I appreciate the response. Her presence and tuning felt different compared to the usual gameplay pace up to that point, but I didn't realize she was a relatively new addition, so I can now understand more of why her encounters felt so different.We will for sure look into her stats. Most players haven't said much about her in actual combat so this helps us fine tune things
I've also recently realized that some of my criticisms on her aren't directly related to her, but rather misunderstanding game mechanics. What I've been calling the "obscure blocking mechanic" is, from what I can understand, my attacks not doing enough damage to bypass an enemy's defense. The confusion came from no damage being referred to as "guard", but also it felt different from normal attacking.
This is a separate issue from individual monster balancing, but I recommend changing hit feedback for 0-damage attacks so that there's no period of monster invulnerability. Or alternatively, if that invulnerability time is a desired balancing feature, still have player clicks register visually without no actual mechanical effect so they know it's still following standard attack mechanics.