Thanks for the feedback!
My initial thought for the combat was that the tick would allow to pause time and redo an action, but since I ran out of time I opted for clicking the swollen tick resulting in next attack being a critical. Still with that interaction mattering less to the player except to evaluate the sanity cost of activating it, it felt problematic to speed up the fight too much…
… but I also don’t feel like I nailed it and got it working that great with the limited player interaction… so I’m a bit at a loss how to combine the two perfectly. Perhaps fights shouldn’t be faster (more actions per second), but shorter?