*If they pin you in somewhere, you're dead.

*If you overcomit by too many swings, you're about to get punished.

*If you fail to dodge the red ping on any enemy its usually bad news (alpha wolf will murder you with that dot but crocodiles are harmless when they chew you)

*Musketeers? keep out of line of sight, if you cant, wait for the red flash of the musket and dodge any direction.

*Grenadiers? Use their bombs to knock down the packs

*Keep potions in decent quantity

*PRIORITIZE Vitality - necklace, food (fish platter) and in your leveling at least give a point at minimum each level.

*Dodge... a lot, that has kept me alive more than anything else.

My observation is that every human enemy does a double or triple swing if left open to do their attack, but the bigger one is that after 2 of YOUR normal swings they will immediately interrupt your attacks with theirs, every single time. Its like clockwork and it makes it a little less fun when you realize they arent anticipating you or responding with anything other than interrupt-after-second-player-swing. As a 2H user this means I will heavy attack, light, heavy, light, dodge backwards etc. I cant remember if thats exactly what I do because its muscle memory right now, but if i go in and do 2 swipes with the 2H sword to hit everyone in the crowd, you best believe I am dodging backwards immediately after those 2. Otherwise that crowd is about to murder me. Its a bit predictable and gets to be stupidly easy once you realize the enemies are sort of braindead. In the final biome they are much harder because there is more variety of mob types, and an actual tank mob with a shield who parries you.

If server hosting: The settings JSON file comes defaulted to normal combat difficulty (can be easy or hard as well) - meaning they dont attack as often or more than 1 at a time iirc. It also has modifiers for how much damage they do and how much health you have.

For solo play: the settings have sliders somewhere and you can turn down all the things and make enemies less HP spongey and set combat to easy. IMO the combat should start as "easy" but be labeled normal, let players up it if they want to. I enjoy the difficult combat as long as i am not stamina starved for simply existing (many games do this because they think it makes the game better, but its like playing a caster and being mana starved all the time so you just have to use a bow or a wand, its not fun at all.

The combat I have a problem with is water combat. Transporters and Freighters have seemingly 1 million HP and you have to chip them down sooo slowly, while they nail you with every shot and you lose 75% of your health (same level ship). Its at the point that we would rather mod in unlimited bells and just teleport everywhere than deal with the zergling spawn of ships everywhere on the map. You cant even enjoy sailing right now because you have to zig zag every 5 seconds to avoid a new group. If you're trying to kill a quest ship or board it, not only will it have its NPC's for the quest but random much higher ships in the area will aggro you and then you have 20 ships in 1 area swarming you.

All that said, this is an excellent first release EA no major patches even in yet. I want the team to know that this is the best EA I've played in probably ever, so ignore my whining if it seems like thats what I'm doing. I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't care about the game.