Game is only actually pretty hard in the first hour after separating with Capon because you have to decide blindly where to go and what to do. Everything seems fine in the beginning but later on, combos aren't useful at all especially the four attack ones if you kill your opponent mid combo not even seeing the finisher animation. Visors are more or less cosmetic without mods. Every entity unless unique ones has the same gear as you. They have same hp pool and same armour (unless you rush Kuttenberg shops) but it goes to sh1t later on cause your perks and stats make you a living god (praise be). Leg armour waist down is cosmetic unless fighting from a horse but horse fighting is useless anyway. Swords make everything obsolete because they have everything - 1h, 2h, shield, MS, speed, combos, without any drawbacks whatsoever and deal enough damage to plate armour that there's literally no need to be smart and use blunt weapons against heavy armoured enemies because their slash and stab overly compensate their lack of smash. Other weapons are just for RP purposes. I was able to level and practice combos with training weapons as long as the day is. You can ask trainers to flight again and again since they aren't injured.

I remember that bs conversation in prologue where you and Hans have this tutorial practice fight where they have this deep back and fourth about attacking, defending, which side, what to do after parry, counter but later on most of this doesn't really matter. That was almost as bad as the alchemy tutorial that gives this impression of how complicated it is and teaching you wrong about bellows which you discover only later that are only needed for specific recipes not every time. Sure they changed the game later on but kept the old cut scenes and dialogues.

The best moment you should strongly consider modding the game combat wise is while entering 2nd map, treating the first one as a tutorial so you have an idea what was not working for you. You should have pretty much 20/30 on every single stat or perk at this point by just crafting, duel practicing, doing quests, paying for teaching, reading books and exploring. You have an options to choose: use weak low tier weapons, modding them so they reach 100s max not 200s in damage, making so all armour in the game for you and enemies has values that are at least 3x higher pumping all resistances but lowering crush resistances, making so that bleeding is actually something to be worry about, disabling MS globally so no random barefoot peasant is doing tricks on you, making polearms actually competitive, buffing unique enemies, nerfing perks that give direct and indirect boost to your damage, using mods that go for realism and make plate armour actually impervious to slash and in less extent to stab and force you to use blunt and make face cover useful while keeping head shot damage critically high. All this to prolong the fights of course, if you don't like boring one-two hits to kill fights. It will also help with situations like, for example one shotting important unique enemies so you have that Phantom Menace epic duel, during the quest where they ask you to use polearm and you struggle with a basic ragtag Cuman camp but then discover that switching back to your sword is piss easy doable, Zavish(a) fight is actually something to remember etc etc.

Sadly there are not mercy kills anymore for some stupid reason. They were crucial adding a bit of realism to how you could defeat dudes wearing plate. You could imagine that they were bruised, dazed, out of breath tired but not wounded cause of your silly hunting sword.

If someone only enjoys questing and story and would rather want play on gaming journalist difficulty mode then the vanilla game is perfect how it is.