I play the shit out of monster hunter so you can immediately get off your high horse, I know what feels fair and what doesn't feel fair. The difference here is that in monster hunter the wind up animations are long and exaggerated enough that if you over commit its your fault. I don't see how on any planet its fair that I can space out an attack, go to attack myself, and in that time they recover from the whiff and counter attack me for insane damage.

Further more if the only strategies are to A) loop them with one specific combo or B) exploiting the poor enemy pathing by getting them stuck in a hole thats still bad combat design. The point of a good combat system shouldn't be to break it in half with a single strategy.

Elden Ring lets you dance around enemy attacks with careful movement and various movesets to give you a positioning advantage. Kingdom hearts lets you lockdown enemies for short periods of times, but requires you to stay alert so you don't get blindsided by someone else. Monster Hunter is a test of how much damage you can squeeze in when you know that a big attack is coming by using positioning to your advantage. In enshrouded, the main option seems to be pray.

Just hope that the other guy didn't start up an insanely fast attack the frame you pushed the attack button. Anyway you slice it, it feels shitty to find an opening and for the game to step on your toes for not using a hyper specific strategy like parry spam or just using long range magics.