You can comit to an attack quick enough with a roll length distance, and many of ther moves, once dodged, actually have enough window to get in with multiple strikes. You do not always have to assume she is going to do that attack at all. I have beat her twice without doing this, and again... I'm a relative noob.
So no, I know that's not true because I've experienced otherwise.
Just for the future, I know that it's not your intention but
generally saying things like "I'm bad and I can do it" is a pretty good way of making other people disregard you. It's not your intention, but it
always comes across as "you're worse just get good" when it's the exact opposite intention. It's how it is, just some minor advice. Encouragement doesn't have to come with
On the actual topic, I think there are a few things that close to objectively making Waterfowl poor design:
-Randomness. Randomness sucks. I have been killed by her doing waterfowl and dodging it, slow walking, and waterfowling again the moment I go in for an attack. That is bad design on it's own, but when you factor in the following problems it becomes awful.
-Un-Intuitiveness. It's extremely unintuitive. It's the worst move I've seen outside of Rykards Skulls in category of unintuitiveness within Elden Ring. It's genuinely the worst part about Waterfowl. It's terrible at telling the player they're on the right track to solving it, and instead actively discourages a variety of solutions. Truly terrible design. And I play old monster hunter, where going online to find key quests is a requirement
and that is bad design too. Fight isn't designed well if people have to look up videos because it's that unintuitive.
-Magnitudes more threatening than literally every phase 1 move and most phase 2 moves. It's no competition, and it's easy to see this by watching people fight her for hours. During these hours of attempts, when Malenia
does not roll the dice and use Waterfowl, she gets down to the 10% or even phase 2 health values, but when she does it's rarely below 50%.
-The randomness and the absurdly off-track threat makes the fight incredibly inconsistent. The worst part of that is how unsatisfying it is for most people to succeed; success is almost always determined entirely be the number of waterfowls & timing of waterfowls in a fight. I have only seen a few people react positively to success, and equally few people react truly negatively. People just beat them and move on, and then rate it as one of the worst fights. This is a large factor, but EVERY factor above
-She's a boss you can trade with but can't combo consistently due to hyper armor moves. She encourages staying close to her, and even reads position to followup with specific positional counters. She encourages "dancing" with her, which Mohg also does, which is a great fight. Then Waterfowl comes into play at 65-70% health, and
the solution to the fight switches to running away constantly. Most runs exploit her deliberate slow walk because she doesn't react quick enough, and all you have to do is walk away which you want to do anyway because Waterfowl simply exists.
People saying that they don't do this are outliers and should not think of such play as reasonable. It isn't, or we wouldn't have most people thinking the fight sucks. There's a run out there with no actions but running and attacking; the existence of such a run
does not disqualify the problems of the fight nor the problems people encounter, every game has challenge runs like this and none of it makes things more reasonable.
I think it's one of the worst fights in the series and it won't be better until the counterplay is conveyed well, let alone the other issues addressed. Challenge for challenges sake does not disqualify problematic design, and instead indicates that From is struggling to make quality challenge that is designed well which is typical of long term series that suffer from power & design creep.
