Direction

As is, many characters remain undercooked, feeling either incongruent with their aesthetic design, too dry and not unique enough, or simply doesn’t function as a complete character. This patch is intended to fill up the design space available now that v1 has neutered the dominant meta strategies. In other words, new toys for everone.

Rage Drive

Rage Drives (and Heat Smashes) provide a valuable design space to work in, but their current execution is lacking. The vast majority of them are just mixup buttons with pumped up properties. Boring.

Ideally, these moves would fundamentally alter the way one interacts with the character. For example, in TEKKEN 8, when Lidia is in Heat, the counterplay to each stance situation changes dramatically because of the added HAE parry.

Some broad categories of move that’d be more interesting as a one-time move use than 90% of Rage Drives:

High coverage unblockables (e.g. Gigas’ Rage Drive)
Safe, reactable lows (e.g. Jack-7’s Rage Drive)
Fast, high coverage, low reward mids (e.g. Feng’s Rage Drive)
Slow, high coverage, high reward mids
Faster options, crush frames, or parry frames on stances that don’t usually have them (e.g. Lidia’s HAE parry in Heat)
Reversals with pumped up properties (e.g. Yoshimitsu’s Rage Art, to some extent his Rage Drive)
High reward punishers (e.g. Jack-8’s Heat Smash, Zafina’s Heat Smash)
High reward CH buttons (e.g. Heihachi’s Rage Drive)
String extensions in general that add further mindgames to the string

Systemic rebalances

The patch will also have the following systemic rebalances that were cut from v1 to avoid bloating it too much:

Punishment will be more broadly balanced within the character. That is, some characters will still have much better or worse punishment than others, but a character’s i14 punisher should be better than their i12, etc. In general, this means i10 standing and i11 while standing punishers nerfed, and i13 and i14 punishers buffed. This should encourage more precise punishment and make the difference between -10 and -14 more significant.
Combos will be more broadly balanced within the character. That is, some characters will still have much better or worse combos than others, but they should all have a wide variety of combos to choose from with a reasonable tradeoff between difficulty, consistency, okizeme, and damage. Focus currently is more so on wall combos, but combos in general may have some attention too.

Changes

(Prospective changes for next patch. Very incomplete.)

(✓ is stuff that’s been implemented so far in dev build.)

Universal

Rage Art requires screw available for full effect on hit

Dragunov

1,3,2 block frames (-12 → -13)
1,3,2 cancel detection end (18 → 27)
- Makes it more usable as a wall combo
1,3,2 damage (7,14,20 → 7,14,24)

Leo

b+1 hitbox location (0xC0D → 0xC0D000D)
- This was unintentionally changed to 0c0D in v1

Leroy

b+4 fix HRM parry not initiating fast enough
FC.df+4,1 fix CH db+4 juggle not working
FC.df+4,1 try and fix OTG.db+2,1+2 not being possible follow up

Lidia

✓ f+2,4 hit effect (+5 → knockdown)
✓ b+3,4 hit effect (+0 → +2s)
- Makes b+3,4,1+2 combo from 1st hit
✓ b+3,4,1+2 recovery (r30 → r35)
- Changes block frames (-10 → -15)
- Also affects b+3,4:1+2
✓ b+3,4,1+2 damage (16,16,19 → 16,16,17)
- b+3,4:1+2 not affected
✓ b+3,4,1+2 pushback on hit in juggle increased
✓ b+3,4:1+2 new hit effect in juggle, more distance but less height
✓ CFT.4 damage (7 → 10), clean hit removed
✓ CFT.4 stagger removed
✓ CFT.4 blockstun (19f → 21f)
- Changes block frames (-23 → -6)
- Up to i14 will punish before Lidia can block
✓ CFT.4 transitions to TAW on hit and block
CFT.4,4 blockstun (21f → 24f)
CFT.4.4 recovery (r34 → r32)
- Changes block frames (-14 → -9)
- Changes hit frames (+5d → +7d)
✓ CFT.4,4 startup (i38~39 → i35~36)
- Trades with i14 punishers after 1st hit is blocked
✓ CFT.1+2 transitions to TAW on hit and block
CFO.b new move, can block after 8 frames
✓ CFO.n,f input changed to CFO.F
✓ CFO.n,b input changed to CFO.b,b
CFT.b new move, can block after 8 frames
✓ CFT.n,f input changed to CFT.F
✓ CFT.n,b input changed to CFT.b,b
✓ TAW.F new move, transitions to HAE
TAW.b new move, can block after 8 frames
TAW.b,b new move, same as CFO.b,b
✓ HAE.F new move, transitions to TAW
HAE.b new move, can block after 8 frames
✓ OTG.d+2 ground hit effect (spike → nothing)
✓ OTG.d+2 recovery on hit (r45 → r31)
- Changes hit frames (-7c → +7c)
✓ OTG.d+2 startup (i23~24 → i18~19)

Master Raven

uf+3+4,4,2 damage (17,9,21 → 17,13,15)
- Changes wall combo damage (20 → 18)
- No change to normal hit damage

Noctis

Due to a happy little accident, the uf+1 knockdown previously intended to only combo under rare circumstances (via db+1,1+2) actually still guarantees a combo, but it’s a fairly tight ws2,2 pickup. Since it’s a pretty cool combo, it’s staying in and instead the move is being balanced similarly to Jin’s m4.

✓ uf+1 blockstun (24f → 20f) and recovery (41f → 43f)
- Changes block frames (-4 → -10)
✓ uf+1 pushback on block reduced slightly
- Safe on block at mid range in most matchups, unsafe up close
✓ uf+1 CH knockdown speed altered such that ws2,2 is a 3 frame link.