Balance Changes:
Reduced the stance regen delay across all bosses.
Reduced stance regen across all characters in varying amounts.
Greatly reduced player passive stance regen.
Increased player stance regen from parrying.
Parry damage has been slightly increased.
The parry damage multiplier for winning/drawing/losing in parry strength has been adjusted. Previously, this was 0.5/1/1.5x of a set parry damage depending on whether the user won/drew/lost in parry strength against the other attack. This has been changed to 0.8/1/1.2x to avoid having some parry situations feel ineffective.
Stance damage return from player attacks has been increased. This is the stance damage that is returned upon being deflected.
Increased player stance break duration from 1.5 → 2.
Increased player maximum knockdown duration. (However, you can always dodge/jump out of knockdowns at any time. )
Reduced knockdown/break recovery dodge invulnerability. (~40f → 15f, used to be almost the entire animation).
Changed counter kick to have a longer animation. This is now possible to be parried or blocked rather than being a free attack. It should also have a more reliable hitbox and movement now.
Increased some enemy weapon hitbox sizes.
Shatter has been reworked. (This is the effect that appears after deflection or parry that increases stance damage taken.) Before, this was +5% x 9 stacks to a total of +45%, but now it follows a curve with ~10% at 1 stack and tapering off at around 30% at the new maximum of 5 stacks. Stack duration has been reduced, but it will refresh the duration of the effect upon stack count change. Overall, this is to be more effective against low-frequency attacks and less OP against high-frequency attacks.
Behaviour Changes:
Enforced cooldowns for some grabs. (Previously, this would just de-prioritize it during the cooldown, but would still be possible to run, just unlikely).
Increased cooldown of the witch’s ice orb.
The current direction intent is for:
Parrying to be primarily for resource management and dealing stance damage rather than just being defensive.
Low regen delays mean keeping up aggression and using other options becomes more important. (Reminder that Frost effect reduces stance regen too.)
Overusing the same attacks will cause your attacks to be deflected or parried more often, which puts pressure on you to either tank the stance break or try and parry to recover from it.
Getting stance broken yourself will be punished much more heavily, especially if you do not have enough MP for Mist Form to cancel out of it.