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I don’t like Dauntless for a simple reason. The dodge roll is not designed in a manner that fits the high speed of behemoth attacks.
For the past five years I’ve been playing From Soft games and Monster Hunter. These games both implement dodge roll to avoid attacks with I-frames the same as Dauntless. Only Dauntless does one thing horribly different. It made the invulnerability active closer to the end of the animation as opposed to the start up. Now, this might seem like a very trivial issue but it is actually massive and causes glaring issues in the combat.
To put it in simple terms, dodging feels unintuitive and punishing for having good reactions. In any other game I’ve played with a similar mechanic you can go into a fight blind and dodge correctly with reaction time alone. You can extend your attacks to the very last moment and then evade just as the enemy would hit you. However, this no longer works in Dauntless and any new fight becomes an exercise in futility. Any attack that has lingering hit boxes and long active frames can also be impossible to dodge in Dauntless.
The Boreus spin jump is a good example of the incoherence between slayer mechanics and monster mechanics. If you are forced to dodge his head rising up you will be hit in the end of your recovery because you need to dodge so late to avoid the initial hit box of the attack. Only he will come down and slam you when you are finishing the animation and rolling immediately after doesn’t work because you won’t get I-frames soon enough. Pangar will also hit you on the rebound if you need to dodge the startup of his tail swipe.
TL;DR - the invulnerability frames on your dodge come out way too late for you to play reactive and thus ruins the feeling of deliberate and skillful combat for me.
Edit: it seems the generally agreed upon diagnosis is not that dodging actually has super delayed iframes compared to other games but the hit detection being server side is simply unreliable. Whether this is true or not is up to a developer to comment on I suppose.
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