The combat feels like it could have gone either stiffer and chunkier like monster hunter or much lighter and responsive like warframe, but it chose the worst of both worlds. So right now you primarily use normal attacks, but they don’t have a lot of weight and locks your character into position and attack angle. The skills feel great in terms of weight (stagger, damage, flashiness, etc) but the cool downs spread them very thin early on, so you are mostly attacking normally.
I actually don’t like PSO2NGS combat for a similar reason, they lock players into a combo or attack pattern in a game that is all about movement and jumping around.
It’s ironic because no man’s sky does ship combat and ship travel so much better than starfield