the short list of my pain points:
- Parry is too difficult: parry window feels extremely short and it’s hard to tell if the attack is parryable or not. It gets rather frustarting when you can’t tell if you mistimed it or the attack is simply unparriable. Another wierd aspect of a parry is if an enemy does 360 sweeping attack and you’re staying behind them. I’m still not sure if it’s possible to parry at all from that position, tried multiple times, but no luck.
- Auto-lock behaviour is weird. I still don’t understand how it locks onto the target and how/why it switches sometimes mid combat. It’s extremely frustrating when you fight 2 enemies in melee range and the target suddenly switches to a range enemy who’s a mile away, while melee guys proceed to pommel you.
- Attacking enemies near ledges makes you lunge to your death way too often. I’m using rapier and I’ve died so many times because momentum of my attack carried me over the ledge with corpse of my enemy.
- Almost every attack brings character on their knees for some reason. Why? I get it that attacks from bigger enemies will knock you down, but I noticed even smaller pokes have that effect. Sometimes I get knocked even if I was holding shield up.
- Most enemies have way too much mobility. It’s not really interesting to try and play the spacing game with your weapon if almost every enemy in the game have a lunge that goes almost full screen (and I’m playing on ultra wide). Even the bigger foes can charge you pretty fast from a mile away. It also works the opposite way, some ranged enemies have insane distance on their backstep moves which makes chasing them down not fun if you’re using weapon with short range.
- A lot of animations are too twitchy. The example that titled me the most was in the fight with caretaker in marin. When you kill the tusk, he has an attack where pulls his staff back, twiches a couple times and slams it into the ground creating a large aoe attack. He can do it multiple times and from the looks of it the timing of attack differs. For the love of god I can’t tell when he’s actually going to hit by just looking at the animation. I even recorded it, the moment staff starts moving forward it’s already too late to dodge. Might be skill issue, but there’s quite a few attacks in this game which I just can’t read. Delay timing attacks are cool when they’re desined to catch panic rolling/parrying, not when they’re too hard too read even if you look for them.
- Backstab attack feel inconsistent. It feels like you need to be extra precise with the back position to land it and some times it still wound’t proc even when you saw skull icon on the enemy.