I suck at this type of combat, thus I cannot really comment. One thing though: I can kill coyotes or small black bears by just spamming the right-click mouse button many times. I estimate that killing a young, small black bear takes about 2 or 3 minutes and about 100 or 200 mouseclicks. Killing that bear fills almost 20% of my xp bar, no idea whether that's because I get xp for the kill or whether it's xp for spamming the mouse button.
And that could be a problem: getting xp for spamming a mouse button.