Vengeance
New PTS patch notes are out and it looks like the healing in Vengeance did not get tweaked. In Vengeance 2, there was way too much healing and way too little damage. Players were able to use vigor + the restoration staff HoT + a burst heal. On top of this, the values for these heals seemed way too high compared to the values of the damage skills.
I understand that Vengeance was just a test, but even on a performance level, HoT stacking and low time to kill probably aren't good for performance. From a balance and gameplay perspective, the Vengeance environment wasn't very fun after the first day with the amount of healing going on. I think that it's important that players have a good experience in Vengeance, especially if there are more plans with it in the future.
Getting the healing in check would increase the role of skill in Vengeance greatly and make the environment a bit more appealing to veteran PvPers.
Combat Animations
So it looks like there's some behind the scenes changes being made to combat animations:
Combat Animation Memory Reduction
We are implementing some backend changes to reduce the size of combat animation files to lower their impact on the game’s memory. Specifically, you should experience the following:
The animation visuals after these changes should be virtually indistinguishable from the existing animations within the game.
There will be no impact to light attack weaving or animation cancelling – they should work as they did before.
My guess is that old gen consoles will need to be able to handle whatever new feature is coming next year, so the game needs to use a bit less memory. That aside, this is shockingly similar to what happened in 2019:
Updated block to be calculated more efficiently by the server, similarly to Sprint. Sets and passives that key off block or “While Blocking/While Bracing” now more accurately update as you transition between actively blocking and not.
Overall, the core block behaviors are untouched between mechanics and cost.
We will be monitoring the forums and other areas for feedback and bug reports, so please make sure to provide feedback on this change if you run into any strange behaviors or have questions.
Activating block while animating an ability or attack will now blend the animation more fluidly instead of completely obfuscating the attack. The core mechanics to block cancelling remain untouched, but now display more of the previous attack’s animation before your character animates the block.
Note the visual effects for blocking still appear as soon as block as officially activated, which has been untouched in terms of how long it takes to activate.
We were told that the core functionality would not change, but it did. The game never actually recovered from 2019's "performance improving changes" if I'm honest. The game has felt significantly worse since. I'm really hoping this won't happen again.