Thanks David!
I'll talk to the team on the abilities to get their input. Honestly I mostly implemented them as a gate to prevent the player from just taking on the boss right out of the gate, but maybe just removing them in favor of some more stat upgrades, and letting the player attempt that challenge whenever would be a better shift...
And I'll look at increasing the base time some more, since that seems to be coming up as an issue. Likewise on the tutorial - I honestly had no guard in place for the player just outright killing the test enemies before even seeing them, developer brain moment, I guess lol.
But thanks for the feedback, we'll definitely get on incorporating this into the next build!