I was able to win 20 or more battles in a row pretty reliably, on highest difficulty. Most within extremely short time.
There are 2 reasons why your stamina may be regressing. First is if the opponent has a certain skill, on domination it depleates your stamina completely.
Or if you used your ability, that boosts your stamina for a short time, you have reduced stamina recovery for some time after that. On the stamina it does look like it parcially regresses though. Thats because ( I think ) the game calculates both seperately. It runs the regular stam recovery and it counter-run the substraction of the debuff.
If you have a hard time, try to level your domination power over "damage"
Set your moves to your shield type to take less damage.
ONLY use your counter after the enemy did. Never do it first.
After the enemy did a counter, go for a signature and you usually win out that one move. (just deplete his escape bar over and over and after 1-2 action always defend to gain more stam for free)
Even on hard mode, I can´t remember seeing them do 3 moves in a row. They are usually really slow.
Thanks for replying, I played this game tons though, too, now and back then, I know how it should work and I win usually unless I am trying something out (oral signature move and meeting a life drinker in survival or survival after a streak that went on one fight too many lol).
I wrote this, because I am very sure the game sometimes just bugs out. I know the mechanics and know what should and shouldn't happen, but sometimes stuff happens, that really doesn't make sense, like with what I wrote. You can get countered sometimes during undressing actions, too, or even overpowered during a stare duel. Or while spectating the fighters animation can bug out and they just stand where they would stand in an animation but combat pose instead without doing damage.
Sometimes enemies just gain domination without anything going on, no message at the bottom right, no abilities,. no steady progress, nothing, but I might just think that because I played a bit with custom dialogue disabled, not knowing that that was the setting that makes your domination attempts take hours and basically rigs the game against you lol.
Anyways, there are lots of bugs, I just don't know now why they happen and if they are caused by something on my end if you are saying you never saw one of the bugs I mentioned. But you have seen the stamina regressing, too, so that means I have not gone totally crazy yet.
Thank you sincerely for replying and explaining, that is exactly what I would have needed, if I was just confused how the game works. 20 wins on highest difficulty is *very* impressive, though, Jesus. Replicate that on 3 Cum mode and despair haha. You got any favorite traits?