AstresEngine

Better Combat, in theory, should be a solid change to Minecraft's base combat mechanics, which are consistently described as lacking by many people. However, the fact that regular Minecraft is a 3D game and not a 2D game like Dungeons makes this mod hard to recommend due to things inherent to playing in first person.

Better Combat changes your sword swings to be two wide sweeps, and then a jab, each of which has a small windup slows you down a little bit. Spears and tridents always use the jab, and axes always use the swings. The hitboxes are accurate to where they swing, so you can hit multiple enemies with a critical hit. It also allows you to hold the button down to continuously swing, which I appreciate for accessibility.

The issues come in when all of these features combine in the context of fighting Minecraft mobs. Because your swing has a windup, you'll have to hit the button before you are within range of the enemy (when the red crosshair shows up). However, since judging depth in a 3D game is difficult, sometimes you'll completely miss, and then get hit with the movement speed penalty. Depending on the mob, this can be fine to really punishing. Zombies, with their large contact hitbox, will damage you. Enderman are too fast and will probably hit you too. Creepers are the worst; I've had times where one slightly mistimed swing will cause them to blow up no matter how well you get away.

Additional points:

• Depending on your animation mods installed, the player animations from Dungeons can feel very out of place.
• The mace doesn't have a windup animation, only snapping you directly to the recovery frames.
• The AoE attacks make it near impossible to keep a jockey's mount alive using melee weapons.
• Hitting air with an axe locks you into swinging until you unhold the button. Same deal with a sword if you're using it to break bamboo/cobweb.

This kind of combat works in Minecraft Dungeons because it's a top-down 2D game where getting hit doesn't matter as much, and the game is fully combat-focused. Unfortunately carrying it over to regular Minecraft doesn't really work out, as there are many contexts in which the combat actively hinders you from doing other things. While it's a polished mod, these points make it difficult to recommend installing it into a playthrough.

My 2 friends and I started playing this modpack on Expert with an expectation that it carried on the legacy of Project Ozone 1-3 into modern versions, but as we got further into the pack, it became more and more apparent that most of the "expert"ness of the pack completely revolved around making recipes ludicrously expensive and then gating functional automation tools (notably AE2) behind the late-game. This made for an incredibly dull experience mostly consisting of exhausting manual labor.

The main issue: A lot of the pack is spent running from machine to machine gathering stacks upon stacks of resources to craft the next big thing, all the while knowing that we'd have to replace all of it as soon as we actually unlocked AE2 and we could set up the production lines. The typical expert direction you'd go is automating resources so you can get some passive materials, right? But at the start, all we could do was use basic pipes to automate some sifters, and that was it. Even crafting Sophisticated Storage drawer upgrades costed 8 copper, 8 iron, 8 gold, 8 diamond, and 8 netherite each, just to set up the storage for the darned machines. Oh, and void upgrades cost Crying Obsidian and Dimensional Shards and Ersatz Leather. Not to mention before the iron press this cost would be x9. Yeah, the plates are a 9:1 ratio before the press, and it used to be 18:1. Do you see the problem here? I can't get anything done without hours of manual labor.

This pack felt like trying to play Factorio, but belts required steel, and inserters required plastic, and construction bots required promethium science. No self-proclaimed "automation modpack" would gate functional automation this far back and call it okay. Yes, you can play packs without AE2 to do everything, but usually there is a complexity limit before AE2 is essentially required, and this modpack far exceeds it, and then some. A lot of the mods themselves are barely changed, too, just making an important ingredient 9x or 18x or 50x more expensive.

We had fun for the first few hours when we were just starting out in a new skyblock pack and being able to expand and grow our world, but I don't think I can really give that credit to the pack, because a lot of it is very similar to Project Ozone's start. It also runs well, and I liked having a in-game command to swap between expert and normal.

Other gripes:

• Blinding and nauseating title screen, calm it down please. Related, the loading background is really saturated for some reason.
• The mod "Cooked Foods" by the modpack author has blurry textures that don't fit in Minecraft, and the pack dev put a line in KubeJS that disables the perfectly fine Fried Egg from Farmer's Delight.
• Sophisticated Storage in-place upgrades from Non-sophisticated to Basic cost 1 storage component. Dumb, but fine. The in-place upgrade from Basic to Copper cost another storage component, even though upgrading it in the crafting table doesn't, so you'd just be wasting another 8 copper, 8 iron, ... etc.
• Some Sophisticated Storage upgrades require Functional Storage upgrades, why?
• Sophisticated stack upgrade and downgrade require 2 of the previous upgrade and one Functional Storage upgrade to make, creating an O(n^3) resource problem.
• I think this pack dev just hates Sophisticated Storage.
• Time in a Bottle equivalent is locked behind end-game, which makes it completely pointless.
• Some recipes are completely overlooked in expert, conductive alloy requires redstone ingot and copper alloy in the IE Alloy Kiln, but has the default recipe of iron and copper in the EnderIO Alloy Smelter.
• Ingot to Block compression being disabled is interesting for about 1 hour before you realize that it significantly nerfs compressing drawers. Also the compressor is gated to far end-game for some reason.
• The iron furnaces mod is actually more expensive in normal mode than expert mode, requiring blocks instead of plates.

Don't play this, basically. Don't make our mistake and build a cool base before realizing that there's nothing more to this pack than expensive recipes.