Thanks for the response! That's an interesting perspective. For higher level players, are the new mechanics poorly balanced in a way that makes them too good, or not really useful?
At my relatively intermediate play style I'm really not seeing many people make a whole lot of use out of things like fatal rush and break blow, which is a bit interesting seeing as I believe the team said they introduced the mechanics for newer players.
I know its a different type of game, and perhaps the Japanese and western voices where largely the same, but it really seemed like Team Ninja was taking a lot of feedback outside of Japan for Nioh. If what you say is true its too bad they don't really listen to everyone like they did for that title.
Usually when a new mechanic is introduced in a fighter, every character can use that mechanic well. Some will be able to use it better than others, but everyone gets at least decent use out of it. That's not the case with DOA6 and many of the new mechanics we have: Fatal Rush, Stun > Launch, SS Attack and Bound. For example, Team Ninja didn't go through every character's move list to change tracking moves. For the most part tracking moves are the same in DOA6 as they were in DOA5LR, despite a huge change to the SS.
From my experience, people don't want to learn their tracking attacks and weren't even really abusing the SS Attack before the nerfs. People just complained it was an easy out because they were trying to play DOA5 instead of actually looking into how DOA6 is supposed to be played. For instance, 90% of the time, I start my offense with a tracking move. I rarely see anyone else do this.
For DOA5 there was a "summit" of sorts where the devs and a bunch of top US, Japanese and Euro players got on a conference call to discuss how the game would evolve. The Japanese players got everything they wanted, no matter how much the US and EU players argued it wasn't necessary. The US/EU players got nothing they wanted. A big example was ceiling damage. Japanese players wanted it nerfed. US/EU players said a nerf wasn't necessary because it only happens in a handful of stages against a handful of characters. The devs didn't care about the US/EU argument and nerfed the ceiling damage anyway.
Same thing seems to be happening here.
