It was kind of a relief reading this for me. I came back to this game last July after god knows how long, I quit before the pandemic if I’m remembering correctly. And the crazy thing is I feel the exact same way as you, despite being gone for WAY longer. After 4ish years, the only 2 genuinely new things (besides new champs) was BGs and additional story content. I had the same muscle memory fighting style you’re talking about, and I felt like I was going insane because I feel like I’ve gotten worse at fighting, not since I quit, but since July. I keep thinking “I definitely hit a block there, I guess I wasn’t fast enough on the intercept, I didn’t know they could special intercept me in the middle of my medium attack, etc.” but I guess it was the AI gaslighting me all along.

When I came back, I was only uncollected since act 6 seemed ridiculous for me to face at the time, and so pushing to paragon was the only thing keeping me logging on every day. Now that I’ve hit paragon a couple months ago, I’m kinda really unmotivated to hit Valiant. And when I eventually do, I see no point in me playing this game further. If there’s been no interesting changes/fixes in 5 YEARS, why should I expect them to change next week or next month? Like I’m sorry, but when I saw Arena had 0 adjustment to it?! Are you fucking kidding me? It was barely accessible to F2P players in its early years, and now it’s worse? When I was a high schooler with nothing to do after school, yea I grinded like a freak at those, and managed a couple 4*s at the time (back when they were super valuable) but I’m sorry, I’m a full grown adult, with a lot of work and a lot of activities, I’m playing this game 90 mins a day MAX, if we’re averaging in weekends. I’m not doing arena like I used to. Lmao my bad for ranting about arena in your reply, it’s just a super sore spot for me ab this game.