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| - There are two types of attacks, fast attacks and strong attacks. Fast attacks are quick strikes that can be strung together easily into long combos. They don't inflict very much damage, but can be important for maintaining your offensive flow. Strong attacks are slow, but powerful attacks that deal significant damage. Weak opponents are not able to parry strong attacks, but relying on them too often could leave Geralt open for punishment. Geralt has the ability to parry blows. Parrying attacks is an easy defensive maneuver that can help absorb some damage. Geralt can also perform a counterattack by pressing the Parry button right before an enemy's attack strikes him. The counterattack will knock the enemy off balance, allowing a few ripostes. Geralt can evade attacks by enemies in different ways: Dodging and Rolling. Geralt can perform a swift short-range dodge in a chosen direction. Watch the timing, as if you try to dodge too early or too late, you'll get hit by the blow, however this is a very fast move that can let Geralt rapidly continue attacking. Rolling out of the way allows Geralt to dodge more sweeping blows and increases the distance between him and his target, and are generally more effective at evasion, but it is a slower move and will take longer for Geralt to recover before he can continue attacking. Various buffs and debuffs can affect the effectiveness of Geralt in combat. Buffs can be gained by drinking potions, drawing on Places of Power, sharpening his weapon on a Grindstone or improving his armor on a Workbench in a village, while debuffs can hinder him with status ailments such as Poison, Bleeding, or Stun. There is one other key type of combat, and that is on horseback with Roach. Being on horseback changes several things:
* Instead of attack combos you get slow, powerful single strikes that appear to be unblockable, but also might not hit very small targets. Your attacks are changed to slow strikes no matter what, but they gain the high damage and unblockable attributes if you use them while at a gallop.
* You lose access to all of your Signs except Axii which you can only use on Roach.
* Roach gets a Fear bar that gradually goes up as you fight. If the Fear bar gets full Roach will rear up and knock you off, forcing you to continue fighting on foot. Note that the Fear bar fills up very, very fast when fighting Undead enemies, and that using Axii on Roach empties the Fear bar. Another tactic is to equip Roach with horse blinders to slow the Fear bar from increasing. Given the above fighting on horseback isn't very suitable for fighting Undead enemies like Ghouls or packs of quick enemies like wild dogs or wolves, or in tight enclosed areas where you don't have much room to move, however it can be very effective against groups of humans with mixed weapons including archers in a relatively open area where you won't get stuck against obstacles; you can quickly charge in and out of the fight avoiding most of the melee fighter damage (which also keeps your Fear level under control) while picking off key targets first like the archers, and they never seem able to block the attacks. If you find that you really like mounted combat you should try to get the Nekker warrior decoction; not only does this give a 50% boost to the damage you inflict it gives the very noteworthy effect of making Roach completely immune to Fear for its entire duration. This will let you use mounted combat on almost anything, even enemies that would normally have Roach buck you off within seconds.
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