I do notice a slight increase in youtube comments when the thread gets bumpped hehe.
I'd listen to these guys too they know what they are doing
When you start out everything seems overly fast. I've been playing like 2+ years now or whatever, but when I come off a long break the game feels really fast to me and I struggle a lot to play at 'full speed'. When I was really into it, the game felt slow motion, I couldn't do things fast enough, but once you lose the reaction time, you feel like your character has weights attached to his arms.
Most people you run into on pub servers play at about 75% off the pace of what a 'good' player (or spammer) will. Most likely you are pacing yourself to the larger body of slower players, so when you encounter a really good guy, hes going to just seem way too fast for a bit.
If you just spam buttons around on your character, you can see how fast he can move from blocks to swings and feints. When the controls and timing of the game is second nature you can move the guy around at full speed with purpose, which is what a lot of those 'faster' players seem to be doing.
For footwork, as these guys said, get a good shield and good armor and try to keep the guy centered. Over time you'll find you are keeping players slightly off to your left or right shoulder. This cuts down the time to hit them, generally you want to strike people the moment your swing will do damage and not 'whiff' on them. If they are slightly to the left, you can left swing, thrust, and overhead and hit them as soon as the swing allows.
Back off and turn to face people if they try to wrap you. Remember with the shield you block stuff in front of you, so face front to them and stop those attacks. Try not to bump faces with them either, keep some space. The animations look differently (imho) from facehugging range than at a distance, and they tend to hit you sooner and at weird angles. Keeping some space between you, you have more time react to incoming swings, and sometimes have the option to backstep so their swing will miss.
With multiple people, you want to stay positioned so that at no point in time will 2 people be able to simultaneously hit you. This is hard to achieve sometimes, but is the key to surviving when you are outnumbered. If you are backing up and 2 people are chasing you, face the closest guy and play him like normal, and watch the rear guy and move the opposite of him. So if the guy in the back goes to your left, you step right. This keeps the lead guy between you and the back guy, keeping you safe from getting hit in the back.
If in the reverse of this and outnumbering a person, try to prevent the tangle and always push to keep the guy you are chasing between the two of you.
But practice practice, try to fix things that go wrong, if your overhead always misses someone to the left/right, try to correct yourself so you always strike your target. Try to fix your timing if you swing too soon/late, and try to push yourself when you transition from block to attack to do it as fast as possible.
Above all though, have fun though. Do silly things, go naked with a load of javs, try to ninja drop off a castle wall and kill someone, and run full speed into 20 enemies knotted at a door spamming like a mad man
