Get that shit out of here. No, this games does not "require more tactics" than most games. You can beat any fight in the game by spamming quen and dodging. Wow, such tactics.
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so no, I don't dislike it because I "don't like to think" or because I'm bad. The combat is slow, dull, and thoughtless. It doesn't fit with the world contextually or thematically. Geralt should be fast and deadly, a glass cannon in a world of first-mistake-losses. And yet combat feels like hitting a guy or monster with a wooden sword until their body spontaneously tears itself apart. This is a great game CDPR has built here but pretending as if detractors have nothing to say is just damned disingenuous.
I'm going to preface this by stating that I have only put 22 hours into the game (a relatively small amount for this game, ha) and have only gotten to level 7 while playing on Death March.
Your Quen objection is exactly my point: you succeed at the game but in the most boring and one of the least efficient ways possible. It's like playing Batman and saying "I'm going to ignore using my gadgets and combo meter abilities and just jab and counter all the time". That mostly gets the job done but makes for a really boring game. Great, you put Quen up, you do 2-3 swings, get hit, shield breaks, then dodge around until Quen is back up. Or, if you've upgraded it, you go on a swinging spree as your stamina drains and, when you run out, you just dodge around while you wait for your stamina to regen. Waiting for Quen means that you have a significant amount of downtime which is boring. And if your Quen isn't going down because you're dodging, well, you're not actually using it. Successful use of Quen requires you to be hit. Let me repeat that: you need to get hit for Quen to do anything. Quen has its place mostly against slow opponents with large, sweeping attacks that are difficult to dodge but have large recovery times, thus Quen eats the one attack it can do and lets you go on the offensive. Against faster enemies, you're better off using signs that actually let you go on the offensive for longer while dodging incoming attacks which you can see coming due to your superior positioning. It does, in fact, boil down to you being bad at the game since Quen requires you to get hit. The real trick for someone who is good at the game is to have no downtime whatsoever: you are either dodging/parrying an actual attack, repositioning, swinging your sword at them, using a sign, or throwing a bomb, never waiting for stamina to use Quen.
And if you aren't waiting for stamina for Quen, well, then you are playing well enough that you don't need it, so use something else that let's you go on the offensive for longer!
Obviously I can't tell you what you personally find rewarding. But I can say the game itself provides little incentive to do much beyond what I've described.
I think they should redesign the combat from the ground up. Put a much greater focus on animation control - get rid of the randomness it currently has - and make it so both Geralt and his foes have a more grounded damage model. The light/heavy button pairing is also a mistake, I'd change it to single/group attacks. Witcher 1's combat system, while really boring, actually had a nice representation of this. It was a good idea and one I was sad they let go. AI also needs a massive overhaul, its really poor as is.
The incentive is to kill things more efficiently. In this wraith example, sure, you could throw up Quen and do your 2-3 swings until the wraith counters and breaks your Quen then dodge around OR you could use Yrden and do 5-7 swings since the wraith is too slow to break your combo. With Yrden and no other wraiths around, you can do one long combo and kill it whereas, with Quen, you might have to set that up more than once if you're not horribly outleveling the wraith. Or you're not actually using Quen since you're dodging its attacks, in which case, Quen is a waste. And the animations aren't actually random: they trigger based on how far away you are from the enemy. If you are right in close, he does a quick slash which may involve a turn but it has similar timing to the simple slash. If you are a couple of feet away or more, he does the longer leap and slash. The only one that I haven't quite figured out how to do consistently is the roll and stab. There is also a group attack style in the sword tree: whirl. Here's a gif that someone posted in OT1: