Okay heres my feedback:

2) the good: animals seem WAY more smooth and migration patches seem great.

the bad: the intention of trying to remove counter play by forcing a animal to attack in order to cause them to miss and thus give you a chance to counter attack... like on dark souls for example... hasn't worked in my opinion, here is why:
So I'm in a extreme danger zone and I'm low energy, low food, low drink. I see a hunchback yote. My lucky day. I run towards him thinking this is my chance to both test combat and get a death port home.. but no. Instead the yote came at me, than seemed to hover near me up in my face REALLY close to me but instead of swing'n to attack, he just moved from side to side slightly keeping the same distance from me without attacking, than ran away from me. Now this this weird cuz I have 65% weight on me so I'm moving backwards extremely slow yet cuz I'm moving back and hes looking for a instant hit, hes not triggering a attack and im not being hit. This could be HEAVILY abused since you could in theory use "walk" mode to stay out of the animals range while still easily hitting it.

I really feel this is a step in the wrong direction for combat. While animals are extremely more smooth (hats off to you there) they react better and jump around less, less choppy and look properly/smooth moving... but the moment it gets to you and does that no attack thing than runs, it ruins it. I'll elaborate more about this below.

Edit~~~~

So theres a bear moonwalking in front of me right now, walking in spot without moving.... than he charged me, I didnt move so he just stood in front of my face at 99 aggro, not attacking or doing anything. So I back up and he follows me. No point in time does he attack me or attempt attack. At this point I figure "hitting him will cause 100 agro" so I hit him with shovel while walking backwars and he didnt do anything so I stopped for a sec and he insta smacked me for big dmg, I kept walking back (65%weight so very slowly) and I could hit him with my shovel WHILE moving backwards and he was unable to hit me and was not swing'n at me. This was a PLATEBACK bear. This is not right. I donno who is advising you on pve but your effectively making the ai so easy even a 70hp crafter pver can fight a plateback bear and prob win if they didnt fuck around like I did, this isn't right, you should need to be a strong combat player to take high end animals.