This didn’t work for me in current version 5.3.2. Has something changed in the newer versions of unreal 5 that has made it so the function you need to override has changed? From what I know it should be the same/this fix should still work. It could be that I have encountered many bugs/crashes related to adding code to my project and had to revert to a backup I made before implementing this fix in order to get it to compile correctly (long story, but first time there were errors compiling, which completely bricked my project. kept saying that project was compiled with different engine version and couldn’t be built on startup. Building from source/visual studio didn’t work.) I fixed the issue and now it compiles successfully, yet reparenting AIC to new custom class still doesn’t allow for pitch rotation updating through set focal point unless it’s a pawn through “set focus” (so essentially, nothing changed.) Tried reparenting back to AIC then to custom class again didn’t work.
I did find my own hacky work around that hopefully I can replace with the correct fix (overriding the terrible default AIC UpdateControlRotation function.) All I did was parent an empty pawn (just scene root) that I called my "Head Actor) to the mesh of my character, and used an interface function that grabs the head actor to then set the focus to the head actor(pawn), not my character for better accuracy.
The IF is then called in the AIC, and the “set focus” node is used with the head actor as focus target.
Still not sure why they decided to completely disallow the use of updating pitch for focal point. If you don’t want a specific AI to use pitch, then you could just uncheck “use control rotation pitch.” If whoever requested this REALLY needed to have it not update pitch they could have had a simple boolean to check for the people that want to update pitch. But for me and a lot of people it seems to be crucial to have because I can think of 100 use cases that need it before I can think of one that doesn’t. And being stuck with just “set focus” doesn’t offer much if any flexibility.