Been having fun and happy to see a gameplay balance patch so soon. That said, the technical side of this game is what really needs work and according to everything I’ve been seeing from Digital Foundry and others there’s some serious low hanging fruit that could improve the frame rate and pacing that is still pretty poor on all systems. Hopefully they bring some attention to that side of things soon. Game is certainly playable in the current state in my opinion but would be much more enjoyable if it actually stuck to something close to 60 FPS in most situations on XSX/PS5.

PvP-exclusive balance adjustments

- Decreased the damage and damage animation of the shearing vacuum effect of the “Swift Slash” Skill.

General balance adjustments

- Increased the Intelligence scaling of the Carian Sorcery Sword and slightly decreased the base damage.
- Extended the throwing attacks range for the following weapons:
- Smithscript Dagger / Smithscript Cirque
- Changed the placement of the bosses in the re-fight against the Golden Hippopotamus and Commander Gaius bosses to be in the same position as in the first fight.

Bug Fixes

- Fixed a bug that caused the Rolling Sparks Skill to deal more damage than expected.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Rolling Sparks and Wall of Sparks Skills to deal no damage while some special effects were applied to the player.
- Fixed a bug where some special effects of a right-handed weapon would also be applied to the following Weapon Skills when cast with the left hand:
    Feeble Lord's Frenzied Flame
    Discus Hurl
- Fixed a bug where successfully guarding while attacking using the Thrusting Shield weapon type would consume less stamina than intended.
- Fixed a bug that prevented players from cancelling the attack recovery of two-handed strong attacks by rolling for certain weapons of the Backhand Blades weapon type.
- Fixed a bug that caused the Lightning Perfume Bottle and Frenzyflame Perfume Bottle weapons to deal double damage under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug where the Arcane scaling of the Bloodfiend's Arm weapon was higher than intended when setting an affinity. The status buildup of the heavy attack was also reduced.
- Fixed a bug where the Faith scaling of the Gazing Finger weapon was not being applied correctly.
- Fixed a bug where the damage animation of some attacks of the Fire Knight's Greatsword against players was different than expected.
- Fixed a bug where the attack affinity of some attacks of the Fire Knight's Greatsword were different than expected.
- Fixed a bug that caused some affinities for the following weapons to be higher than intended:
    Smithscript Dagger
    Smithscript Cirque
    Smithscript Axe
    Smithscript Greathammer
    Smithscript Spear
    Golem Fist
    Smithscript Shield
- Fixed a bug that caused enemies to heal when the Maximum HP reduction gradual HP reduction effect  applied by Black Knife Tiche wore off.
- Fixed a bug that caused summoned NPCs to behave differently than expected under certain circumstances.
- Fixed a bug that where the unblockable bite attack of the Golden Hippopotamus boss would connect with players more easily than intended.
- Fixed a bug that caused text to display differently than expected.
- Several other performance improvements and bug fixes.

Possible unstable performance fixes

- For the PS5 version of the game, unstable framerate may be improved by using the "Rebuild Database" option from the device’s safe mode.
- In some PC versions, Ray Tracing may be unintentionally enabled and cause unstable performance. Please check the Ray Tracing setting in the "System" > "Graphics Settings" > "Raytracing Quality" from the title screen or in-game menu.
- In the PC Version, the message "Inappropriate activity detected" may appear without cheating. To fix this issue, please verify the integrity of the game's files before restarting the game.
- In the PC version, unstable framerate may be caused by third party applications that control mouse behavior. Deactivating these third party applications may improve performance.

Is the first Rolling Sparks change just removing that bug where you free aim it at the ground to cause it to deal all it’s damage at once?

Also unsure what the second Sparks change is about.

RIP bloodfiend’s. Heard it was really good.

I’d barely heard it mentioned before now, but the magic infused smithscript axe was doing CRAZY damage for me and a friend. Like 1.5 the amount of the Darkmoon great sword at 80 int, I think the number was ~950 ar between phys and magic damage. I’ll have to hop in again and see how bad it is now.