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In any scene, you need to look at what story values are at stake. Narrative is interesting insofar as it develops or changes story values. It is boring insofar is it does not. Technical descriptions of how things work *usually* don't develop or change story values. Occasionally they do, as in the examples of Herman Melville or Tom Clancy. Sometimes how things work, or a fantasy of how things work, is a major story value, as in a procedural or a hospital drama, both of which function, among other things, to give us reassurance against the threat of crime or sickness. 

The cut and thrust of a battle scene is not usually a story value. It might be if you have a student who has been learning martial skills and now needs to display that they have learned the thing that was always giving them trouble. (Think Karate Kid.)

Most of the time, though, the story value at stake in a battle scene is courage. The role of a fight or a battle in most stories is to test the courage or the resolve of the protagonist. So then the question becomes, what part of the cut and thrust of the battle speaks to the courage and resolve of the protagonist? 

But there is no one answer to what works. The exact same description that works in one book may not work in another, because in the first it spoke to a story value that was at stake and in the second it did not. There is no right or wrong in abstract in these things. It is always, what serves the story?