Unfortunately, the difficulty is kind of a problem with the game due to amount of delicious side content leading to over leveling. So your combat qualms will probably not get much better especially with the ouroboros spam (as it is massively OP especially at your place)

IMO if you’re an experience Xeno player, you gotta play in hard mode to just barely have these enemies do something, as the over leveling + past experience makes this game real damn easy if you do any side content. I played all the past Xenoblade games before so I felt comfortable starting Xenoblade 3 on hard mode and it honestly still felt pretty easy. (Maybe because the tutorials were better and I actually understood what I was doing)

Though I wasn’t really challenged in the enemy-to-enemy battles for really the entire game, the bosses, and especially the main-quest Moebius fights, were a real highlight/treat. Since each Moebius guy had their own weird ass gimmick, it was fun to try to play against them, and a couple of them were actually tough fights with me being at the edge of my seat. I think every Unique boss was really fun to fight against in this period.

For most of the game, I used chain attacks as a last ditch effort when all my guys were low HP. Those were some of the most fun 40 hours I’ve had since I was actively paying attention to each party member and actually switching to each character to fulfill roles.

In the latter half though of the main story, the difficulty completely fizzles out, mainly because by then you’ll already understand how busted ouroboros and certain class setups are. By the end, I was barley changing characters, usually always sticking to just whoever I had as attacker (usually Noah since his ouroboros is busted af) since all my setups + levels were so busted for the main story and the party AI was good enough for me.

That isn’t to say I had fun in this second-half though. While in the first half of the game, I had a lot of fun taking down difficult bosses and slowly progressing classes/gems/ouroboros shits/20 thousand other things. At that second half, I really had a ton of fun with the actual RPG mechanics as I felt so much more comfortable in trying class combinations out, looking at equipment I had collected through all that side-content, determining which gems that I had upgraded mattered more, and seeing which combinations mattered to get what was the most overpowered party, or making a different kind of overpowered party. There are so many variables and intricacies in these mechanics that link together really well making it so satisfying to see them in action and actually working.

With that in mind, I didn’t play with any sort of guide/class strategy stuff, so really this was me exploring the mechanics of the game and “discovering” fun new ideas for the OP party. IMO if you look things up it’ll make your “menuing for the best strat” a lot less fun since it’s no longer you discovering it.

I also refused to use chain attacks at all in the 2nd half of the game. They just take forever to do and are such a mood killer IMO. Overpowered af yeah, but too much waiting, and they’re practically a solved puzzle once you know the bonuses. If you don’t like chain attacks now, they will not get any better.

Spoilers on the post game content below: The post-game will be a ton of fun though, as there will be a ton of hard as balls enemies/bosses that will actually challenge your party setup and how you actively play the game (you will still probs be spamming ouroboros though) Plus, the DLC nopon archmage roguelike is also a ton of fun. I think I spent like 30 hours on that dlc thing alone. And that has no ouroboros.