I have a new gripe, and it's the Gryvian enemies in FIRST-14. They seem to be there to tutorialize lust combat, right? Since they have a regenerating shield, which is a nuisance for anyone not using an energy weapon (though tech specialists can pretty much just brute force their way through with the starting laser pistol), and there's also a constantly popping up bold "(She may be easier to take down another way...)" statement.
The thing is, you get to FIRST-14 with the starting equipment. That starting equipment are the Dress Clothes and the Plain undergarments, which collectively provides only 2 sexiness since the Dress Clothes don't provide sexiness or resolve. When it comes to teasing, your starting equipment is kinda shit, and since you were literally unable to go anywhere or get any alternate equipment or modify your character beyond the starting choices, So the only real way to get a boost in sexiness prior to fighting them is to just strip naked, and, well, why would a new player think to do that? After all, the equipment has stats, stats which seem like they'd give a boost, so without being told "by the way, if you strip naked, you get a +5 boost to your character's sexiness, which makes tease attacks stronger," they just wouldn't know.
Going against them, 90% of the time my characters end up missing 50% of the teases and those that land just do 13 lust, so it takes like 10 turns to wear them down unless I'm lucky. Except for the character where I just stripped the clothes off, and started doing 27 damage on every single tease, which made it go as quick as the lion fight. See, the lion generally just takes 3 turns of "shoot" or "attack" and he's down. With the Gryvian, it generally takes obnoxiously long, especially with bad rng.
You might think that it would be clear to use Sense. After all, it should expose a weakness, right? And it might, like how with one fight, a character had C-cups and the Gryvian liked small breasts, so that did 17 damage per tease and ended it in 5 rounds (1 for tease, 4 for hits). Which is weird, C-cups aren't really small, but I guess in TiTS C-cups might as well just be pecs compared to what many have. It's still a lot longer than with the Scavenger Brute fight, but it saves some time. But that fight was lucky, because every tease hit.
See this? The character I'm using for this is the same as the previous example, and they're male, but they have C-cups, so they're considered to have a feminine face due to the femininity score. None of the other things matter, since they're a human and you can't have a bald character or get sweaty until you're able to actually have free access to Tavros and New Texas. So, that leaves balls. Since they're male, it makes it clear that the good thing to do is genital teases, right? This character used the genital tease 7 times in a row and every single one missed. After that there was one more tease, a hip tease, before loosing the fight, and that one landed a 13 resolve blow.
So. Assume you're a new player, experiencing the new player dungeon, and this is your experience. A normal mob fight where physical attacks are worthless, like against the Celise tutorial fight, which by the way is also not that good (it cuts out most of the choices, doesn't tell you to try to use Sense to understand her weaknesses, doesn't make you select which of the four tease types you use, etc. so basically it only tells you that teasing can be good, and doesn't train you on how to actually engage in lust-based combat). So, because the tutorial didn't teach you how to tease properly, nor that sense is a good idea, you just spam teases. You don't get 7 failures in a row, but you do get a lot of failures, and every tease option just deals 13 damage if they land, making this a tedious slog lasting 3 times longer than a Scavenger Brute fight, while requiring more attention since you have four options of resolve damage rather than 2, and you need to be aware of when it says "by the way, hit the wait button."
In this case, are you having fun? Is it fun to sit through a slog of failures and low damage? Are you learning anything? If I didn't have knowledge of the game, my takeaway would be "some enemies are poorly balanced and teases are barely more effective than attacks even when physical damage is directly disincentivized." I would not learn to use sense to understand their weaknesses, and even if I did use sense there's a chance that they just have no likes that match what my character has and every single option just deals 13 lust damage, so the one thing it could be teaching can just fail to be taught, even if the player was paying attention and experimenting just due to shit rng. And like, that's fine if you want to make people think that the ridiculously overpowered combat option is ridiculously underpowered, but if you're trying to impart a positive impression or to teach how to effectively engage in combat, this doesn't really seem like the best way to do that.
This is, of course, pretty heavily rng-dependent, but still, it feels like it happens way too much without being naked or equipping the Sweater, and it can easily be something that drives away a new player for just being a bad experience or teach a new player poorly.
