The issue I think you might be seeing is when they use the Katana special but don’t go through with it. Normally when a player does the special attack (not in combo), we hold the Block/Kick/Special button and then use the Light attack command. Then you get the katana dash.
The problem with thralls is they are giving inputs like its a Two-Handed Sword. So when they use the special, they don’t use light attack with it. They’re trying to Overhead strike with the wrong weapon.
This isn’t a hard fix for FC to make. They just need to give Katana its own entry in the combo table and either give them the occasional dash attack, or simply give it the normal 2 Handed Sword combos without the overhead swing. Either would work.
For Shortswords, using the 1-Handed Sword normal inputs isn’t a problem. But giving them an entry of Heavy Attack followed by four Light Attacks would give them a vicious little combo that would work amazingly well in PVE.
Just to give people insight into how all this works… depending on the tier of the thrall (there’s two, so I assume its Tier 1 and 2, and Tier 3 and 4, but it might be T1-3 and T4, this I’m not certain about) there is two tables, one normal and one elite.
The normal one for most weapons is basically 2 hit combos. Light and Light, Light and Heavy, Heavy and Light, and Heavy and Heavy.
The elite one has the above and 3 hit combos and 4 hit combos.
Some weapons like 2-Handed Sword, Daggers, etc. Occasionally have a single combo that uses the Block/Kick/Special. This is used when a shield is detected or a off hand item also. Which is why when you give your thrall throwing axes or shield, they kinda randomly block or throw. Its because a combo is randomly picked.
So they may do two light attacks, or 2 lights and a heavy, or just block for a bit. You all get the idea.
I assume this also affects NPCs as well.
Unfortunately I don’t know how thralls pick weapons. I haven’t dug that deep for what causes them to pick different weapons.
Also Pets use their own combos. Which are usually pretty simple to my knowledge. I haven’t dug deep on this either. But animals and creatures have ‘natural weapons’. Which give them various attacks. They use some method (maybe random) to switch weapons to do different attacks. Like the tail swipe on the Giant Croc boss is a different weapon than their lunge and I believe the regular crocs are not equipped with that one.
Which in turn brings us back to the point of the thread. The pet ‘nerf’ is readjusting these ‘weapons’. Right now, pets use the same weapons as their wild counterparts. Which in some cases gives them incredible amounts of damage since they get a lot of bonus damage per strength.
Tamed pets will have their own weapons separate from the wild ones which will allow FC to boost pet damage without boosting wild ones.
For example… no one here wants to see a dog/wolf buff also buff Corrupted Wolves do they? Well… I do, because I’m crazy
Or see a buff to wild tigers and cats giving Greater Sabretooths a buff in PVP.
I hope we’ll see some Armor Penetration changes in the future for pets.