Testing Grounds: Fight System Improvements

Hi warriors!

In this iteration of the Testing Grounds, we’ll be testing changes that aim to improve offense and consistency. We want you to be able to attack more, hit more often, take slightly less damage, and make attack animations and indicators more consistent for everyone to make the game more accessible. We hope that you enjoy these changes, and most importantly that you share any feedback you have with us.

Improving Offense

We feel the game is currently too skewed towards defense. At all skill levels, attacks are too easily blocked or parried. The effects of this are especially noticeable when you face a strong opponent who can react to all your openers.

What we are doing:

We want to move the game towards Read-based defense instead of Reaction-based defense to ensure your attacks land more. The skills required for defense shifted from reactive to predictive since your defense against some of the fastest attacks (400ms and faster) you used to react to will now need to be anticipated (read).

We also want you to attack more often and mix up your attacks more, so we’ve made changes to attack damage, stamina penalties and attack recoveries to help in this regard.

Improving Consistency

Some players intentionally “delay” their attacks to decrease the time their attack animations and indicators appear, making them harder to defend against due to their inconsistency.

These make the game less accessible as it introduces an unnecessary dexterity requirement to make your attacks successful.

What we are doing:

We are implementing new technology to help with attack animations and indicators be more consistent, which makes all attacks act as if they were delayed.

This technology reduces the dexterity requirement for all players while also helping to reduce flickers, and enables us to make Zone Attack inputs more comfortable.

Testing Grounds Patch Notes

Visible Attack Speed

All attacks now hide the first 100ms of their animation and indicators to opponents. Previously, on the Live version, they would be hidden for a variable amount of time.

Feint Believability

Feints, Soft Feints and Cancels should be more believable as they also follow the changes to visible attack speed.

Stamina Consumption

Stamina penalties on Miss, Block or Parry are removed.

Damage Reduction

Damage for attacks has been generally lowered. Some attacks and heroes have been adjusted more than others to give us more consistent values across the cast.

Attack Recoveries

All Light attacks and all Heavy Finisher attacks have their recoveries on Hit, Normal Block and Interrupt Block normalized at 700ms.

Specific Attack Nerfs

Orochi’s Top Light opener and Zone Attack, Shaolin’s Top Light opener and Lawbringer’s Top Light opener were slowed down to 500ms. Additionally, Orochi and Nuxia’s chained light attacks are now easier to dodge when they follow a Light attack. With the changes to attacks, we believe these nerfs are necessary to reduce the frustration associated with them.

Zone Attack input comfort

With the changes we’ve made to visible attack speeds, we’re now able to make Zone Attacks easier to perform.

Custom Matches

In this Testing Grounds, you’ll be able to play Custom Matches, both in Dominion and Duels. In order to play Custom Matches, you’ll need to group up beforehand.

More Information

For more information on how attack speeds are changing, visit our attack speed breakdown (in EN only)!

We are very excited to test these changes out with you, as we believe they will improve many aspects of the game. We look forward to your survey answers, and we will see you on the battlefield!

See you in the Testing Grounds, warriors!