Personally I think the combat is in the best shape, outside of a few edge cases than it's ever been. Yes, parrying is problematic and there needs to be away to punish it. Equipment hits probably need a pass over. I think the speed of combat is fine, especially when we're considering how it's going to perform. There's less desync, combat is way more transparent and there's less gimmicks.
A lot of the arguments feels like its veterans (a small subset) arguing that MO2 combat isn't exactly like MO1 combat, and to that I say thank god. MO1 was shit sandwich; people have just become so accustom to the taste of shit that when they taste filet mignon they find it repulsive. Their palate needs to adjust.
Quite the opposite. Combat has grown too close to late MO combat where parry whoring and staying defensive is the best option, where combat is easy and with long reaction times. Where the combat bypass skill through gear and numbers.
This is exactly what MO combat became after years of crying about dying by bad players, just like now in MO2. We went from a fast paced skill based combat (we also had 360 degree blocking and it was better) where you could beat 10 guys in a row in 1 health bar, now you cant 1v3+ against players who know how to parry.
So no its not us veterans with a critical view on things who want MO combat back, its everyone who says combat now is fine, and everyone who brought us to this point with their suggestions.
Atm MO2 is MO combat with a new swing and block direction added for flavour.
Us veterans are shaking our heads now wondering what exactly SV meant by "We have learned from MO". And the numerous times they told us MO2 will be improved yet we are still as limited by tech as MO was even though over 10 years have gone by and tech have sky rocketed since 09-10 and as such MO2 now gets the same treatment as MO did for the same reasons yielding the same useless results.
The problem lies with the fact that players generally cant accept constant humiliating defeats due to not being good enough and have not put enough time in to shine above others.
So why put in 400h training if you can simply whine to the devs and get your way through bastardizing the games combat to suit your needs.
The only thing that had a positive result of the changes put in place to curb the little desync there used to be was ping normalization that ofc was the last change they tried and so all the useless changes made before that came will most probably not be reverted to see the difference now after we have ping normalization which was needed and a good change.
TLDR:
Dumbing down the game does not help anything other than make the game worse when the game and Servers are still bottlenecked by tech like back in 09-10.