Entering the boss fight with 184 HP... and yup, he one-shotted me immediately.
Edit: Tried the same strategy another time, going into the boss fight with 604 HP this time. Boss guarded first turn so no one-shotting.
I think what's happening is combat is too random - the mooks are able to deal 150 or so HP of damage every time they hard attack you and they have three chances to do so each. Between two mooks that's potentially a lot of damage. Blocking is basically useless because it doesn't stop enough damage to make up for the lost turn. The boss is quick to use his super too, in my experience, so you need to go into his fight with good health.
Taken all together, this means you're sort of stuck simply spamming hard attack until the dice roll your way. With no way of knowing what your opponent is going to do next turn and little to help even if you did, your best option is always the same: deal maximum damage and pray it's enough to get you out of the fight before you die horribly.
I think my solution would be two things:
1) Make the enemy AI less random and more telegraphic. The AI needs to have eyes on and consider the situation before them - just a simple nested if tree would do a decent enough job I think. I think forcing them to make either a quick attack or a guard on the first turn would help a lot and be easy to handwave in-universe as them being cautious of the MC.
Then they can decide to use a quick attack or heavy attack depending on the player's health, their health, and the player's ability to hit back; enemies who see you have lots of IT, plenty of QL, and a decent amount of health should be more likely to guard or use heavy attacks to knock your health down quickly. Enemies with low health should guard more often than usual as well. Enemies who see you're low on HP should restore their IT for a flurry of quick attacks that may kill you if you're not guarding yourself.
This decision should be made at the end of the enemies turn as well, so that you can add in some kind of telegraph to tell the player if the enemy is likely to attack, guard, or use their quirk (and this should be unreliable, but not so much that it's useless - it'll probably take some tinkering to find the exact right number but I'd angle for about 75% accuracy for a quick estimate)
2): Make Guard more useful. 5 turns is a long time but 20% isn't much reduction. Perhaps make it a 2 turn block and 50% reduction? Or make it only last 1 turn, but somehow put the enemy on the back foot or debuff them. That'd go a long way towards making guarding have a noticable effect in combat. 20% of 150 is only 30 damage, which is less than a single quick attack. If you guard and then the enemy smashes you with a heavy attack each time, you've only blocked one heavy attack's worth of damage and four have gotten through. I don't think splitting it into quirk attacks and normal melee is a good idea either, especially with such a low reduction. Rather I think it'd work better as a stronger guard that costs the more valuable QL resource as opposed to the rather transient IT resource.
Edit: Yeah, the boss whooped my ass. First hit he landed on me did 400+ HP damage, then he missed three shots while I smacked him with heavy attacks only doing 60 or so (did he get a better version of Guard or something?), and then he finished me off with what appeared to be a quick attack for 180 damage.
I'm going to Save Editor. It's time to cheat!
