god he took me so many tries that watching someone attempt the fight made me realize I wore an extremely deep groove into my brain. my shoulder twitches every time you have to dodge two fucking years later.

does he actually input read, though? I remember baiting him with spacing to consistently get free hits and then dying because I got greedy and went in for just one more with a large club that locks you into a swing for an eternity. if you run to the far side of the arena from him, he does the slow, heavily telegraphed flying attack eventually so you dodge under him, let him do a combo in the wrong direction with just enough space that he can't do the reverse claw/tail swipe thing, watch for his shoulders to relax, immediately jump attack and dodge again as soon as you connect, and break for the opposite side of the arena to rinse and repeat. he always looks like he's open to one more swing and he will get you if you fall for it.

so I think what he does is entirely in relation to where you are relative to him? dunno though, I wouldn't put it past them to cheat the difficulty. I'm really bad at reading tells and reacting fast enough so I had to come up with safe strats like that for every fight and just gave up on the game because fuck doing that much work to play a game.