This is not a Fighting Game - What direction should this game take?

Prelude: This is a reaction and kind of rambling about what Roman said in the last Warriors Den. How they envisioned the game to be mostly reaction based, but are drifting more and more towards reads instead of reaction. What I would like to achieve with this thread is a discussion on what you guys think the direction of the game should be.

So people have pointed out time and time again how For Honor is a fighting game and that things like vortexes are also in fighting games and that this and that should be implemented because that is how a fighting game works ect.

The 2 biggest reasons I voice doubts about this are:

• Attacks are all reactable for the most part. Fighting games afaik, heavily rely on reading your opponent and to prevent him to just react to you, attacks are way faster than you would normally be able to react to. This is not the case in For Honor.

• The effective health pool is way smaller. Since you heavily rely on reading your opponent, the game has to give you a chance to get to know them even slightly. In For Honor, everything can be over in 3 attacks and that's that. Better luck next time.

The reason I bring up this comparison, is because for one, it is important to have a consensus of what this game actually is roughly, and two, the devs seem to take note of and implement mechanics, that I feel, do not even fit in this game.

Case in point, the shoulderbash mixup of the Warden and the kick of Shinobi in their current state. This is NOT a discussion about if things like these are (too) strong. I would argue that they are a bandaid to break the defensive meta and nothing more, an unnatural way to bruteforce your way into the defense of the opponent, that does not fit into the fencing nature of the game and that "take a guess, when I press this button" is not a fun and fulfilling game mechanic in this very setting. Taking the devs words from the past streams, I think they really like these things and are looking to implement even more of it for the upcoming future.

Let me just say that all of this is highly opinionated. Feel free to heavily disagree with me, and point out why I am wrong down below.

• Do you agree that this is what the devs have in mind?
• Should the game take this route?
• I feel like introducing more "brute force" mechanics like the ones mentioned above, will lose us even more players, because they wanted sword fighting, not an actual fighting game. You think that this is an accurate estimate?
• What about other ways to introduce more reads into game, without destroying the flow of the game(200ms feints+chip damage ect)?

Please also give arguments for why you think this or that. I feel like this was the most important thing that has been said on the dev stream, yet I have not seen alot of discussion on this very topic.

Edit:formating

Edit2: Thanks everyone for coming up with such detailed replies and ideas thus far, I read everything and it's super interesting, just don't have the time really to reply to you all today, hopefully tomorrow! ^^sry