This game is broken at high level. When you get good enough, you realize that almost all of the unique tools that each character have are pretty much irrelevant. Almost every single attack can be reacted to, and the parry window is enormous, they're basically free. Guard breaks are so reactable that they become a non-option at high level. Even attempting to bait a parry with a feint will fail because a player can option select a parry with a feint of their own and make it safe. This results in high level play turning into a frustrating stalemate where both players are tepid to attack because of parry threat, there's extremely few ways to reliably open your opponent up. And many of the game's mechanics go out the window. The basic rock, paper, scissors breaks and you end up playing rock, paper. When you look at the risk vs reward, it's really never worth it to attack at high level.

Some of the people on the previous alpha and beta forums were discussing ways to possibly fix For Honor's overwhelmingly powerful defense, myself included. A lot of it involved dramatically changing how the game played in hopes of ending the stalemates at high level, which might have ended up making the game worse for low to mid level play, which is where For Honor shines.

But yesterday I may have found a surprisingly simple answer that may fix the game. As an experiment, I went into the options and turned off Fight UI, which disables all combat based visual aids. Now instead of watching the guard symbols light up red and reacting to the guard break symbol, I had to actually look at the character I was fighting and watch their animations. I played several matches with it turned off, the results were shocking. Simply defending against attacks became considerably harder, but still quite doable. But I felt I was under more pressure to be offensive because of how much more difficult it was to defend. I could no longer react to guard breaks. I had to anticipate them, which felt invigorating. My defense was no longer near impenetrable. I actually had to fight as opposed to just counter everything my opponent did.

It won't fix everything, parry timing is still too easy and you shouldn't be able to make them safe, but it does really help to fix a lot of the issues the game has. Fight UI needs to be turned off in ranked play. Otherwise high level play will remain miserable. It won't hurt the normal game in any way. It just means that when you want to get serious you have to take the training wheels off.