My experience has been that you might fight an armoured dude for many rounds, many of your hits being blocked or doing only limited/mitigated damage, but then the moment you get one or two really clean hits, that might decide the battle - hence Runt could be a slow war of attrition that your character will almost certainly be worse off of, looking for that opening for the head, but for players who by luck or skill or whatever can get that clean hit from the start, it ends up being a 'simple win'.
In one sense, I think that's great - I like the fact that these are swordfights where you carefully feel out the enemy and one big mistake or great move from either side makes a significant difference, instead of a linear war of attrition where you're taking off 20 hp each time like clockwork or whatever. It should really hurt, on either end, to get a clean hit on an unprotected area.
The problem is the instances where the AI is bad at handling initial transition in/out of locked-in battle mode, so that you can run up and get that battle-winning hit for free (or do it with arrows I guess, the ability to kite and shoot being an unsolved problem in just about every open world RPG). Combine that with what I'm hearing of weapon damage scaling too high, and I think that's why sometimes the system works and you get this nice probing duel, but for other players, especially if you like to switch targets, run around, run away, etc. a lot, then the system breaks down and you end up getting deflating ridiculous victories.
Not sure how to solve the problem, honestly - you can see a similar problem in all Piranha Bytes games, where combat works far better 1v1 but it becomes so easy to purposefully or accidentally smash people in silly ways when you're dealing with irregular terrain, far distances and/or multiple combatants. Whether in the big Pribyslavitz [sic] fight in KCD, or mass battles in TW2/3, big battles end up with players just circling around on engaged enemies and smashing their face in from behind.
