Hi Tephra, thanks for the detailed feedback. I wanted to pop in an give some context for these changes only because we’ve been doing a lot of weapon animation revamps and rebalancing lately, and these might be viewed as those also - but that wasn’t actually our aim here.
We had a handful of weapons with what we considered to be less than acceptable levels of quality on their visual mesh and animation combinations. For this update, we didn’t have more animator time to implement new animations and do a full weapon revamp like we have done with weapons like katanas, hammers, and claws recently. Changing their visuals and animations to use existing assets we had were the best way for us to raise the quality level in a short period of time.
Over time, we would like to continue revisiting different weapon types to update their visuals and gameplay. Eventually we may also get to a point where we can either do a full animation revamp on these weapons as well. In the mean time we probably can make some simple tweaks - the suggestion to speed up the attack window from the draw animation for example is something we can look at really quickly and make it feel better.
Thanks again for the in depth coverage. We always appreciate varied perspectives on the game :)!