Ick. Aquapazza's whole "negative emotion" thing always seemed like a terrible mechanic to me. You get bonus modifiers to damage scaling by moving forward and attacking, but you have negative modifiers to things if you block, back dash or use other defensive options? Why should someone be punished for being able to block a blockstring successfully? I understand that they were trying to come up with a way to force players to be more exciting and to take chances but punishing folks for playing smart and using footsies and proper reads is pretty offensive in my eyes.
But hey, its a crossover game so it gets more numbers by default I guess.
I think one of the main purposes is to drive people to use Impact Guard in spots where they normally would not, forcing players to be a bit more active when on defense. This becomes rather apparent when fighting someone like Sasara or Riannon, who can force you to block stuff at relatively long ranges* and you will fall into that state just from blocking without ever getting close.
(*Unless you're playing Tamaki or Karulau, then you just block one of their many laggy moves mid-screen and use supers to blow them up.)
I kind of like the idea of having neutral/high emotion, but low emotion is such an anti-comeback mechanic (as you take more damage, build less meter, do less damage and are way more likely to get guard broken) it's kind of stupid. That and when you end up in a bad situation, it turns out that blocking -- even for a relatively short period of time -- isn't good enough. I suspect the mechanic was added in part due to how almost everything is rather disadvantageous on block, so people can't really run any sort of pressure sequence without having to burn meter for assist cancels.
Personally, I would probably keep (but tweak -- most likely normalize) the normal/high emotion states and completely get rid of low emotion, and just keep guard break properties flat across them (and have a separate indicator for a player that's at risk of getting guard broken).
I'm shocked that Big E has the ability to change the date of NEC with three months to go, but looks like it's gonna happen:
https://www.facebook.com/BigEGaming/posts/1030296683671155
I'm surprised he's considering that -- and doubly so the Thanksgiving weekend date. That would just be an absolutely brutal time to run an event.
Spooky said there will be no more Next Level by the end of this month
NLBC closing and Sp00ky packing it up? It really is the end of an era over there. :\
