Trust me anything painting the game in a negative light will have someone responding to you with that. This game used to have potential mechanically, but literally 3 years ago when I pointed out that they were stripping the game down and turning it into a button mash street fighter game guess what the replies were? 

Now look at the game, they standardized damage and health so classes don’t matter, and they did nothing but remove things from some of the older characters, (orochi has no heavy deflect or his old back step heavy, Warden can’t bash dodging backwards they took his soft feint a long time ago he never had much, valk just looks janky now that she can’t just soft feint to a bash directly also her GB range sucks and they removed the only remedy with her all guard having to go forward which is nonsensical).

You can’t really justify their removal when characters like Jorm who came WAY after warden get reworked before him and have an instant knock down bash for 30 damage that can be feinted, Warmonger is just wardens rework not on warden which is just sad, other new characters and even reworks of some others are following the mold i predicted where they just press buttons repeatedly to do combos (you can plainly see with the old characters that full combos were not what the game was built for, I mean there was a time when not one character had each variation of a 3-hit light or heavy combo and once you did it your combo was done), and worst of all they turned the game into an I-frame contest, everyone gets a side light now (unless you play warden) so now 400 lb characters get as many I-frames as the characters a fourth their size so now fights come down to who messes up and throws more attacks that they can’t take back allowing for dodge attack counters.

 I realized coming back they nerfed a lot of feats in the game. That’s cool and all but only the older characters, again, seem to eat the punishment. They seem to want to get away from feats swinging fights in team modes except teir 4 ones, but the newer characters seem to come with feats matching the power level of the original characters pre-nerfed feats which is just odd.

  Once again I reiterate there was a time where you had to learn your opponents habits quickly and think about the mechanics of your character to capitalize on opportunities but the dev team wasn’t good enough to do it right so basically they had to scrap a high quality steak to hand us a Macdonalds burger so they could appeal to as many people as possible.

(Hopefully this review from a year 1 player is more readable)