[Touc]

[Words]

Thank you for saving me from making a long, long effortpost. I'm still going to post, though.

One of the other problems that I don't think anyone has identified is the fact that against a sustain user, you need to play *perfectly*, because otherwise they'll regenerate through your damage. Miss a swing, miss a beam, whiff a combo? That's your rotation down, and the less time you have to deal damage to them, the more time they have to just keep healing, and healing, and healing. This was exemplified perfectly through Caliel and Gnash's fight, where because Gnash missed two important attacks he died when by all rights he should have won.

Leading on from that, sustain prolongs the amount of time that you have to play perfectly because of their healing. Even if you keep landing your hits and getting good combos in, the likelihood of you messing up and either walking into their own combos or messing up your own heightens simply due to the fact that the battle is taking longer.

Sure, you can say 'skill issue', but when your enemy is 
1. Making a conscious effort to dodge and block through stutterstep-blocks and 
2. Making the battlefield akin to 'nam through a bunch of traps and summons and AOEs and attacks of their own
it's not as clear cut as it might initially seem.