A fresh batch of motion-captured animations landed this round, and they went everywhere.
Swing a plain sword now and the Penitent works through three distinct strikes — a proper combo carved out of a dual-blade routine, each cut with its own anticipation and follow-through instead of the same recycled swings. Pick up a mace or a hammer and the whole silhouette of combat changes: blunt weapons no longer borrow sword arcs, they smash — overhead blows and a committed leaping slam that alternate as you attack. A club should not fight like a rapier, and now it doesn't.
Sundering Leap got its body back too. Casting it used to fling the character through the air in whatever pose the legs happened to be in; now the Penitent plays a full jump-attack through the flight — coiling, airborne, striking down into the landing — so the slam at the end finally looks like the thing the numbers say it is.
And then there's the big one. The Dark Lord — the cathedral's end boss — has learned to fly. Push him past his first phase and keep your distance, and he'll answer it: a roar, a crouch, and a massive leap that carries him across the arena to land on you with a very large, very purple nova. The landing circle is drawn at your feet the moment he commits, and you have his whole crouch-and-flight to get out of it — this is a dodge test, not a death sentence. But stand in it and you'll learn why the circle was there. It closes the gap in his kit: hanging back at mid-range used to be the comfortable answer to him, and now nowhere is comfortable.
The quieter half of the round is the one you'll hopefully never notice. The game now degrades its spectacle under pressure instead of its framerate: when the horde on screen grows past a certain size, faraway monsters animate at a reduced rate (the ones actually fighting you never do), cosmetic effects and floating damage numbers thin out at the edges of the fight, and everything snaps back to full fidelity the moment the crowd thins. Smoothness first, always — the sparks exist to serve the fight, not the other way around. In a stress test with three hundred skeletons converging at once, the animation cost of the horde dropped by three quarters.
The dark is getting better at coming for you. Best keep moving.