Reflecting on this feedback a little, I also think something that hurt this game's controls is that I initially envisioned it on a gamepad, but realized later on that most players would experience it on a keyboard. So controls that might make sense on a gamepad (hold a button like RB and then press a face button correlating to the attack), didn't make any sense on the keyboard (square to fireball, triangle to fire blast, circle to fire armor, cross to meteor slam turned into left click to fireball, right click to fire blast, E to fire armor, space to meteor slam which was super janky and disjointed, and on top, the layout means adding an extra button to hold would always be awkward). The gun button was Left Trigger, which became Left Control, another really bad mapping - but again, on controllers, this made some sense - left trigger for the gun, tilt finger up to LB too to aim.
I think at that stage is when I should've re-evaluated the control scheme closer and switched to a system of selecting an ability and casting them all with one button, and switched to gun-by-default.