Not even a week after Mortal Kombat 1’s first major US tournament we see Netherrealm Studios working tirelessly to release new balance patch on October 24th to shake up both the pro player scene as well as the more casual online playerbase, featuring many changes both cosmetically as well as mechanically, for most characters on the roster as well as general changes. Read the full balance patch here.
The first major general change is the fix to flawless blocking, which is huge. Flawless blocking in the previous patch prevented the chip damage you would take while blocking, but the opponent would still gain meter and thus be rewarded despite your performing of the flawless block. With this change, expect to see flawless blocking become a bigger priority for high skill players.
But for those of you who are aware of the top tiers of Mortal Kombat 1 you’ll expect some of these changes regarding the characters in the game: Raiden and Baraka, two top tier characters, have received nerfs. They deal less damage, though their general gameplan isn’t too different. To contrast however, fellow top tier characters in Johnny Cage and Kenshi are generally unchanged, which is probably shocking news to those familiar with just how strong these characters are. The two of them, alongside Rain who was recently discovered to be a top tier character as he won East Coast Throwdown, will likely dominate the game until the next patch.
But the biggest changes come in the form of the kameos, as expected. Cyrax was largely nerfed here taking a hit to his damage, alongside Kung Lao whose spin kameo attack no longer launches opponents on hit.
These changes will definitely shake up the meta of Mortal Kombat 1 it likely won’t reduce the amount you see of these nerfed characters and kameos too drastically. It seems Netherrealm Studios has learned from its history of patching Mortal Kombat X, which was infamous among the fighting game community for having a major patch that completely shook up the roster every month. While the suddenness of this patch suggests Netherrealm may keep that volume of balance changes, this rather tame patch probably means they won’t look to make players completely re-learn their characters MKX style any time soon.
Though how soon this patch came out contrasted with Capcom’s current philosophy of balance patching Street Fighter 6 raises an interesting discussion the fighting game community will likely be having in the coming months, especially as Bandai Namco’s Tekken 8 looks to launch early next year. How often should a fighting game be re-balanced? Mortal Kombat 1 looks set to continue its predecessors’ standard of semi-regular patches, compared to Street Fighter 6’s single balance patch a year. Going too far in the former direction can lead to the aforementioned Mortal Kombat X situation, where the game is changing too much too soon and it soon becomes tedious to re-learn everything about the game; the latter, however, can lead to the game becoming stale and frustrating as issues players have with the game look to go unanswered for several months such as Street Fighter 6’s infamously bad input reader.
Whichever direction the developers of these fighting games go though, things will definitely look to be interesting in the scene moving forward.