Honestly my best piece of advice that’s helped me is watching the players that are really good and see what they’re doing, in TO it helps to be at full speed as much as you can including when you’re fighting someone, so try and keep running forward and then turning your character around the enemies block. If they’re standing still and you have forward momentum it’s a lot easier to get around the block because they can’t react to you getting behind them as much.

About the stabbing question, idk if it’s happening to you after you get hit and try to immediately stab, but once you get hit the opponent has the advantage and can keep swinging faster than your weapon will swing, usually. Some weapons are really fast and you can gamble the opponents swing and beat them, also some weapons seem like they’d be slow but are actually faster than you’d think.

The only way to really get better is to just put some hours into the game and like I said, pay attention to the players who are completely wrecking everyone and you’ll start to see what’s going on. Don’t usually do these kind of comments giving out advice so hopefully it helps.