Judgment used to be a sword swing with a fancier name — a heavier version of the same overhead cut every melee build already had. It didn't feel like the capstone spell its name promised. Now it is one: cast it, and a colossal blade drops from directly above the target and slams into the ground, a verdict delivered from on high rather than swung from the hand. It's slower and heavier by design — a deliberate, weighty payoff for the biggest Vigor cost and longest cooldown in the Warfare tree, not another fast attack in a different coat of paint.
Bulwark of Faith got a similar rethink. It used to be a watered-down copy of another shield skill, offering the same kind of protection but weaker — a buff nobody would ever pick over its sibling. It's now its own thing: a real Armor-and-Block buff that trades the shield-required, later-unlocking Aegis's raw numbers for something you can lean on earlier and without a shield at all. Two skills that used to blur together now have distinct identities.
Around those two redesigns sits a wide pass of the kind of fixes that don't make headlines individually but add up to a game that behaves the way it should. Ranged attacks and thrown weapons now start from the actual hand holding them, not an approximate point on the chest, and their hit detection no longer whiffs on the edges of the things they're aimed at. Poison, burn, shock, and curse icons now actually show up over enemies' heads — they were tracked correctly under the hood the whole time, but the nameplate only had room to display three of the six ailments the game can apply. Buff and debuff icons everywhere are bigger and genuinely see-through now, instead of a translucent PNG rendering as a flat, opaque square. Hovering a skill now shows the real mechanical bullet points of what it does — chains, pulls, curses, stored damage — pulled live from the skill's own numbers instead of a hand-written blurb that drifted out of date every time a rune changed something.
The waypoint map got rebuilt from a flat list of clickable rows into an actual travel screen: destinations grouped by zone, a preview panel for wherever you've selected, and a deliberate second click to confirm the trip. And Shield Throw now hurls whatever shield you're actually wearing — the visual updates automatically if you swap gear, instead of throwing a generic glowing disc that had nothing to do with your build.
None of these were big systems. They were the small, specific wrongnesses that accumulate in any game under active development — and clearing a batch of them out at once is its own kind of progress.