For Honor‘s currently in its sixth year and the second season of content. General game updates are regularly released, changing balance, adding maps and modes, and most importantly, new characters. With the game starting out small, having only Knights, Vikings, and Samurai, the team at Ubisoft has added two new factions over time, the Wu Lin and the Outlanders, each with their own respective pool of characters. Today, though, we find ourselves in another For Honor Public Test, which changes a couple of substantial traits relating to the game’s guarding mechanics.
The update seeks to change how the defense is structured in gameplay and is available to play right now for PC users. A much more detailed breakdown of Ubisoft’s intentions with this patch can be found here. As for the public test itself, it was originally announced on the official For Honor Twitter page a couple of days ago, which you can see below.
Guardbreak Vulnerability changes are live on the Testing Grounds now!
Read more: https://t.co/KVEwzzz3jY pic.twitter.com/Tbyyrt7Jt0
— For Honor (@ForHonorGame) June 30, 2022
So, the big changes for this update revolve around the Guard Break, specifically. This move is only usable while locked onto an opposing player, and at the press of a button, you can attempt to break their guard, leaving them open for a damaging Heavy Attack. The defender can hit the same button in response to cancel the Guard Break attempt and return to neutral. Ubisoft has, in the linked-above developer blog, stated that they feel that, in handicapped scenarios (1v2 or 1v3, for example) things can be a little unfair, and as such, are adding in invulnerability to Guard Break attempts. To quote the post directly, the following is what’s being directly changed:
-
Most Attack recoveries are now immune to Guardbreak until the hero regains the ability to block
-
By “Immune to Guardbreak”, we mean Guardbreak attempts will bounce off the opponent and not interrupt them at all, similarly to what happens when you try to Guardbreak an attack too late during its startup
-
There are some exceptions for especially slow recovery attacks such as Shaman’s Pounce, Shugoki’s hug, etc.
-
When a hero regains the ability to block during a recovery, Guardbreak attempts will land, but are techable.
-
-
All chained attacks are fully immune to Guardbreak
- Every bash that had a recovery of less than 766ms on miss is now has 766ms of miss recovery to ensure that Dodge Attacks will always beat Bashes
- Highlander has new Side Dodge attacks while in Defensive Stance, performed by pressing the Heavy button to ensure the hero can beat bashes
-
Jiang Jun can now enter Sifu Stance at the same time as the hero can block during Hit/Block hit reactions to ensure the hero can beat bashes
These new changes to Guard Break can potentially make 1v2 scenarios less dangerous for the handicapped player, as getting unfairly Guard Broken into instant death traps after using an Execution was a problem the game’s had for years at this point. As for the new update’s timeline, it’s available from June 30th (the day the blog post was published) until July 7th (five days from now), exclusively to PC users.
For Honor is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam and the Ubisoft Store. Once again, the current Public Test is only available to PC users.
