Playing on testlive, it doesn’t seem like a survival game so much now since the new combat has been introduced. It’s quite easy to defeat most enemies, even with just the stone sword. I realize creatures are yet to have their ai upgraded, but most (or all) NPCs are upgraded and they don’t stand a chance against my stone sword either. I don’t have a good suggestion as to how you could make the fights tougher; there are adjustments for damage output, etc, in server settings, but I prefer to play on the official servers. It’s not as simple as raising the creature’s health points… the fight would end the same, just take a bit longer. I’m hoping for a challenging game where trying desperately to survive is the main focus, but it’s Easy Street right now and I’m not scared of any monsters… even bosses.
Dodging is where I’d suggest the problem is. Once you understand the mechanic, it’s easy enough to manage your stamina while fighting an enemy much stronger than you. It doesn’t matter how little damage you do, or how little health you have, so long as you can sustainably damage the enemy without being hit.
It’s a hard problem to solve, as you cant just increase the stamina cost of dodging, as that would only prolong the fights. I think the answer is to make players get hit more often. But how?
My suggestion is to reduce player speed according to health and stamina %. Low stamina players should move slower, and low health players should be easier to ‘finish off’. A player who is hit once should be easier to hit again. A player who expends most (but not all of) their stamina should be more open to a counterattack!
Otherwise, dodging needs less immunity, and an actual delay before the immunity starts.
Why give them immunity at all?
If I am rolling out and get hit, I should eat the damage. The reason behind dodging is getting out of range/out of that area which is going to be hit at. Or it should be?
To me it seems there are too many stagger attacks, as well as the cheesy dodges. You can juggle a tiger or croc so they can’t even hit you with the mass amount of stagger attacks. This gets a bit better in pvp now that heavy attacks offer hyper armor, and i hope this gets added somewhat to AI. A level 2 should fear crocodiles, not actively hunt them.
The dodging is OP. I know they are adding stamina cost so you can only roll 3-4 times, but as Nuria said, if you get hit you should eat it. Dodging SHOULD be just a quick evasion (to get out of range of attacks), not a damage negator (while still being in range).
I’m not saying that in real-life you could just climb on the back of a crocodile and pick it to death with a blunt stone tool, but I’m confident somewhere in Australia a duder just posted it to YouTube. Right now it’s easy cheesy to jump on one and kill it early-on, but I’m confident this will be changed by launch. I mean crocs used to scare me into altering my behavior more than anything else, even other players.
Speaking of which, when you’re getting chopped by three players there’s basically nowhere to go but dodge.
From real-world experience, I know a practical hand-to-hand/disabled rifle or knife hit-box is limited to around four men with weapons. That means no matter the size of mob, I only ever have to fight four men. All bets are off if they’ve got sticks, pipes or ad hoc spears. In CE we have a lock when there are three players encircling you, and that’s almost instant death via immobility – unless you have an OP heavy chest, hand and head armor hotbarred – to allow a light non-rolling dodge where you can actually have a chance with the Kingslayer. In other words, they gave us an escape hatch if we’re being dishonorably cheesed. A lot better than real life. 
IMO this is temporary to encourage our continued play on active servers. I believe there will be a level of nuance to some of what I’ve just described.
I got distracted by @Enyo and now finally returned to why I came here in the first place. Overnight I went through my collection and played a lot of classics. I did start at my favorite combat cheese – GTA V online – to study the rolling mechanics, where on the PS4 if you roll like a pro you will dominate free aim lobbies.
I agree with your post. However, can you think of successful games where you take damage in a roll? I am struggling to find even one. What I absolutely detest is games that break the roll when you get hit, so between the two options, I’ll gladly eat the damage during some frames. 