Here a small list of things to improve quality of life during matches in a Tl;DR fashion first:

  1. Moving backwards should be roughly half the speed of walking forward
  2. Backdashes should cost stamina
  3. Most sidestep attacks should be considered "lights" in term of parry punish options
  4. Countering a guardbreak should be a bit less lenient
  5. Lights should not be be changeable into a zoneattack
  6. Input queue needs to be decreased


Now that list with a bit of thoughts:

Backdashes costing stamina and moving backwards being slower simply has to do with the combat being cheesed by attacking until your stamina is low and then retreating. While it sounds cool on paper it plays out as spamming backdashes and holding down S leading to a frustrating situation. Stamina also regenerates so fast that just unlocking target and sprinting towards it will have him almost full again unless you exhausted your opponent.

Fights should involve movement, but when the movement becomes a full out keep at bay with no downside to currently being low on stamina, then the system is to be improved.

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Sidestep attacks being considered light attacks in terms of parry punish is simply to remedy the situation a bit of assassins having the luxury of waiting for any form of attack -> sidestep attack. Yes again it sounds cool, but the counteroptions are very tedious:

Do a heavy-feint and parry the sidestep will often only yield minimal punishment. Keep in mind not all classes can get a heavy out of guardbreak nor are in a position to guardbreak after the parry in the first place.The primary defense of an assassin should not be sidesstep-attacking but either blocking, parrying or deflecting. Should they chose to sidestep-attack and get parried on it the punishment should be massive.

The other punishment option would be to make it a lightattack and hope it connects, but it won't always do that.

Take the raider as an example the stunningtap is considered a light so if that is parried in general the opponent can do whatever the **** he wants with you afterwards. Guardbreak, heavy or whatever tickles his fancy. Now the raider parries the sidestep-attack of a peacekeeper and he gets a guardbreak (sometimes) or a light.

So literally if your assassin opponent is HELLBEND on doing sidestep-attacks you can parry punish the first and do one light as the punish and you can't even chain another light for some characters because the opponent will be able to sidestep-attack out of the chain again. Leading to the fun situation of having to parry punish ~10+ sidestep-attacks for victory.

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The guardbreak timing is not tight enough. I get maybe grabbed once every 5-8 dominion matches outside of punishes simply because you can tech it easily on reaction once you know how the animation looks like. You see it, you tech.

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Right now inputs have a leniency considering zoneattacks. Since I play on the mouse the input for me would be leftclick + rightclick. Now how it works is I can do only one button and then press the second one a bit later and it will change the move to the zoneattack thinking it was what I originally intended.

The effect is that if you use it you can attack your opponent and he will visually have 2 incoming attack markers or in the raiders unfortunate case suddenly you get an unblockable (raider can feint heavies into stunning tap by doing rightclick->leftclick. Do it too fast and you get the zoneattack thing)

Zoneattacks are already increadibly strong there is no need for double marker shenanigans.


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I don't know exactly how it works, but sometimes you will notice that you are getting inputs you didn't press and it often happens in situations where you parry.

It would be possible for me to record my inputs, but I have witnessed my character doing a heavy attack almost 2s after my last input you can also often see a jittering on your attack direction after a parry although the mouse is not moving anymore at that point. The game queues your commands and it is too big.

Additionally it might be smart to make sure the system differentiates a parry attempt from wishing to do a heavyattack. In 1on1 situations it ain't a sweat, but when you want to swiftly parry an external in a 1on2 or 1on3 situation during revenge it suddenly might become a heavyattack if you fail the parry simply because you are uninterruptible. I think if the external just briefly staggers you you will often see your character do a heavyattack after the stagger.

So maybe during revenge let the system know a short RMB tab is meant for a parry and holding RMB down a bit is the wish to attack.

For mouse & keyboard users it would also be great if after a parry you are allowed to change your attack direction immediately. For us the camera and the attack/block direction is on the same thing so obviously we move the camera a bit as we parry and then we fix the camera as we want to punish, but the game queues that up as a wish to change the direction of the next attack often destroying the punish because it literally takes time to go from attacking left to e.g. attacking top.