What you have been experiencing is the changes to the combat system.
I also had to adapt to the changes being that you literally have no hyper armor while npc’s often have + that they sometimes do not take damage from your attacks if they start a counter attack on you, in that case it doesn’t matter if you had started a combo before their counter.
Your best move then will be rolling away and try again or simply just use hit-roll, hit-roll etc.
skeletons are a really good example of this and while latency definitely can be an issue, they quite often start a counter attack not taking damage from you even if you already have started a heavy combo.

The best way to win a fight against any npc is to let them do their attack and evase, once they have finished their atttack that is when you attack them, always be aware of and learn their attack patterns, oh and not to forget never get in the middle of several angry npc’s, that is usually a recipe for a disaster, try to spread them out a bit and only do small attacks on them, if they stagger you then your only option is to roll away.
I hope it makes sense to you :slight_smile: