Good lord, do I need to make a thread with a melee guide for KCD? Never imagined so many people on the Codex would not understand melee combat in this game, which is actually one of the greatest combat systems in any game ever.
Rather share your views on this thread, just summarize it. Im interested
Summary: Warhorse created an amazing melee combat system in KCD, very close to real life HEMA combat. However, they then fucked up on two fronts:
1. They do a bad job of communicating how it's supposed to work to the player (that trainer guy tries to, but it basically requires the player to experiment and understand things or read a guide like this).
2. They introduce a few broken mechanics on top of an otherwise great system, like Masterstrike and Clinch, or damage scaling in mid-late game that breaks the system.
So to address point 1, you need to read something like the below. To address point 2, install a mod or two, some good ones are outlined in my modding addendum linked in the Codex KCD review.
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KCD melee combat, similarly to the real thing, is all about alternating attacks and defenses while looking for an opening. Enemies have a pool of defensive actions, like blocking, parrying, dodging, or taking damage. Each action has some percentage to be in effect (this can be adjusted by mods somewhat). The action to take damage is very low percentage, so that's why you will almost never hit someone by simply swinging at them. That makes sense, since obviously in RL, your enemies can block and parry and dodge too, and why wouldn't they.
So the openings you look for are basically combos. As you play the game, you learn more and more combos (unique to each weapon style). They consists of different sequences of directional attacks. So the idea is, as you fight the enemy, you strike them with whatever directional attack you happen to pick. But each one potentially leads to a different combo. If the enemy parries you, the combo is dead, so you look for a new one, but if they simply block, you can continue with the next directional attack in the combo. This takes some muscle memory and practice. If you string a few such attacks together without the enemy parrying or dodging, you get to complete the combo with a nice hit.
By default, enemies block a lot more than parry, and this makes combos somewhat easy to land after a while. So that's why I suggest changing the percentages in the mods. Up the parrying and lower the blocking relatively. So now combos are actually rare and challenging to land. Meanwhile, as the enemies parry you, they often counter attack with a swift strike, so this adds more defensive challenging on your part as well. The mods also remove the Masterstrike crap.
So now, following this approach, you have something that very closely simulates medieval combat, a great movie-like flow of attacks, parries, counter-strikes, and fancy combos.
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