NEW HERO: VIRTUOSA

Description

Virtuosas are renowned for their relentless pursuit of perfection. They fight not out of necessity, but for the thrill of outwitting their opponents with speed, creativity, and elegance. For the Virtuosa, each duel is a puzzle to solve - every challenge a stage for their brilliance.

Difficulty: Hard
Posture Specialist
Evasive

Special Capabilities

• Unique Postures for different situations in battle
• While in Posture, can evade most attacks
• Take advantage of evaded enemy attacks with a quick Riposte

IMPROVEMENT

UI

• The health bar of allies is now visible in the team widget at the top of the screen.

Graphics Improvements (PC Only)

Support for NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR

We have added a native support for NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) in For Honor. These upscaling technologies significantly boost performance while maintaining excellent visual quality. Players with compatible graphics cards can now enjoy smoother framerates---especially at higher resolutions---without compromising on visual fidelity.
You can now enable DLSS or FSR in the Graphics Settings menu, with access to multiple presets tailored to different performance needs:

• DLSS Presets: Ultra Performance, Performance, Balanced, and Quality
• FSR Presets: Performance, Balanced, Quality, and Ultra Quality

BALANCING CHANGES

GLADIATOR and BLACK PRIOR:

Gladiator:

• Zone Attack now deals 1 damage and generates 30 revenge.

Black Prior:

• Horizon Spin now deals 1 damage and generates 30 revenge.

[Developer Comments] With the introduction of Virtuosa, we want to revisit how we treat Zone Bashes. In the past, these did not deal damage and therefore couldn't kill minions. With this change, we hope to deliver on players' expectations to use Zone attack to clear minions.
To ensure that this doesn't affect coordinated attacks (ganks), these will still generate the standard amount of revenge on hit.

GLADIATOR and CENTURION:

Gladiator:

• Sucker Punch changed back to 10 stamina damage (from 0).
• Counter Jab changed back to 30 stamina damage (from 0).
• Skewer Jab changed back to 10 stamina damage (from 0).

Centurion:

• Lion's Roar (1st & 2nd hit) changed back to 15 stamina damage (from 0).
• Lion's Roar (3rd hit) changed back to 30 stamina damage (from 0).

[Developer Comments] In a previous patch, we removed stamina damage from most attacks in the game. While we still believe this is best for the game in the long term, a side effect to this change is that certain characters' attacks became too situational. Until we can give those attacks something to compensate, we are giving them back their stamina damage.

Antigank Reintegration - Part 1

Hit stun states have been standardized so they can no longer be reset via using specific pinning moves or bashes. 

[Developer Comment] Pinning moves currently have the ability to reset the hitstun state of their targets if they hit them during their initial hitstun (known as 1st hitstun). We want to ensure that pinning moves no longer reset hitstun and now consistently lead to the 2nd hitstun state, where heroes gain a large amount of damage reduction as well as hitstun immunity. While this change limits the impacts of ganking, it doesn't entirely remove the ability to pull off inescapable ganks. Instead, the window to do so is more consistent but also much stricter. 

To be more specific about the changes: 

When a victim gets hit for the first time, they receive 100% of the intended damage from the attack and go to a "1st hitstun" reaction.  

At this point, if the victim gets hit a second time by the same attacker, repeat the process (i.e. 100% damage).  

However, if another attacker hits the victim during the 1st hitstun, the victim will receive 75% of the intended damage and go to a "2^nd hitstun" reaction.  

Any subsequent attack on the victim during 2^nd hitstun, regardless of the source, will only deal 25% of the intended damage and no hitstun is played on the victim. (this is known as the "3^rd hitstun" state)  

This rule is true for all strikes and now also applies when pinned or knocked down.  

In the case that a pinning move causes a stagger, hits received during the stagger reaction, will count as the second hit for hitstun stacking purposes. 

Note that we have more changes coming. This is only the first of many steps to give players a fair fighting chance when defending in outnumbered situations.

BUG FIXES

Heroes

Raider

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; the Female Raider does not have blonde hair on Steinnun helm.

Varangian Guard

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; the Djarfr Chest hasn't any physic and clips with lower part.

Valkyrie

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; the Valkyrie's capes are clipping with her back.

Shaman

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; Shaman's bite damage was incorrectly modified by the antigank changes.

Maps

Canyon

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; Players could access Out-of-Bounds area near Zone B.

Citadel Gate

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; Players could access Out-of-Bounds area near Zone A.

Viking Village

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; Players could access Out-of-Bounds area near Defender spawn.

Forge

• [Bug Fix] Fixed an issue where; Players could access Out-of-Bounds area near Zone C.