Reposting this from the beta section with some edits:
Are feints still being looked at? I think they're in a bad place right now. They used to be too fast and hard to read, but imho as I said in many other posts they were "nerfed" with a quick and dirty solution that didn't address the root issues, which was reducing the ready speed of attacks, something that had side effects on other areas of combat such as the effectiveness of spamming for example in a shield vs shield situation, the responsiveness of combat in general, and needlessly made it slower to switch directions.
The problem mostly comes down to how smooth the animation transitions are: feinting into a different direction or the same attack can be done with a very quick and small movement of the character's hands, as the animations seamlessly transition into the next, that is why despite this ready speed nerf some feints are still just as hard to read as before while having less control over them.
Similarly, these smooth transitions cause another issue, which is that after pressing RMB to cancel an attack, the weapon will continue traveling in the same direction for a short period as the animation tries to blend into the next, however this makes it so that feints can go through shields/blocks tricking the player into believing that they have blocked, and they also make it so that attacks appear to have been canceled later than they actually have. I think that is why we all asked to reduce the window to cancel attacks further, but in hindsight we were only pointing at a symptom of the issue. Indeed after the reduced canceling window I started feeling like it was too small, despite attacks seemingly being canceled later on screen.
The best solution I can think of here is to make the animation transitions less smooth, quicker, more 'abrupt', essentially feinting an attack shouldn't look like it seamlessly continues into the next attack (think of left to right feint for instance, to visualize it), but like the attack was interrupted, and the next one started. Transitioning to the blocking animations faster should make it easier as well. This would make feints break up more and better telegraph to the player that the attack was just canceled. It should also fix the issue of feints going through blocks. Following that change it should be possible to increase once again the ready speed and slightly increase the canceling window.
Are feints still being looked at? I think they're in a bad place right now. They used to be too fast and hard to read, but imho as I said in many other posts they were "nerfed" with a quick and dirty solution that didn't address the root issues, which was reducing the ready speed of attacks, something that had side effects on other areas of combat such as the effectiveness of spamming for example in a shield vs shield situation, the responsiveness of combat in general, and needlessly made it slower to switch directions.
The problem mostly comes down to how smooth the animation transitions are: feinting into a different direction or the same attack can be done with a very quick and small movement of the character's hands, as the animations seamlessly transition into the next, that is why despite this ready speed nerf some feints are still just as hard to read as before while having less control over them.
Similarly, these smooth transitions cause another issue, which is that after pressing RMB to cancel an attack, the weapon will continue traveling in the same direction for a short period as the animation tries to blend into the next, however this makes it so that feints can go through shields/blocks tricking the player into believing that they have blocked, and they also make it so that attacks appear to have been canceled later than they actually have. I think that is why we all asked to reduce the window to cancel attacks further, but in hindsight we were only pointing at a symptom of the issue. Indeed after the reduced canceling window I started feeling like it was too small, despite attacks seemingly being canceled later on screen.
The best solution I can think of here is to make the animation transitions less smooth, quicker, more 'abrupt', essentially feinting an attack shouldn't look like it seamlessly continues into the next attack (think of left to right feint for instance, to visualize it), but like the attack was interrupted, and the next one started. Transitioning to the blocking animations faster should make it easier as well. This would make feints break up more and better telegraph to the player that the attack was just canceled. It should also fix the issue of feints going through blocks. Following that change it should be possible to increase once again the ready speed and slightly increase the canceling window.
