I like the economy of adjectives here. You're painting a picture with as few details as possible and letting my mind fill in the rest.
Question I have is, how do you know what you want to describe versus what you want to leave to the readers' imaginations?
Thanks for the kind words, my dude. I appreciate it. I try to keep things as vivid as possible with regard to general details, but most of the finer points I leave up to the reader's imagination. Like with the orcs. I give a general outline, they're big, mean, brutish, green, and muscular. Their individual attire isn't so important, and the reader can now "dress them up" however the reader likes. Maybe someone imagines one with an eye patch, maybe a bandolier of various items, maybe they're armored, maybe they're not, that kind of stuff is inconsequential from a writing perspective in my opinion.
What's more important, I think, is what's happening. Give a general outline of the appearance, let the readers fill in the fine stuff, but you need to be as exact as possible when describing the action. In fight scenes, we should get a blow by blow, in my opinion. That way it feels like you're watching an actual fight instead of reading someone glossing over it. The fight's where the excitement is, at least in action-adventure stories. But outside of fight scenes, in dialogue, describe what the characters are doing. Add in little flourishes about how the wind rustled his cloak or whatever if you want, but if you see the character moving their arm in your head, you need to write that they moved their arm in the story. Facial expressions, body language, all that can be just as important as what's being said in the dialogue itself.
That's the way I view it, anyway, but I freely admit that my approach to writing isn't so much "authored" as it is "emergent." I plan very, very little. I get a rough idea of a character outline, some basic characteristics and traits, what they're good at, what their job is, that kinda stuff, figure out where they are at the start of the story, and then try to make the opening exciting to hook people in. Then the story always, always, always quickly loses me and runs off and does its own thing. I'm not really "writing," I'm "writing down what I see happening in my mind's eye." Weird, I know, but it's how my skill developed over the years, and my advice won't work for everyone.
Hey, what works, works. :)
TBQH for the majority of the first fight scene I thought you were indulging in some 40k fic. For which by the way it would have been completely down. But this is better.