I'm willing to eat a lot of crap, but still imo it's ok-ish.
If you mean against other games made in the text-based porn space? Sure. There are far worse combat systems in this genre. But those games don't put you in even a 20th of the encounters this game does so these problems while existent are buried behind the rest of the game.
The more your combat you force the player to suffer through the bigger onus is on making that combat enjoyable.
Ah fuck it. I've got time.
the other flaw with their gameplay system is bosses can never be particularly complex, or have like changing behavior patterns in the same fight, which is probably what leads to the Mexican standoff fights damage wise
The high damage matched with limited (but still comically powerful) healing and generally poor item support creates encounters that revolve exclusively around alpha striking and this exhibits itself most acutely in the boss fights. This exhibits itself to such an extreme that the only "hard" boss fight is one that has 2 encounters and a (potentially) full party aoe cc. And that fight still ends in less than four turns on dark.
Trail rations and the overall high damage and limited duration of per sleep buffs makes it clear that this was the intended design. This wasn't an accident. So they had a game design idea and acted on it but the end result of this isn't very exciting as centering combat around large amounts of encounters that will almost entirely all playout exactly the same regardless of what you're fighting is what leads to the monotony that exists now.
More importantly,
It'd be nice to have some reasonably long, resource draining fights
That doesn't work in this system nor would it be fun. You're taking a poorly thought out recharge system and extending it further, at a point you'll spend multiple turns doing nothing but normal attacking.
Secondly, item support is miserable. Items are either useless or overpowered with no in between. Full HP heals, 50% hp heals, full hp revives, items that max out stats on one hand. On the other hand minor heals that scale like shit, buffs that contribute an inconsequential amount of damage, and poor scaling summons.
Party members can use exactly 0 items I guess because they're less dexterous than Pochi
This powerful pooch pulverizes enemies. Also has better AI. Low HP? Doggy healing grenade. Don't wanna fight shit and the ability has a chance of working? Doggy bark. Put him in the doggy tank and equip him with a doggy rocket launcher.
and some enemies do need to be spongier.
Fixing the boss fights isn't as simple as "just make them tankier" because the systems in the game aren't built to sustain any kind of depth or complexity when you're limited to 5 abilities. 2 of which you realistically can only use once an encounter and 1 of which can be eaten up by a stance.
To take your aforementioned example when spaced over a longer fight
I summon a mook
I cast grease
I cast fireball
I cast grease
I do nothing
I cast fireball
I cast grease
Oh. Sorry! I couldn't see you over my clearly massive tactical dick.
I even used trail rations so after the fight is over it's a full team heal, look at me.
Or hell let's say you're a charmer. Your at-will is your song, your encounter is song of splendor. You use allure. Repeat splendor into allure into every encounter. What's that? Instead of song of splendor you're using dawnbreak or a summon? Swapping out your dual wield cleave build for a two-hander cleave build that uses the same skills or different skills with the same effect. Goodness how dynamic.
On other side of this
Reducing party incoming damage is now at odds that you have a 60+% heal you can potentially use every single turn and any number of items that are a full refresh whilst you waltz about with the maximum hp due to consumables that you can use and abuse that max toughness.
And additionally it's not so simple as reducing damage to begin with as these one shots happen due to enemy target prioritization for skills. Speaking of skills
All of this is before getting into the CC. Garrote/Silence, Stun's to infinity, and disarms.
Which I guess I'll put in the category of "shit only inexperienced indie developers do" where you have no clue how to balance incoming and outgoing so you add CC to spice up combat in encounters with no meaningful on demand counterplay for your companions so it ends up just being shit you take and dish out with no thought or nuance at an extremely high degree of accuracy.
It's obviously too much to look at the history of games in the RPG genre and even attempt to internalize why status afflictions often are attached to middling success chances influenced heavily by skills.
You can't bang x *because*
it's a magical golem! This is going to be the last of my points in an overly long post.
When was a new repeatable sexable NPC encounter added?
Unless I'm mistaken. Over a year ago.
The reward for engaging with the endless tide of combat sucks.
And the sex scenes that do exist for random encounters are few per encounter. Gone are the days where the lowly random goblin has like 9 scenes. You'll be lucky to get an encounter with more than 3. When they're not unfuckable monsters to begin with.
...
Anyways
In other news Bubs is still AWOL
I wonder if Savin is going to pull a Hugs and murder his character(s).