Street Fighter 6 just released a new set of balance changes to go along with Elena’s return to the World Warrior scene. After a good set of hours, both changes to the game are ready to be applied. The new stage’s music is reminiscent of other Street Fighter Africa stages as it shows itself in the form of Elena’s non-default music.
Elena’s Back
Elena received a launch trailer yesterday. Elena’s story, World Tour Stage, Combo Trials, Emotes, and mastery moves are now available.
Elena’s Character Guide has been out since last week, but the veterinarian has only been available starting today, post the balance update. Elena’s normals at least give off some sort of distance if blocked to get that turn back. Elena’s Lynx Song can add different command moves, which are some of her original moves, such as the Mallet Smash. The Overdrive version of this already adds damage potential from the Lynx Whirl follow-up.
The Lynx Whirl can avoid projectiles like it’s Street Fighter X Tekken again. Lynx Whirl is so dangerous that it can be used after Spinning Scythe to add more command spice to combo setups. Elena has a way to interrupt some high normals. Elena’s blind spot does feel like the lack of lows, but it’s too early to tell. Revival Dance restores a good amount of HP after pressing down, but the sacrifice is the Super Combo’s damage. All that to sniff daisies and get back in the ring is a cool trade-off.
Street Fighter 6 Ch-ch-changes
Various changes have occurred with the poster boy Ryu getting the better end of the stick with 200 points added to Hadouken, Denjin, and other moves. Denjin Hadouken’s speed has been increased, while the hits have been increased to 8 hits instead of just 5. Here’s a bit of what the focus is, including the perfect parry change and other core mechanics.
Our focus for this end of the content year update was various character tunings in addition to alterations to the general strategy of the game through a number of battle system changes. A list of changes and our explanations behind them can be found below. We hope these explanations will help explain our thought process, especially for adjustments where the intention is less obvious than others.
Perfect Parry
A screen freeze will no longer occur when successfully performing a Perfect Parry unless the correct direction is held. Down-back must be held for low attacks, and back must be held for high and overhead attacks to successfully produce a screen freeze.
This change is intended to improve the feeling of being on the receiving end of a Perfect Parry, and is in response to a number of situations. One, because Perfect Parry required no additional input, it was too easy of a choice to simply parry the moment the player sees their opponent move. Another was the Drive Parry before Drive Rush occasionally causing a Perfect Parry by chance when hit by an opponent’s spacing attack. These kind of “incidental Perfect Parry” situations were found to result in frustration for players when a Perfect Parry turned the tide of a match.
While we had attempted to balance the risk and reward of Perfect Parry through gauge use/gain and increasing recovery of Drive Parry, reward was still too high on success, and the risk too low on failure.
By requiring an additional input alongside the already present timing requirement, we hope to reduce these incidental Parries.
Perfect Parry against projectiles, which produces no time freeze, have been kept as they were in order to prevent projectiles from becoming overly oppressive.
Adjustments Resulting from Perfect Parry Changes
Because the Perfect Parry alterations have made highs and lows more important, many characters have received changes to their lows to ensure they are not overly powerful.
This change also means that it will be more difficult to perform Perfect Parry against an attack out of Drive Rush, a common choice to begin an offensive push. Taking this into consideration, crouching medium kicks that cannot be canceled into other moves have been given scaling in order to ease their strength when used from Drive Rush, as they could lead to combos and were safe on block.
In anticipation of long-reaching lows becoming a powerful way to begin offense, characters that are able to cancel their crouching medium kicks will no longer be able to evade an opponent’s throw after having their Drive Rush > Light Attack blocked from crouching medium kick. This will require the opponent to throw as soon as they are able.
Attack sequences using crouching light kick from close ranges have also received changes. Because Perfect Parry was universal for strikes, it was common to have crouching light kicks Perfect Parried when trying to check an opponent’s wakeup. This combined with the fact that most light punches resulted in more advantage, crouching light kicks were considered a low priority move. With the changes in Perfect Parry, these attacks should see much more use. We have also made it more likely for consecutive light attacks to reach with alterations to advantage and pushback on block to light moves.
As discussed below we’ve added Assisted Combos that incorporate a crouching light attack as the 2nd attack in the string, so you can attack in a similar fashion as when using Classic controls
Throw Escapes
The player who escapes a throw will now receive more Drive Gauge and Super Art gauge than before.A classic defensive strategy was to perform a delayed throw escape after blocking for an instant. This was a strong option against both strikes and throws, but it proved difficult to turn the fight around into your favor as the attacker could simply wait and attack a whiffed throw attempt, making it a high-risk but low-return defensive option.
As a defensive measure against throws, players could also back dash or jump to get better rewards, which meant that throw escapes was not an option that was chosen often.
In order to provide players with another valuable close-range option when on the defensive, we decided to give more resources upon a successful throw escape. This will be a huge boon for a player especially just before hitting Burnout, and can become a valid option to get out of a tight situation.
Sweeps
Along with reducing the hurtbox on the 1st active frame, we made adjustments so that on a normal or counter hit, players can still perform a recovery.By greatly reducing the hurtbox immediately after the attack start-up, although there’s some risk if the attack was blocked or missed, it’s now an attack that can win out against other pokes more often. Remember this option when you don’t have much health left or are in a pinch.
On the other hand, the move can now be recovered from after a normal or counterhit, so your offensive situation after hit is much different. Each character will have a different wake-up gameplay now so study up.
Due to this change, the strategy of knocking down an opponent and switching sides before they get up is now gone, except if the attack lands as a Punish Counter.
Note that attacks that slide along the ground are not subject to this change.
Modern Controls have received two major updates.
1. Jumping Attacks
By pressing the Assist button with an attack button, you can now use different jumping attacks while in the air. As a general rule, good air-to-ground attacks require pressing the Assist button, while attacks suited for air-to-air situations are now the normal jumping attacks.2. Unique Assisted Combos can now be performed starting from a rapid cancel light attack.
Due to the properties of Assisted Combos when using Modern controls, it wasn’t possible to look for a combo after a second light attack with the exception of some characters. However, considering the changes made to Perfect Parry, it’s now more important to mix up the high/low levels of attacks more than ever, so by performing ↓+AUTO+Light from a rapid cancel light attack, you can now perform a unique Assisted Combo that begins with a light attack.This unique Assisted Combo is the exact same as every character’s Assisted Combo 1, but when rapid canceled it will continue until the end regardless if the attack hits or is blocked.
Detailed character changes can be seen here, also. Rooflemonger broke it down with a more detailed visual version of the balance changes. This is right on time for the Street Fighter 6 Year 1 and 2 Edition of the game, which is coming out on the same day as the Nintendo Switch 2 launch.
