Sun Wukong's 'Way of Awakening' buff makes manually chaining Defenses impossible

[Plumber]

This has been a thing for a while, since I started playing even, but it only recently occurred to me that it might be a bug and not an intentional quirk of the talent.

Normally, after a successful Empty Palm usage, you are able to quickly perform any other action including a new Empty Palm. This can help protect you when enemies are going to hit you at an ambiguous time, and especially when you're being attacked by a horde of enemies. Exclusively during the Way of Awakening double stance buff, Empty Palm itself is exempt from this. Putting it simply, this means you have to drop your guard to refresh it, ironically making it weaker in what's supposed to be a super-mode dual stance.

Outside of making the move itself much weaker, it seriously disrupts the Divine Palm talent since it's not safely possible to weave in extra parries; for example, knife cultists' five hit string can be blocked with a single Defense activation, but without WoA, you can manually retrigger it during block frames to get extra parries. If WoA is active, you cannot retrigger it unless you animation cancel with a normal attack.

as a minor tangent, Sun Wukong will also not react to incoming attacks; normally he strikes a pose whenever a new instance of damage is blocked but he will not during WoA. Looks cool to not have him react at all, but because being hit extends the Defense's duration automatically, being able to tell whether you've blocked something is important...

[MXiaa]

Hi!

Thanks for the report. We took a look at this, and we could not reproduce it. As you describe it, it seems it happens often or always. Could you please provide us with a video? You can send it to: [e-mail]

Cheers,

[Plumber]

Sure, I’ll figure out an input viewer too.

[Plumber]

When recording and testing more rigorously, it seems like my original impression that it was impossible to chain successive Defenses purely for defense was incorrect; you can buffer a new Empty Palm as the previous one expires.
However, WoA definitely locks you out of reusing Defense early without animation cancelling, which messes with Divine Palm and mechanical feedback as previously described.
I'm compiling some clips and will send them in shortly.

[Plumber]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSCRae2xCNI

[MXiaa]

Thanks for the video, it was super helpful!
It'll be fixed in our next update :)

[Plumber]

excellent! I’m looking forward to it!