Even ignoring the percentage of bullshit in this post (I could play the same silly game attempting to describe Dark Souls as "Just keep your shield up and walk slowly, attack after blocking" and it would be true, if extremely reductive, for a good 80% of the standard enemies) nothing of what you are listening would define the core mechanics in this combat system as implicitly poor.
I already pointed some flaws with the overall balance and I would also agree that enemies would need some heavy addition to increase variety, but then again not a single one of these complaints would be about the core mechanics of combat.
Man, you are massively understating the problem, if CDPR "fixed" the combat balance and added a ton of new attack patterns/abilities to the enemies, I would see this becomming a decent combat system but that would be more of a revamp of the whole thing than just a balance pass and as that will never happen, there is no point on minimizing the combat flaws of the actual game that exists. About Dark Souls, yes, Dark Souls has 80% trash mobs but:
1) Those mobs are very often placed on strategic places to fuck you, that requires level design what unfortunately is mostly lacking on Witcher 3.
2) You waste stamina by rolling, heavier armors make you lose more stamina and nerf your roll and you have to level your stamina up meaning you can't roll around forever avoiding most enemies and win by easily outmaneuvering them.
3) On Dark Souls, most mobs have different attack patterns that can fuck you up bad and they are dangerous attacks that can get you even when you are used to them if you don't pay attention. Witcher 3 mobs follow a very simplistic attack pattern: a) their health bar turns red, they lunge at you, you hit them three times they jump back for a counter attack, b) If they are big, they are slow as fuck and they are mostly glorified punchbags, this makes them awfully predictable. Even when they use special abilities like poison, hypnotize and regeneration their abilities are inefective/easy as "my grandma with artritis could do it" to avoid.
4)On Dark souls, you can roll, parry and block. The only real way to protect yourself on Witcher 3 is dodge/roll, yeah... you can parry but good luck trying to attack the humans surrounding you and parrying strong monster attacks... yeah, good luck.
5)On Dark Souls, bosses have more than one simplistic attack pattern copy pasted.
6)On witcher 3, signs are hilarious broken, why risk missing a dodge to do 300 of damage if you can do 3000 damage a second with Igni, perma stun with instant kills with Aard, turn enemies on glorified punch bags with Yerdn and have IDDQD with Quen unless you have Parkinson disease? If that was end state Geralt, I would undertand, but you can do that shit by the time you end Velen.
) from the fan-pandering that others *cough* Bioware *cough* have been belching out. The review clearly points out where the strength of the game is and why that is so. Kudos!
