maybe periodically you may pause to sum up your opponent, but you don't do it on EVERY swing. Even in fencing, they will swing 3+ times before scoring a point, then they pause. This is just a game mechanic to work around the time-wait system without making it where we have to click a target everytime we want to attack with a normal weapon. I'm glad ranged is a per attack mechanic though--you could create a serious hate control issue if you were able to spam ranged attacks faster.