A few of your suggestions already exist, you just need to spend points in the magic tree to get them. AoE Aard+AoE damage from the Sword tree is amazing for taking out groups of smaller enemies. That and bomb/trap spam.

I don't think the problem is really with the combat system. Its with how they designed the encounters. You are thrown up against hoards of enemies before you have the proper tools to deal with them. There are a ton of tools you can get after a few levels for dealing with groups of enemies. They either need to let you get some of these a little earlier or adjust the early encounters to use smaller numbers of stronger enemies. I agree that the spam dodge while getting in the occasional swing style that is required in the beginning is not fun. However this gets mostly fixed after you can develop your character some.

Also, I think its intentional that signs are not very effective unless you spend points in them. If you do they can be very powerful though.

I am fairly sure we could finish the game (on normal setting) just with the Quen sign, and dodge (rolling around).

That is what makes me think that everything IS there, ready to be used by the player as an additional bonus to beat even the hardest encounters.

The game content isn't too difficult in my experience.

It is just not properly introduced (learning curve), or played out (clunky animations need us to play like metronomes).

This of course remains just my own, subjective, opinion of the game.

Ohh I'm not saying that it would be hard to finish the game with quen + dodge. Just that it would be boring. Those early fights against tons of enemies aren't really that hard if you know how to dodge, they are just extremely tedious and simply not fun, at least IMO. Once I got my first AoE spell I started to actually enjoy fighting groups of enemies. It would have been nice if I could have gotten it before lvl ~10 or if I didn't have to fight 6-7 enemies at once until then.

One think that really annoys me is the special cut scenes. They do not immerse me personally rather the latter. I feel they scapegoated making actual action animations because it was easy to just make predetermined combat scenes. I hope they add more animations in combat and make real time animations instead....

I honestly can't understand what the crying is about, other than some sequences where the difficulty scaling is a bit off. I adore the combat, find it lively and engaging, and by the end of chapter 1, on Normal difficulty, Geralt is such a baddass that outside of boss battles, there isnt really much difficulty.

Strike opportunistically, dodge/reposition, strike opportunistically, dodge/reposition, etc. I dont even rmeember to use Quen most of the time, and I'm not any sort of champion twitch action gamer by any stretch. Just keep moving, and keep enemies in front of you. For heavy opponents roll past them and strike from the flank. The constant adjustment to enemy movement is what keeps in interesting and tactical.

There are definitely some difficulty scaling issues with some bosses and the prologue, and not all skill trees are created equal ( I cant vouch for someone deciding to invest in the alchemy tree over magic and sword) but combat itself is fun and fluid, and dodging is easy even with a mouse and keyboard.

Starting out relatively fragile and becoming more durable/powerful is an RPG convention. In chapter 2 Geralt has better gear and better abilities, and can be much more reckless in combat, although you can still get yourself into trouble. Investing 6 or 7 well chosen points in the sword tree makes you godly.

This.

The special animations would work a lot better if the world around you shifted into slow-motion while you retained full camera control. Now the animations feel a bit out of place because often the ending result is not the same as was shown in the cutscene.

The combat could also feel more responsive at times, some fluidity would be nice between the moves, especially blocking. However this is a minor gripe and I feel that combat is just the right speed: Geralt feels realistic to handle.

The difficulty at start was really refreshing and nice, but the degrading curve of difficulty is really annoying. No more does venturing into the woods feel dangerous, instead most of stuff dies just by swinging my sword at it from afar. I have been playing on normal though, but I really would've hoped a more stable difficulty. While some people might feel that this is to make you feel powerful, I would've preferred an approach where the character progression was to help you survive, not make the game easy.

However I am really enjoying the game very much, and it's shaping up to be my favorite game in many years.

Definitely agree. I don't mind the new combat system per see, but IMHO I still find that too often it require skill not to defeat the enemies but to work around the gameplay limitation be it either the lack or responsiveness or the sometime funky collision detection (when good old Geralt decide that getting stuck by a 10cm wall or some little rock is a good idea in the middle of a fight).

I don't mind dying because I made a mistake or didn't plan enough my assault, but it definitely annoys me when I die because Geralt decide to stop fighting and stand like an idiot for 2 second instead of dodging or casting the sign as I ask him to.

Exactly, now that I'm further I can actually handle fights pretty well with new abilities. It was back in the first stages of chapter 1 where every side quest pinned you up against crowds of enemies and you could do nothing but retreat around with quen which isn't just boring, it's cheesy.

