Well, I've been thinking about this thread for a long time, and I'm feeling a little spicy after being killed repeatedly trying to get my stuff back after the Queen spawned in the overworld due to a bug.

Mistlands is noticeably more difficult than any previous biome, that's a fact. The game always gets a huge difficulty spike when you first enter any biome until you manage to get better gear and food. Between the elevation, the mist, and the seekers who are almost as mobile as mosquito's, hit harder, and don't die in one hit. But my complaints don't actually have much to do with what was added in 0.212.7.

The problems with this games combat stem from two things: Stamina and Hitboxes. Allow me to explain.

Stamina

Stamina regens at a flat rate. Doesn't matter if you have the base 40 stamina, or 200+ stamina from using the best foods, having more stamina just means you have to wait longer for it to regenerate. How this plays out in combat is that you can only play extremely defensively and walk away from/around enemies while your stamina recharges. Running and dodging while doing so is severly limited because draining stamina resets the cooldown before stamina starts to recharge again.

In relatively flat, open areas like Meadows, Plains, Swamp, and Black Forest, or even dungeons like the infested mine, this isn't too big of a problem. Certainly it's manageable. But when you start fighting on a mountain slope because of a random wolf hunt, or when you're running through the rolling hills of the Mistlands and get ganked by seekers, now you need absurd amounts of stamina just to maneuver properly, and you have nothing left to defend or attack with.

Hitboxes

On the topic of elevation, let's talk about the second main problem with combat. Hitboxes. I cannot tell you how many attacks I've whiffed that visually definitely hit the enemy, but because of the smallest vertical difference, ended up ineffective. These instances are made even worse because they drain stamina and leave you open to retaliation from enemies that probably would have died or been stunned had the attacks hit properly.

Further more, the weakpoints on seekers are placed in areas that make them needlessly difficult to target for solo players. I consider myself pretty good at parrying and dodging, but when I parry a solider, he's only stunned long enough for me to get behind him and hit him once, rarely twice in the weakpoint, and only at the expense of a lot of stamina, and then he just turns around and attacks again. It makes these fights extremely slow. If you get swarmed by 3+ enemies, it becomes nearly unmanagable.

Solutions

So how do I propose it be fixed? The fixes should be extremely simple. Let stamina recharge at rate proportional to your max stamina. Being full should give you faster stamina regeneration than being hungry. Even if stamina consumption for attacks is increased, or stamina foods are reduced in effectiveness to balance it out, being able to get in and out of fights faster would make combat more fun, and puts the emphasis more on your own skills with timing, evasion, and decision making.

Secondly, hitboxes (either the enemy or most weapons) needs to be expanded on the Y-axis. Just across the board really. Being able to more reliably hit the enemy when they should get hit can save so many instances of unfair deaths due to failing a killing or stunning blow.

I'm sure there's a lot of other issues that can and will be addressed as the game steadily works it was to 1.0, but I think fixing these two core issues would go a long way.

TL;DR

Mixing slow stamina recharge rate, high stamina usage, and bad hitboxes results in very unfun combat, even for people who enjoy a challenge. The solutions should also be relatively simple fixes on the devs end, and I believe they don't take away from the challenge the game is trying to present.