One thing that’s hard to get your head around, especially if you are really into the souls games, is that Sekiro plays differently.
You don’t use up stamina by attacking. You should basically ALWAYS be attacking, unless you’re blocking or something. You should basically always be doing something.
This is in stark contrast to how I played souls games, where it was all about slinking around and avoiding damage until an opening presented itself.
In Sekiro, you can attack forever. You can’t BLOCK forever. So in general, you don’t want to block.
You either want to attack, or you want to deflect, or you want to dodge. Always. As long as you attack, you’ll keep chipping away at an enemy’s posture, eventually killing them.
The one exception to this, MAYBE, is some bosses who regen posture super fast while their health is high. For these guys, attacking their posture is kind of pointless, until you do some health damage to them. Then, once they’re hurt, they stop regenning their posture as fast.
But even in those cases, it still often pays off to just go right for their throat.
The trick is that enemies will deflect your attacks, and counter attack, so in a lot of cases you go something like:
Attack, attack, attack, attack, deflect, deflect, attack… etc.
Like, you can get these ridiculously long chains against mini bosses, and if you can keep it going, it melts their posture and they get no chance to regen it, and you can get a deathblow much sooner than you can by killing their health.
Also, in a lot of cases, you get audio clues regarding what you need to do… a lot of times, when they deflect and are about to attack, you get a different kind of sound.