Speeding up melee combat? No surprise...

[rerednaw]

Or in my experience, skipping the “Strike, Parry, Strike, Parry” UNTIL critical hit cycle?

What do you do as a player to mitigate this?
What do you do as a GM?
As a player, I tried different tactics, disarm, reduce my attack to drop their active defense (aka deceptive), etc...try to flank and get behind them...but this isn’t always viable. Sometimes my tactices made the situation worse because if I had just swung (w/o the penalties I took for a maneuver) I would have gotten a critical hit.

Thanks!

Aha! I had forgotten about the Feint maneuver...this will help a lot, thanks!