One of Street Fighter 6's most annoying and powerful tactics neutered in latest update
Although Capcom has said they only plan on giving Street Fighter 6 a large balance update once a year, they didn't hold back from pretty drastically changing up some of the game's mechanics after a month and a half.
On top of adding Rashid to the SF6 and implementing a new way to Drive Rush cancel, the developers have intentionally neutered one of the game's most annoying and powerful tactics.
Drive Rush cancels will now come out from appropriate light attacks, even if the move completely whiffs.
This means that anyone trying to buffer Drive Rush will now end up burning three bars of the Drive Gauge for potentially no benefit and possibly a punish.
With the new update you can no longer buffer drive rush cancel from lights, even on whiff you will always get DRC to occur.
This is definitely because of Tokido lol https://t.co/02CsqliL7Y — Brian_F (@Bri4nF) July 24, 2023
Capcom noted in their patch notes that adding the new Drive Rush cancel input would "have a huge impact on fights" if they left it as it was with the interaction with light attacks, and they're totally right.
Before, high and even mid-level players would simply toss out light attacks just out of range of the opponent while buffering the dash cancel input to get a big punish and full combo conversion just in case they ended up hitting.
With it being difficult to effectively counter lights in neutral, this made for a very low risk / high reward tactic that basically benefitted everyone on the cast, though some obviously more than others.
Now, however, the game has been made more "honest" and committal, lest you waste half of your Drive Gauge and maybe get hit in the face for it.
With the new change on Drive Rush cancel from whiffed light attacks, it's now possible to do Drive Rush when Drive Gauge is below 0.5 bar pic.twitter.com/n9KO5DD4Ry — HiFight(ハイファイト) (@HiFightTH) July 24, 2023
We used to see similar tactics used throughout the entire life of Street Fighter 5 whether that be fishing for Crush Counters with heavies in neutral or throwing out buttons to easily V-Trigger cancel, but it seems they want to nip some of that in the bud right away in SF6.
After Street Fighter 4, Capcom hurt the usability of light attacks quite a bit in SF5 for a long time, but SF6 made jabs and shorts powerful options again.
They were arguably too strong with the Drive Rush cancel system as it was before and could have been pretty busted without this change.
Lights are still going to be integral to the game going forward, but you're just not going to get free Drive Rush combos by just throwing them out willy nilly.
It's going to be very interesting to see how both of these Drive Rush changes are going to impact the competitive scene especially as we're so close to Evo 2023 now.
Let us know what you think of the mechanics changes to Drive Rush and light cancels in the comments below.
Source: EventHubs