The combat system while nowhere perfect is a vast improvement over the first installment. With that said, i too thought the block was unresponsive until at some point in act 1 i figured out it was tied to Vigor... this is something that should have been made very clear in the prologue.

I also think they should switch the Vigor usage from parrying to dodging, rolling away from attacks takes a lot more effort than blocking with your blade.

I agree that the prologue difficulty is too high for a phase of the game where you are supposed to learn the basics. You simply do not have the vigor required to use signs and still block attacks. What they should do is properly gear Gerald so he takes a lot less damage and does a lot more for the prologue, this would let players make mistakes while still learn the basics. Plus he would looses all that stuff after being imprisoned.

Adding a sign mini challenge/tutorial quest at the base camp where you can learn what each sign does would also be useful but that's gravy.

The Quen rune is also much more powerful/useful than the other runes (downright sick with upgrades).

My only other gripes would be:

Inventory management and Crafting: Keeping your weight under max and junk out of your bags is a chore. Please add more filters (a junk one!) and the ability to drop quest items (give a warning if need be). The crafting recipes/diagrams could use some serious organisation, plus it would be nice if you could just learn recipes instead of carrying 40 of them at all times.

Let us craft items too; crafter being needed to craft items might make sense but since any of them can craft anything and we provide the recipe it kinda defeats the point. Another option would be to make the crafters able to craft items that are unique to them (we cannot buy the recipe). It would make sense for weapons and armors since we only need the recipe once anyway.

Meditation: Potions needing to be used prior to combat; while this can make sense it severely limits the uses of many potions, most fights are not expected and unless you are on your second play through you have no way of knowing what potion would be better to use so most players will fall back to safe potions choices that have general purposes. Maybe make the more powerful potions usable only during meditation and make situational ones usable in combat.

Uneven difficulty: Starts hard and gets too easy, re-balancing the difficulty would help, prologue should be the easiest and the game should then keep an even difficulty (based on your settings) as you progress in levels (maybe some stuff being harder or easier depending on your talent choices) and a harder epilogue to conclude.

Overall i still think this is an excellent game, i like the fact its hard and challenging (up till act 2 anyway then i gets a bit easy). and i still give this an easy 9 out of 10, if they ever fix the small things i listed this would be a 10.

I'm glad to see there is a mature discussion about combat going on here. I've been playing on normal difficulty and am trying not to use the Quen sign very much. I'm only in chapter 1.

I for one am enjoying the combat a lot despite the early frustration factor. It could be a bit more fluid perhaps, but I don't feel like I'm fighting the controls too much. Targeting is finicky, but I'm getting the hang of it.

Personally, I'm finding the parry/block to be fairly effective. I think it's tied to vigor because if it wasn't you could upgrade it to the omnidirectional parry and then just keep it up all the time, but perhaps they could have solved that problem some other way.

I found fighting got much easier once I upgraded, in the Witcher training tree, to the omnidirectional parry and upgraded the combat vigor ability twice for +20% vigor regeneration and +1 base vigor. Facing two foes at once I find it's really effective. Either:

A. I have the initiative and launch attacks at one foe. When his companion starts to attack me I block, throwing him off balance, and then resume my attack on either one of them.

B. One of the foes attacks first, I block knocking him off balance, and then attack the other foe.

Managing enemies is the name of the game here. The advantage of using the parry is that it allows you to maintain your position even when you start to get swarmed. If I manage to maneuver and isolate one enemy, but fail to finish him before his companions arrive, I'm able to block their attacks to stun them momentarily and resume my attack rather than rolling away and starting a fresh set-up altogether.

I'm still just after the prologue so I don't even have the riposte ability yet, but I imagine parry is going to be even more useful once I have it. A lot of people seem to be frustrated with parrying and are counting it out, but really haven't learned to use it effectively yet. Parrying is very effective and situational, you activate it to prevent your offensives from being interrupted. If you try to use it as a "hold down and absorb every attack continuously" button it won't be very effective for you.

Another thing that should just go is the "press _ or die" boss/fist fights. I remember this being the absolute worst part of any game that included the mechanic, and this is no exception. It's an immersion breaking gimmick. Boss fights should be difficult and involve tactics and planning, not just devolve into pressing buttons as they pop up on the screen.

I for one do not mind the quick time events, they add some cinematic to the boss fights, they are used very sparingly and they are not live or die events so i am very happy with them.