The Street Fighter 6 community is talking all about the kinds of changes we’re hoping to see as Capcom has opted to promise one major balance update each year and the first of these for Season 2 is surely right around the corner.
Though specific character changes and Drive Rush tend to be the most discussed issues, there’s another that MC Mura directly addresses in his latest video: neutral-skipping fireballs.
Surely remembering how moot they wound up being back in the parry-prominent atmosphere of Street Fighter 3, developers were clearly careful to balance fireballs according to most of the mechanics in Street Fighter 6. They recover and tend to travel faster than in previous games, so as to make sure they’re still useful in a game with global parries.
Some characters, however, have notably slower moving versions of their projectiles, and when you pair these long-lasting, horizontal hitboxes with the Drive Rush mechanic, you run into some problems.
Characters like Chun-Li, Juri, A.K.I., and Ken (there are others) can quite easily set up situations where the back and forth of neutral play is entirely dampened by incredibly advantageous “DRC behind a slow fireball” approach.
Once these characters have their fireball on screen, the defender’s options are vastly limited as jumping over it is almost always easily seen and thwarted, contesting will result in certain failure, and trying to parry most often ends in massively disadvantageous situations.
In short, for the price of a Drive Gauge or two, these characters can all but skip neutral and get right up in your face for some not so well earned mix ups. What’s the solution? That’s hard as anything dealing with altering global mechanics threatens to do more harm than good.
For what it’s worth, the first thing that comes to my mind is to treat Drive Rushing while an active fireball is on screen as a cancel. This would mean following active fireballs with DR would cost 3 gauges instead of just 1, and though this wouldn’t affect utility, it might be enough to make things feel more fair.
Mura has a different approach to rectifying the issue, and you can hear all about it (as well as the additional details of slow fireball DR) in the full video here: