An upcoming update for Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite is bringing a variety of balance tweaks to the game, with champion Dante getting a serious nerf.
Dante was always a strong contender in the franchise’s previous entry, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3,a consistent fixture in the game’s meta although never outright dominant. However feedback from MvC:I’s competitive scene seems to be that not only is Dante as strong as he was in UMvC3, he’s actually gotten stronger.
The community has shown a lot of ‘touch of death’ combos with Dante, a touch of death combo meaning a combo that outright kills a character after you’ve hit them with a single attack to kick every off, the referenced touch of death. To illustrate, here’s a video from September of Jonathan ‘Tyrant’ Parkes performing one on character Chun-Li who has slightly lower than average health, but should still show how terrifying this can be to play against.
Still, it seems in the latest patch Capcom have nerfed Dante substantially, with patch notes as long as the rest of the champions put together. This will create a ripple across the game as he was so easy to dominate with that every player from amateur to pro would play him.
Reacting to the nerf, Parkes took to twitter: watch for language, kids.
Dante got
F U C K E D
— UYU | Tyrant (@Tyrant_UK) November 16, 2017
https://twitter.com/Tyrant_UK/status/931320465297215488
Still gonna play Dante cos he's a badman
— UYU | Tyrant (@Tyrant_UK) November 17, 2017
Dante’s health has been reduced, damage on several of his moves has been reduced significantly, in addition to meter gain for special moves. It’s going to be a massive change in the competitive scene as Dante will now play like a completely different character. Worse, he’s lost a lot of his mix-up stuff, which might actually put him at a disadvantage to several other characters that would have previously been very favourable match-ups.
Elsewhere, the Reality Stone Infinite Surge has been nerfed significantly, and there are minor tweaks to many of the characters in the game. You can see the full patch notes here.