The game seemingly isn’t designed around fighting multiple enemies at once. If you don’t spam your attacks you don’t have a full command queue to execute before dodging or blocking. When you’re talking about your combo however what you’re running into is command queuing, the game will take your inputs and perform them in the order they were made. You can’t interrupt your attacks to dodge, this is part of the “strategic combat” thing I talked about earlier, this is what people mean about being committed to your actions, this isn’t Bayonetta. But it’s definitely not random, it’s a designed system that works as intended for a reason. Honestly I do not know the exact particulars about how hyper armour and stun locking works to describe it. This may or may not be exclusive to the Abyss Watchers, where I know for a fact that it’s random whether or not they break out or keep being stunned. Some enemies can break out of being stunned by your attack combo, and since you can’t interrupt your attack animation to dodge, this results in you taking a hit and being stun-locked into their combo. I played through my first time with sword and shield, but when I entered a boss fight I almost always stashed the shield away and 2h the sword because blocking was for the most part unwise. If a creature 3 times your size hits you with a piece of metal as wide as you are it seems unlikely you’ll safely deflect the blow with your shield arm. There are for sure attacks that you shouldn’t even be trying to block, to some extent I found that was something that always made sense. If it’s an action game, just design the difficulty curve around fixed stats it’s easier on developers because they know exactly how strong players will be, and it’s easier on players because they know they won’t be under-powered.

Maybe that’s still “my” fault for not leveling it up, but on top of stat increases being minimal, “RPG mechanics” have also become a pet peeve of mine. I’ve had single attacks drain most (if not all) of my stamina bar, resulting in a stun.

Peeve binding of isaav