The knife's stab animation is awesome, quick and strengthful, and it shakes the screen a little, which makes it better, compare to that, the sword's slash is so soft and weak, it's like cutting papers, not using muscles at all.
Please, improve this.
Improve the sword slash animation, make it more strengthful
While Sea of Thieves is in no means realistic, the difference between the animations make sense.
With a Dagger, the wielder needs to put their strength behind each swing.
With a Sword, the sword itself does most of the work.
Now, at some point Rare may split the sword into 3 separate categories, Light, Regular and Heavy, with each one having a different attack pattern... in which case the Heavy Sword would need to have the feeling of the wielder putting effort into the swing... but for now, a normal sword swing doesn't require the effort a strong knife attack would need to have the same damage effect.
The sword needs so much work.
So many times I do a full 3 slash combo against PvE and they don’t die indicating one or more of my slashes didn’t count even though from my end it appears all three counted via audio and visual feedback. This can also occur against players it’s just more noticeable against PvE because most of them die to a 3 slash combo.
So many times I think I landed the first slash only to have my combo interrupted by a skeleton’s or player’s slash. And then sword fights devolve into a spam fest where it’s just a race to see who dies first rather than the sword functioning as intended.
Even sword lunging you can experience times where on your end it appears you damaged PvE or a player with your lunge but you still suffer the delay for missing a lunge.
Swordplay is still not working as intended. It doesn’t feel consistent and reliable. There are still many examples where what you see and what actually occurred on the server don’t align with one another.
Besides all technical stuff that isn’t working right there is still a glaring issue that Rare overlooks relating to sword hopping through players and PvE.
Controller players by default have a very slow sensitivity that results in very low turn speeds. If they get used to playing on low sensitivity they will have a massive disadvantage against a sword user who plays on a high sensitivity.
Sword hopping (hold block + move + jump) through a player and quickly turning around 180 degrees is the easiest way to get behind someone who is blocking. Players with a low sensitivity may not be able to turn quickly enough to be able to counter this move. I see it time and time again since many streamers now are using sword in place of the blunderbuss.
Why does sword hopping allow players to pass through others as if there’s no collision? And why doesn’t Rare teach this basic move to new players? And why is the default sensitivity so low?
This is just another example of many examples as to why new players can’t just pick up and play Sea of Thieves. There are things to learn that the game will not teach you and you must either learn from experimenting or learn from watching a guide.
Hide emotes, common hiding spots and how to counter them are another big one that continues to harm new player retention time and time again. Rare had an opportunity to fix this issue if they combined hide emotes and disguises in the same radial menu accessible via crouching but they didn’t choose to go that route.
Players must still find out about hide emotes from browsing through the bloated pirate emporium. Then they must equip them via the vanity chest. Then they can hide. Completely unnecessary. Put the free hide emote and any paid hide emotes in the radial that is only accessible via crouching alongside disguises.
2 out of 3
