GrudgeGloryCombat

* Chip Damage on attacks dealing more than 45 damage increased to 18% (from 10%).

***Developer comments***: *Chip Damage is the amount of damage that you deal when your attacks are Regular Blocked by the opponent. Since the Chip Damage values currently varied from 2%, 5% and 10% based on attack damage, Chip Damage has been so low that you would never fear to Block anything. This increase will make blocking less effective as a stalling mechanic as there will be a more noticeable health penalty to pay.*

*Chip Damage will however still not be lethal.*

*No Chip Damage is applied when your attacks are Deflected, Parried, or Interrupt Blocked\*.*

*\*Note: Interrupt Block occurs when a Light Attack is Blocked, or when a Light or Heavy Attack is Superior Blocked.*

*Chip Damage stacks with Chip Damage Gear Stat, damage buff from Feat / Boost, Revenge damage bonus.*

*Chip Damage does not stack with Attack / Defense Gear Stat.*

Revenge State Update

* Revenge Activation is now immune to Melee Attacks.
* While in Revenge, Attacks won't be interrupted by Melee attacks.
* While in Revenge, Melee Attacks\* no longer Unbalance.
* While in Revenge, Shield Boost has been increased from 50 to 70.

***Developer comments***: *With the recent changes to Revenge earn rates, we also wanted to rework how powerful Revenge State should be. An important aspect of the rebalancing of Revenge State is the role of Melee. Melee is currently very strong in Revenge State, but also very strong against it. It could be very difficult to deal with getting unbalanced over and over by a Warlord/Valkyrie/Conqueror who is in Revenge - and being in Revenge also seemed very weak when surrounded by Centurions who Kicked. It also created a split between characters with and without Melee attacks. While in Revenge, we want you to have more opportunity to attack, and while attacking to be less vulnerable to Melee attacks. We expect to see group fights be less reliant on having someone to spam Headbutt/Shield Bash/Kick. We've also updated some bot behaviors accordingly.*

\*Known issue: Centurion's Jab post Heavy Finisher still unbalances, it will be fixed in a future update.

Disabling Moves

We're making important changes to reduce some Melee attacks' stun lock capability:

* Centurion's Charged Heavy
* Valkyrie's Sweep
* Shinobi's Heavy Finishers
* Conqueror's Sprint Shield Bash
* Warlord's Crashing Charge
* Raider's Stampede Charge

All these attacks push synced-up reactions on their victim which can be interrupted if the victim gets hit again during the initial reaction. Some other specific attacks are completely uninterruptible during the synced-up reactions and won't change, such as Shugoki's Demon Embrace and Lawbringer's Long Arm.

The reason we're updating these attacks is so they become compliant with our generic reaction anti-stun-lock rules. In *For Honor*, attacks push different kinds of reactions:

* Generic Reactions: Hit reactions for weapon attacks, Bump reactions for melee attacks.
* Synced-up Reactions: where the attacker & victim play two synced up animations.

Generic reactions have an In-reaction variant that is pushed if an entity is getting hit by two opponents very quickly. The first attack causes a normal reaction, if the second hit registers during the initial reaction, the In-reaction variant is pushed, which guarantees uninterruptibility if a third hit occurs. This is how we've limited stun locking so far in group fight. The problem is that the In-reaction system has only worked for Generic reactions.

From now on, all the above-mentioned attacks' synced-up reactions will also be able to be interrupted by In-reaction variants. For instance, a Player pinned down by a Centurion's Charged Heavy will no longer be pinned down a second time if another Charged Heavy hits him while the first reaction is still playing. Instead, the second Charged Heavy will cause an In-Hit reaction. The damage of the Charged Heavy will still apply, but it will free-up the target.

In addition to these changes, we're making a few more states invulnerable to these Synced-up Reactions to further prevent stun locking:

* Counter Guard Break
* Guard Break Timeout
* Unbalanced

Out of Stamina attacks

* Warlord no longer has Superior Block on Light Attacks when Out of Stamina.
* Warlord no longer has Super Armor on Heavy Attacks when Out of Stamina.
* Valkyrie no longer has Superior Block on Light Attacks when Out of Stamina.
* Conqueror no longer has Superior Block on Heavy Attacks when Out of Stamina.

***Developer comments:*** *Since attacks are supposed to be weaker when Out of Stamina with the much longer startups, it didn't really make sense to us that they still maintained special properties such as Superior Block or Super Armor.*

### Combat animation system

* [Bug Fix] Attacks with Superior Block property on startup no longer play a Hit reaction animation against the Shinobi's long range Heavy Charged attacks.
* [Bug Fix] Heavy attacks no longer switch to Light Attack animation when the opponent uses Guard Break.

***Developer comments***: *It's important to note that these are animation bugs causing the animation not to match the logic under certain circumstances. In both cases, the logic always worked properly, but visually it simply looked off. In the case of the Heavy attacks versus Guard Break, whenever the bug happened, it never turned Heavy attacks into Light Attacks, it just played a Light Attack animation while maintaining all the gameplay properties of the initial Heavy Attack (timing, damage, etc…).*

### Guard Switch

* [Bug Fix] Resolved an issue causing Guard Switch not to activate in the correct direction under specific timing conditions.

***Developer comments***: *For keyboard and*
mouse we buffer the Guard Switch input indefinitely, which revealed a bug in our Stance Change code. Some of you identified it with Assassins not switching to the correct stance post Dodge. https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveForHonor/comments/6bdpy4/reflex\_guard\_buffer\_bug/

*In fact, this could also happen on consoles but with much tighter timings due to a shorter buffer.*

### Feints Defense

* [Bug Fix] Kensei, Warlord, Valkyrie, Centurion can now block 100ms into their Feints.

***Developer comments:*** *Most characters can block within the last 100ms of their Heavy Attack Feints. However, the above-mentioned characters weren't setup properly. This is now consistent across all characters except Assassins because of their Reflex Guard.*

### Zone Attack OOS

* [Bug Fix] Valkyrie, Nobushi, Shugoki, Raider, Kensei, Conqueror, Peacekeeper can no longer Cancel out of Zone Attack when Out of Stamina.

***Developer comments***: *With these characters, it was possible to trigger your Zone Attack, go Out of Stamina and still Cancel the next part of the Zone Attack. This is no longer possible.*