As someone who has clearly put alot of time into Rep I must disagree and I'd like to see your viewpoint but I don't. So let's discuss.
We all have. My viewpoint is a little different...maybe moreso because I'm looking at a lot of different things at once. Like what did get positively changed and how that affects matchups and how I play the character.
Like the run change. I use dash for actual mobility quite a bit. It's good because it also puts a hitbox on the screen that will catch people trying to run. The run change directly affects that tactic and that means they can't just run in after getting tagged with one during their run. It ups the value of dash in that scenario. f21 is also boosted, and the general change heavily affects matchups vs RC characters. It's a big buff to his own neutral game, which is a lot less run reliant in comparison to a bunch of characters. Top it off with EX spit stopping run...get a dash on a run, EX spit. If their anti zoning sucks...whee back up and forceball or bait out the inevitable jump.
And that's just a little bit of what I see. Better anti run game leads to better neutral control overall, which buffs everything in some sort of way. Losing the ex claw launch sucks, trust me I was pissed seeing it at first. It fucks with the AA. But we don't know if we were hit with the graces of the d2 buffs. The dropping of some top tiers in certain ways helps us too. Alien's loss of armor on EX flip and the addition of tail hurtboxes boosts up our zoning a bit due to what I said above. Mileena b1 being a high makes fighting her in neutral so much easier now that we don't have to hold it in certain ranges. Kotal losing armor on EX oh sword and the run changes really swing that matchup towards us. Run changes in general makes the matchup vs Liu, Cage, and D'vorah so much more tedious. Just by removing the armored launchers for 1 bar makes blowing up Reptile's forceballs in certain scenarios much less rewarding. I'm looking at this stuff and go, I'll take the L on AA and blowing up gaps if it means there's so many things changing that benefit my neutral game.
