Any idea when these changes are going to happen?
Soon
Nooooo, weapon swap is an interesting "Advanced mechanic" plz don't nerf!
Hammering LB as fast as you can to almost triple your damage output goes beyond an "advanced technique" and into "exploit" territory. Right now, it can be used to literally bypass certain phases of bosses and even a beginner can do it if they know it exists. If you had to use frame perfect timing or intelligent spacing or really understand the nuances of boss patterns to implement the technique, we'd leave it in.
But you don't.
You just hit LB while holding the shoot button.
If an actual codified technique in a game was "tap LB as fast as you can to triple your damage", do you think that would be a good design decision?
When I hear "By using this one simple technique, you can bypass complete phases of bosses!" it actually means, "By using this one simple technique, you don't actually have to play the game! You just get to win!"
That said, it's getting a nerf, it's not getting removed.
Why not buff the other moves instead? Bubble feels too weak as it is too unreliable to kill adds and too awkwardly ranged to be useful.
Because the bosses were designed with a certain damage output in mind and one of the weapons falls a decent amount outside of that damage output. It trivializes some encounters. You can crack off 3 charge shots and kill ph3 of the Bee fight. That basically means you don't have to play the 3rd phase if you pick the broken weapon.
Buffing all of the other weapons to damage output level would decrease the boss fight times by a huge portion. At that point, you'd be able to commonly beat bosses between 1:00-1:15. Successful boss fights were designed to be between 1:45-2:00. They are timed and sequenced and balanced for this.
If you really want to get into it, we can put some numbers on it so that it becomes clearer.
Let's take a boss that has 4 phases. Let's say we buff up all of the weapons so that they have damage output of the charge weapon at it's most broken. That leads to a 1:00 fight. That means each of the 4 phases lasts about 15 seconds. Let's say each of those phases has an intro animation that is about 3 seconds long. Add an additional second for the boss to come out of the intro animation and do it's first "tell" before attacking. So that's 4 seconds where you don't have to actually do anything. So we're down to 11 seconds of actual play time on a phase. When Cuphead takes a hit, he gets about 2 seconds of invincibility to recover. So that gives you a "free" 2 seconds where you don't actually have to worry about what's going on on screen. So we're down to 9 seconds where you have to be actually watching out what's happening on screen per phase. If you picked Super Art II (invincibility), you would probably only get to use it once per fight (because they are so short), and it gives you almost 5 seconds of invincibility. So divided by 4 phases, that's about another 1.5 seconds per phase where you don't actually have to be paying attention.
So we're down to 7.5 seconds per phase where you actually have to be watching the screen, reacting to what's happening, learning the patterns....you know, playing the game.
7.5 seconds.
Now, if we wanted to
properly balance the weapons around the same damage output as the charge shot, we'd actually have to buff the EX shots as well. So that would take our boss fights times down even more.
So we'd probably be down to about 6.5 seconds.
Which would exacerbate the problem of not having enough time to get enough parries in to get either A) Have ranks mean anything, and B) Even have them be useful.
Now, to add to all of this, there are some bosses that have elaborate transition animations as long as 6 seconds. So that would cut some forms down to 4.5 seconds.
And some attack tells are held for 2 seconds...so in that 4.5 seconds of actually playing the game, you would have 3.5 seconds of actually having to react to certain attacks. Of actually playing the game, per phase.
That's a problem.
Also, Lobber is used in the current All Bosses Speedrun record so....nope.