After the Monster Hunter World collab I actually want to get into The Witcher series

combat is dogshit but i remember enjoying it more than 2

read the books

>witcher games are about combat

It's about 50-60 hours depending on how many sidequests you want to do. It starts slow but only gets better and better the longer you stick with it. As for the combat it mostly consists of clicking the left mouse button when you see the mouse icon light up. Sometimes you switch styles, chug potions, and use signs depending on the situation. It's not terrible but it's nothing amazing either and not like the other two games.

Only the short stories are good. Ciri is an even worse character in the books and she ruins everything with her bullshit.

would a controller work better?

Combat is dance dance revolution tier.

One last thing, the English dub feels weird for the first game so I ended up switching to Polish and everything felt a lot more natural sounding. If you aren't feeling the English voices, try out the Polish audio with subs because it sounds great and if you're familiar with any Slav languages you'll notice the English version adds some extra profanity and makes Geralt sound a bit more dickish in some dialogues.

i actually prefer to play them backwards, 3,2 and lastly 1.

Every game is different gameplay, tructure and storywise.
Playing W3 without the others isn't confusing, but you may need to read the in game descriptions of characters to catch up.
It's harder to care when you don't know the events, people and location mentioned. But that's the only problem.
3 stand strong on it's own through the quality of it's own storytelling in the side quests more so then it's main quest, so you're not losing out on the best stuff and callbacks are consciously limited to keep new players emersed.