Thanks for reading everything. It’s a lot, but this is a complicated problem with the game, and so I think it’s worth the lengthy write-up.
The Balak Taw archer is fairly weak on paper, but he can call reinforcements, and his ranged attacks make group fights much more complicated. You’ll notice that you only encounter a Balak Taw archer alone four times (IIRC) - once at the beginning of the woods, where he’s intended to introduce the player to a new enemy type, and the other times on a ledge above an area where a fall means death or serious damage. Moon knows that individually weak enemies which pose little threat to the player can be substantially more dangerous when put near a death-pit, and you’ll find that many times you encounter a lone weak enemy, they’re near a hazardous ledge.
And for “god-tier” moves – the archer has two: the backdash-into-stagger arrow, and the aerial dodge-into-ground-slam. Both grant intangibility throughout the entire action. Neither are telegraphed, neither can be parried. Both have knockback, and can kill a player if they’re near a ledge – which they probably are.
IMO, both of these moves are too powerful – they can be used in fractions of a second when they player gains the advantage over the archer, and essentially nullify the player’s attack and punish the player with a potential one-shot (if the player falls off of a ledge). Many other enemies have similar trump cards.
For telegraphing, I’m trying to draw a distinction between an enemy’s lead-in animation, which warns the player that an attack is coming, and delivery animation, where an actual hit box is created. For most enemies in this game, the lead-in pose is very lengthy, but the delivery animation is extremely fast – so fast that very few players are going to be able to reflexively parry it on an initial encounter with a new enemy.
I understand that you may know someone who has had better luck memorizing the attack patterns of the enemies and learning to parry them, but in my experience, most of the people I play this game with have chosen to never parry, because the process is unintuitive given the quirks of enemy attack animations. Those players don’t want to have to memorize dozens (or hundreds) of lead-in animations to figure out the right time to parry for each one.
In response to your last paragraph: this is certainly a tricky problem. Enemy attacks fall into two categories in NRftW, single-attack and multi-interval attacks. Enemies don’t technically combo attacks, because once a lead-in animation is selected, the enemy will always follow through with all subsequent attacks associated with the lead-in animation. So in a way, you can look at multi-hit attacks from an enemy as a single attack with multiple hitboxes generated over time, not an actual combo. These multi-interval attacks don’t have to be metronomic, but they could still have slightly slowed delivery, This would provide an example of an enemy attack which could potentially be parried by reflex, but doesn’t adhere to a predictable rhythm.
As far as games which have more forgiving delivery animations, I’d say Dark Souls, Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen, and Warhammer 40k: Darktide all contain enemies which have delivery animations that can be reacted to reflexively for the most part. For two of those games (DD:DA and Darktide), the challenge comes from overlapping enemy delivery animations hedging out opportunities for the player to respond to the attacks safely. One enemy overhead can be accounted for, but THREE overheads coming in at slightly different times cannot be accounted for.
It might be worth Moon’s time to develop a perfect block mechanic if they’re not going to invest into reworking enemy attack delivery animations. For many players, blocking feels safer than parrying, and if a player learns to reliably perfect block, then they’re not far from learning to parry most attacks (or dodge them, for that matter).
Last thing: I didn’t feel as strongly about these issues until a few days ago. Something has always felt “off” about this game to me, so I started a Hardcore run to stress test the game. After completing it, I had learned a LOT about enemy behavior and animations. When character death is trivial, it’s easier to view erratic attack animations over death pits as a quirky (albeit slightly annoying) design choice for the game. On Hardcore, where every fight matters, it becomes a much more glaring design problem – attacking an enemy only for them to immediately perform frame-perfect intangible dodges, and then send you inches from a fatal fall within fractions of a second gets old really fast. Trying to punish an enemy’s whiff with a backstab only for them to punish you literally frames after the prompt is revealed just seems unfair. You learn a lot when perma-death is on the line, which is why my posts outlining these issues are rather lengthy and emphatic.
This made it more interesting. Also, so far it always seems to be on its own, so we’re facing 1 at a time and not a horde, which feels like it makes it more managable.