Great game, little difficulty with combat

[Ruserius]

I have only been playing for 15 hours. Fantastic fun game. I love the hidden items scattered and trying to get to them. Sometimes you have to fall of something real high on the wrong side to find a little hidden area. Town building a bit like Wolcen, some of the crating, gathering and fighting style reminiscent of the old Gothic games. The mechanics in fighting are a little unbalanced, especially with parrying. 2H weapons seem to parry most enemies, and first boss, I figure this is because of the high defense on it. But I didn’t get that, I got a staff and parrying early with a staff is next to useless especially with mini 2H bosses and first boss totally useless. 1 in 10 parries worked. Either get rid of the ability to parry on staffs or give it a defense like other 2H melee weapon stat, to help with the parry. Get rid of it entirely, I learned to fast dodge but when you hold down parry button it tries to parry not fast dodge roll. So broken. Died a lot trying to get it working. A hell of a lot. I spent a good 2 hours dying to work out staffs are useless for defense. Very frustrating. The mechanics of casting a spell is so annoying. You have to take your thumb off the movement joystick and hit the pad joystick and then X button. Problem with this it prevents you moving away from an attack or dodging to side or back. Can you reconfigure this somehow, I am thinking to swap My either my “Y” button or using top of movement joystick button for the spell set button. Both a fraught with danger and Y button is useful for many other things. Died a lot trying to charge up for a spell by melee hitting, then trying to set it to casting it, then to lose it all when you die. Got so frustrating, next to zero chance to parry and only a random fluke spell, out of futile fear and frustration to avoid getting killed. I discarded the staff and by doing so found a very fun and unusual fighting mechanic, unarmed. You can punch faster than with dagger(s). I figure this is because you don’t have any speed negation if you are punching, and this can free up the parry button for dodge/move fast combo, to dodge just about everything. So, here’s what I found about unarmed. If you use a shield, you lose fast dodge as parry button now causes you to parry instead of fast dodging. Handy to keep in inventory in tight areas or when you have 2 or more to fight. Not sure if you know this but if you time your punches when they are starting a weapon strike you can get up to 3 punches in and this causes them to do a mini stagger. Enough time to get 2 more punches in. Dodge roll fast away and wait until they finish their combo, rush in and punch again or power punch. There’s a risk with any form of power hitting, there’s a pause afterwards that leaves you vulnerable. Rinse repeat. When they have about 25-30% life left they are weakened and get in with a series of punches they stagger more often or if you give them a second of pause, they try to do a power strike to survive or think about their next attack. You can feedback loop stagger them by doing this little pause, this gives you enough time to get in and create a stagger again a couple more punches, pause and the whole thing repeats with them not being able to get one single hit in or block or roll away from the onslaught until they die. So much fun. This didn’t work so well with the First big boss, but I worked out just buy 6 smoke bombs, fast dodge around him until he does long pause or drops, throw a smoke bomb at him. Took 6 smoke bombs to kill him. He went down fast. I was wondering, if you haven’t already, create some unarmed fighting gloves that can hold one rune and one gem, thus the unarmed style has longevity. Maybe even add some combos into them, would love to see a jab, round house and finish with a massive uppercut combo. Maybe something in the line of mortal combat finishing moves. Great game. Loving it. When you run into roadblocks that’s when you find out new things.