Basic light attack and heavy swing of the sword with occasional visceral attacks. Then you have signs which are like magical abilities, all unlocked from the get go and you can switch them during combat, they act more like cool downs and have a global cool down time so it's not frantic spell casting but fairly basic, a sheild, fire attack, blast attack, mind control and a debuff spell. It's all very basic stuff but it's more the servicable, along with the underlying systems of the game it becomes fun on higher difficulties. I'd suggest the second highest difficulty at the very least and don't be put off, it starts hard but by the time you get the a few basic things unlocked in the first 5 hours the difficulty comes right down and it slowly gets lessened as the game goes on with gear and unlocks. I say put it on the highest difficulty after you finish the tutorial area cause that's where the game shines, it forces you to use all features in the game and really think about itemization, looting to craft higher gear, preparation such as oils for swords and practices you can do for certain monsters to make fight easier. Again, a very basic combat system but that doesn't mean it isn't fun, handling crowds of enemies becomes very much like Shadow of Mordor or the batman games but without the QTEs. It feels good and those visceral attacks where you chop someone in half or sweep there legs off from under them feels punchy. The signs are needed for some enemies but rarely are forced on you, they just add variety but you'll mostly end up using the same sign which is a shield you can upgrade to explode when hit, mostly cuase it's a free one hit invincibility.  

Thanks Legit.

To answer the poll question, I consider TW3 to be THE showcase that stands on the very edge between action-RPG and action-adventure, and benchmark for all pseudo-RPGs (or RPG-lites, or whatever, like AC Odyssey, Horizon and similar games) to be measured against.

To tie into the answer about brilliance - as someone who gave it 8/10 back then, with caveat that its various aspects go from 6.5 to 9.5, it's mostly its RPG aspects that gravitate toward 6.5. Hopefully, TW4 fixes that.

Proper Action-RPGs never really got to the same place of quality of RP part as CRPGs have (and no, I'm not talking about BG3) - while there are some that were standouts and gave a glimpse of potential bright future, I find that, in time, action part of the genre got too dominant over RPG part, thus diluting intended experience.

I never understood the Witcher 3 love. I bought it last year and played about 20 hours and largely lost interest. I keep thinking I'll go back for more but haven't touched it in months.

Battle system is meh. The skill tree is extremely basic. The lore and story are great. Combined it is an average game.

It's not. Shit combat but then again the West usually sucks at melee combat. It's an average to above average at best game.

I completely agree.  I found W3 to be exceptionally average.  I was not remotely blown away.  

The very high amount polish in dialogue, tone, atmosphere and beautiful areas with a generally functional-to-decent combat system and RPG elements that are not solely small % buffs on attacks.

Basically, at that scale, it's a choice between well written stories with beautiful visuals and an interesting interaction with the game mechanics. Rarely both. Witcher 3 IMO does the first exceptionally well and the second decently, putting it above most games of its kind.

Also, Gwent.

I do generally think that people gloss over the combat not being something particularly good, mainly because most WRPGs with action combat systems suck at that.

Yeah, I have no problem at all with its combat - combat is usually something that has always been playing second fiddle in this type of RPGs and it's more than adequate in TW3. Admittedly, a lot, if not majority of people who played TW3 were not standard action-RPG fans and came from more action oriented titles, so I understand why their expectations were different (as someone who loath most of Japanese approaches to melee combat, Souls being notable exception, I can understand peoples sensitivities about combat).

As for people saying the combat is shit. It's a massive step up from something like Skyrim. I feel like this is complaining that Fallout isn't an exceptional First person shooter but I have to say that people must not be playing this game on the higher difficulties, it is fun when you're juggling enemies and I see no difference between the combat in games that are praised like Shadow of mordor, it just does away with the QTE's. It's not just servicable, it's more than servicable and the fact that is is basic is not the same as it being bad. I bet if they used the shoulder buttons instead of Square and triangle that people would feel differently about the combat system...oh it's like souls they'd say. The problem here is the difficulty options, anything lower than the second hardest difficulty is FAR too easy to the point where you don't even have to use signs for basic enemies or prepare for monster fights like the game intends, yes the combat is basic but what goes along side the combat is where the fun is that makes you look forward to monster fight. Thing about this game is bosses have mechanics too which is very rare in Western RPG's along with a lot of encounters and dungeons having mechanics, there's more to analysing this than simply the very basics of the combat. Does it feel good? That's subjective but in my opinion it does. Is it fun, again subjective but I have a lot of fun playing through this game and I wouldn't if the combat was flawed at the most base level.

Skyrim just sucks period. ES keeps stripping away RPG elements from that series.