The answer is yes: max everything.. still took 12 tries. You just happened to be luckier than most. The issue is that with a combat system so simplistic and RNG dependent, statistically, any two poor results in a row puts you in a hole you can't climb out of. Other games with similar systems compensate for this by having multiple levels of recovery; that is if you find yourself in a brink-of-death you can just use a bigger or max potion to top yourself back off and get back into the flow of the fight. Since this one only has the one potion, and it heals less than the enemy hits, 2 bad rolls in a row puts you at a significant disadvantage that you really can't recover from except hoping that YOU get 3 good rolls in a row. Since the players has no idea about enemy hp, and since a stun is neither guaranteed, nor its duration, the player really can't make any informed decision about that.
If you see no reason to change it, that's understandable, but I hope this clears up a lot of the frustration players are having.
I don't believe this is the case at all with the exception of two enemies I mentioned below.
You can't say I've been luckier than most in every boss fight after playing the game for like ~20-30 times.
And to say that two bad rolls in a row are like a death sentence is a such an overstatement that I don't know what to say to that.
The mistake you're all probably making is that once you stun the enemy you keep using the rotation cut until stun has passed away.
1. The way I fight is stun-stun until I manage to stun the enemy.
2. After stun, If I'm less than ~75%HP use potion.
3. If the enemy is still stunned next round, hit Rotation Kick again until I stun it again and reset the stun counter.
4. Then I hit Rotation Cut 1 or 2 rounds. Mostly only once and then spam rotation kick until next stun.
Sometimes I'll even keep spamming potions for like 5-6 rounds if I really get unlucky.
From my own experience from playing the game a lot of times from the start till the end throughout the years, there are only two enemies that are very tough to beat.
Lord Otias - This is the last boss which is very hard to beat. Depending on the outcome of this battle, there will be two endings.
Heavy Swordsman - The NPC above is surrounded by these NPC's and you will need a lot of potions if you plan on beating all of them one after another.
The merchant that shows up in front of the brothel at night sells very good equipment that would make all fights a piece of cake but if you don't know the exact way to get that equipment, he will cheat Sarah and swap the real items with a replica after you buy it.
He sells two sets of armors.
One is called Demon King Set and the other Holy Angel Set.
Inside each of the armor sets, you have a necklace, bracelet, ring, and a charm.
Every time you manage to buy a REAL set piece item, the merchant will put another set piece up for sale.
I've been meaning to revamp this whole event for a long time but I never could come up with a good system to make these items affordable but still hard to obtain.
There's a reason the original author made this "swap with real item" system in the first place. The armor and weapon items are just too OP.
Some of the items give 999DEF and 999ATK which means one item maxes the attack and defense and any attack would result in 0 DMG received.
I don't know what would be a fair but hard system to obtain items that make you invulnerable.
If you manage to obtain both of the armors sets, the merchant will offer to sell Holy Angel Rapier which gives 999ATK.
With the system that is in place right now, a player would need about ~15million gold to be able to buy all these items.