Duels needs to be the focus of this game. I hit top 300 grandmaster rank at peak; its extremely unfortunate the development route they took. Can't blame them though. Duels you either win or lose, and the only person you have to blame at the end is yourself. Dominion/Brawl lets you convince yourself that you were always the real good guy and that its everyone else fault if it goes wrong. Needless to say those modes are far more popular than looking your responsibility over your own skills in the eye. Otherwise, an extremely precise and mechanically well thought out fighting game. At the highest skill levels, nothing needs to be up to chance if you're good enough and anticipate the opponent. There is no luck or tricky attacks, only figuring out the human behind the screen.

Also extremely toxic community which you unfortunately need to participate in if you want to get better. Like genuinely the number of people's evenings I ruined using voice and text chat is directly proportional to how good I was at the game. My favourite victims were the RPers who would salute in brawls and talk about being "dishonourable" when yeeted off a ledge, but then proceed to lose the 1v1 they demand 7 times in a row.

The hard truth about FH and life is that everything is run by mean people. There is no redemption or epic anime arc. The only way you can control your experience is to have the cold, hard, skills required to run things yourself.

My friends stopped playing with me after I learned how to parry 200ms light attacks 100% of the time.