Please enlighten me as to “the way it was before”. You keep saying this, but I keep not understanding it.
The lockout X delayed? Definitely better when it wasn’t. Hopefully a fix comes.
Can’t break startup of manuals? Was always in the game. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way, but the work involved to change it would make the game unstable right now, and nobody wants the game to break. They added it to juggles, but I explain why it’s easy to interpret this as a positive change for the offense, not a “let’s make combo breakers better” change.
The only real thing that’s different is the “break during hitstop” change. That affects a few key things, like Thunder’s stop, Cinder’s recapture, etc. And counter breakers are still “first class citizens” over combo breakers here, as long as you’re willing to beat them to the punch and not just counter break halfway through the move. Is this change really that big of a deal to you? I can understand preferring it the way it was (because it’s muscle memory now, and that’s kind of annoying to change)… but do you think this prevents you from engaging in certain KI mind games? Would you rather have unbreakables in the game due to feral cancel/instinct cancel manuals? I know you hate unbreakables a lot. What do you want the devs to do here?
That was only on manuals. For all other breaker attempts in the game (which, by S1 players standards, should be “almost all of them” because I keep hearing “we didn’t break the manual, instead we tried to break the linker”), they didn’t converge; you had to be strictly earlier than the defense’s attempt to break. So I actually don’t really think this is true. DH wanted you to be earlier than the breaker, not 5 frames after and have it still count, for all combo elements except manuals, which for all we know was a bug that we just grew accustomed to over time.
Trust me, I know.
I would rather have all the information in one place for inquiring minds, though.
Also, it’s entirely possible to “prefer the way it was before” but still play/adjust to the change. I played 5 versions of SF4, largely preferring certain things in older versions, but also liking some new changes they brought in. You enjoy SFV, so you’re going to go through this same thing in a few months. Not every change they make to the game you’ll love, but you’ll just have to play through it and understand why the change was made (in this case, to remove unbreakables that were the scourge of professional play in S2).