One topic that was touched on a little bit is something I’ve been saying for over a decade now. It objectively makes more sense to buff characters than it does to nerf characters.
As far as balance is concerned, the goal should be to make as many characters in the game as possible competitively viable. Meaning, you can use any character you want and be able to compete. The best way to do this is to have a consensus on who the top tier characters are. Then, and this part is crucial, understand why these characters are top tier. Not only what they have in their arsenal that makes them uniquely good, but what do they have in common with one another that makes them such good characters.
Then, you start implementing buffs to the consensus low tier characters to fit that criteria as closely as possible.
You never want to have a character, or multiple characters, that are top tier and really good, and then you gut them to where no one wants to play them anymore. That is not at all the direction you should ever want to go. I’m not suggesting you should never nerf any character or never nerf anything, but that should be reserved for things that are so obviously (actually) broken, or characters that far and away dominate the meta. The issue is, you have to be careful when you nerf said character. You don’t want people to completely abandon the character because anything and everything that made the character good was gutted.
I think the best way to go about this is that you START with buffs. You attempt to elevate all the low characters to fit with the mid tier characters. Once you’ve accomplished that, then you start tweaking all the mid tier characters to make them able to be competitive with the top tier. After you’ve done this, and the top tiers are still too good comparatively speaking, THEN you start implementing SLIGHT nerfs to these characters. But, that doesn’t mean you make them no longer top tier, the goal is to bridge the gap. The smaller the gap is from tier to tier and from character to character, the better the game will be overall.
As a concept it seems so obviously the right way it should be handled, I will never understand why it never seems to be the direction NRS takes the game.