I'd highly suggest not picking OP perks and sticking with middle tier or lower weapons and armor or this game gets stupid easy.
Yeah I kind of figured this would be the case when I realized how stat-based everything is, despite the level of complexity the combat system has.
What I really want to do is get to the proficiency such that I can do this against everyone, even really tough enemies if I play perfectly:
But it feels like there's just too much noise and stat-dependency in the system to do it.
More explicitly from that I can tell the game's combat is dice based and transactional, such that when the player has an enemy targeted and attacks, some die is rolled to determine whether it's a hit, a block, dodge, parry, riposte etc. This is obvious early on and is why the player spends the first few hours of the game getting rekt again and again.
I haven't quite figured it out yet, but from what is intuitive and what the game says, the following contribute to that equation:
1. Player stats vs opponent stats
2. Player stamina, opponent stamina.
3. Whether the opponent is recovering from a hit.
4. Whether the player just parried/dodged/riposted/blocked.
5. Whether the player feinted.
6. The location of the enemy's weapon/shield relative to attack direction.
7. Some combination of how much variance the player's attacks have been up to that point.
The above list is really cool and this is the first game I've played that truly attempts to follow the list of "intuitive and realistic melee combat". Unfortunately the list is basically a fantasy. The variance in the equation of hit vs non-hit itself is massive, and the effect of #1 just totally swamp out everything else in the system.
That that means is that like most RPGs you'll easily handle stuff significantly weaker than you, you'll be rekt by stuff significantly stronger than you, and against anything around your level you'll just sort of grind down until their armor/weapons break.
I kind of hope that I'm just a shitter. I'd love to see a video of someone demonstrating how to use player skill to ace a high level opponent like Captain Bernard using real weapons (the guy outside of Rattay that you can train with).
The game is still fun and the combat is enjoyable enough with the above in mind, but I'd really love to play a mod that makes playing perfectly. All the pieces are there, they're just not put together from what I can tell.
