Which patch notes were you reading?
The reason there’s nobody in here discussing the Yun changes is because there don’t seem to be any Yun players on SRK, the Yun forums are less active than the Hakan forums, and half the posts in there are from people who don’t play him and just want their 5 minute hate. SRK is mainly American, and the American Yun base seems thin on the ground, nobody plays him, you just all like to complain about him.
So i’ll break those changes down for you, since there seems to be a demand for more salt.
The Yun changes are a joke and won’t make it to retail, it’s fairly clear Capcom thought they would just start out by crippling absolutely everything, and then see which changes they wanted to leave for a later version. Those changes directly or indirectly remove everything potent that Yun could make use of, and nobody seems to have really discussed what they mean. I’ll go 1 at a time:
The damage nerfs to these TCs are largely unimportant, they just seal the deal on them never being used in combos, TC4 used to do 170, so this has now been crippled. The big deal here is the frame dissadvantage on the 2nd hit. S.mp is Yun’s main poke in any footsies, his other options are fairly poor, but it’s a poke that is -5 on block. Normally you cancel this into 2nd hit of TC4 which leaves you at -3, but is too far for most characters to punish, so confirming and stopping at the 2nd hit is safe as long as you don’t do the 3rd. Now you’re punishable by most or all characters after any hit of this string even if you hit confirm the very first poke, and Yun can’t delay this TC to try and fish for counter hits, it’s just a free punish.
The other thing to remember is, this TC is the main reason that focus isn’t great against Yun’s ground game - it’s nothing to do with the lunge, because throwing out lunges at the sort of range where people might use focus against you is a generally terrible idea (Lunge is not a blanka ball, it has a long startup before any active frames where it is easily stuffed if used in footsie range). Since this TC now dissapears from Yun’s ground footsies, due to every hit being punishable, focus is now suddenly a useful tool against him, and Yun’s ground footsies become mostly garbage. Cancelling to the LP shoulder will always lose to a focus, and can be reversal’d or tap focused on block every time due to never being a real blockstring at any range, so his primary poke is now always unsafe on block.
This is a fairly sensible change, and it has a big impact on a lot of Yun’s matches, as this is currently used to go under several character’s offensive and defensive options. This by itself will significantly change high level matchups against chars like Viper. At the moment c.lk goes under burnkicks and HP thunderknuckle, so meaty c.lk OS on Viper’s wakeup can beat reversal TK and reversal EX seismo, and Yun can avoid a lot of guesses by just dropping under burnkicks. You remove this and you massively change the matchup, this is the sort of stuff that really alters high level tier lists, not online scrubbery like spamming EX lunges from full screen.
This is a bigger nerf than it looks as this is used multiple times in any damaging Yun combo, his main punish combo on most characters is c.mp c.mp s.mp upkicks, which currently does a horribly broken 258 damage. This is a bigger damage nerf than say the Viper changes, simply because Yun is going to use a lot more c.mp’s than Viper is going to use EX seismo’s per match. Compared to the other changes which fundamentally break Yun’s offensive options though, this isn’t that important.
Here we go… the ability to pressure with dive kicks is pretty much the entire design structure for Yun, his ground game is iffy compared to Yang’s, and has nothing that can really be exploited effectively. Assuming this means Yun now has the current Yang divekicks, this kills his divekick pressure on wakeup, as you will no longer be able to meaty divekick crossup into a combo or block string after knockdown. Since Yun has no crossup jump normal, he now effectively has no crossup options worth anything, and even from the front, meaty divekick will now be easily seen and reacted to. There is no mixup anymore, Yun’s Oki options now amount to c.lk with OS dash punish, or a meaty command grab if you’re feeling incredibly brave.
Ok first off, several of these changes kill Yun’s big damage combos outright, and here’s 2 of them. The timing for EX upkicks > Ultra1 is pretty much frame tight, and any more landing recovery means this is no longer possible. But the biggy is LK upkicks, this is currently his AA, and one of Yun’s most powerful options is LK upkicks as AA into gineijin. This is relatively tight already, so depending on how much recovery is added to LK upkicks it will either become impossible or unbelievably hard, and even if it’s still borderline possible on full moons, the invulnerability change still kills it off…
Upkicks have a remarkably crappy hitbox on the early frames, but LK upkicks is currently saved as an AA due to having lots of invuln, so it still cleanly beats jumpins. Removing the extra invuln means it now works like AA’ing with HK upkicks, that is to say that it doesn’t work. HK upkicks consistantly trades with everything for 1 hit and flips you out, for 70 damage. It can’t be followed up, and generally trades against you. The intention clearly seems to be that only MK upkicks can now be used as AA, it’s not as good as LK upkicks was, and just had its damage nerfed, it can’t be followed up by anything, so this kills one of Yun’s main damage options dead even if it’s still possible to Gineijin after LK upkicks, which it probably won’t be, and you won’t be able to AA with LK upkicks anyway.
The next big salt that comes from this change is, one of the major major features that contributes to Yun being considered a strong char in high level play is the ability to continually pressure after most of his damage combos. Combos which end in upkicks leave you close to the downed player, with just enough time to step forward and meaty divekick either in the front or back, and then combo into upkicks again. Extra recovery on upkicks would remove the ability to do this even if you could still do meaty divekicks, which you can’t because the divekicks are crippled. So this leaves Yun’s pressure game dead in the water, it’s like the Yun equivalent of removing BK mixup into BK mixup for Viper.
You now can’t use these at all unless you know the other player is afk. EX command grab could work previously in strings because after a blocked c.mp you had just enough frame advantage to EX command grab before a 4 frame OS crouch tech would hit you. Now you don’t, and you also can’t hit crouch techs with quick divekicks anymore, because of the height restriction, so this is now an extremely limited use grab that you might be able to use as a meaty on the other guy’s wakeup if you’re REALLY sure they’re just going to sit there. The recovery on whiffing this is massive, so it’s a really high risk option that is now also very unlikely to pay off, and if you skip forward to the EX lunge changes you’ll also see it no longer has any big payoff either.
People compare this to the speed of fei’s command grab, but that’s because they’re retards who don’t understand how fei’s grab is used. Fei tenshin is in the sweet spot where it’s just slow enough that you can actually cancel it off a blocked s.lp and it will connect immediately after the blockstun before the other player can mash out with a 3f jab. It’s so slow that it’s actually good. Yun tenshin is now too slow to use well after a blocked normal, and still too fast to work when cancelled out of a jab… too fast by 1 frame. It would actually be better if it was 12f instead of 11f, they managed to choose the exact sweet spot where it was completely and utterly useless.
So yea, you can now no longer start offense with the incredibly slow full screen EX lunge, online players rejoice. Guess what you also probably can’t do - link ultra off it. The ultra after EX lunge is tight, and actually doesn’t work on some characters already, it’s highly likely that making the 2nd hit connect earlier (to give him more recovery) will mean that most or all characters will be too low or too far away to connect lunge > ultra. That now also makes his command grab worse, as the main damage combo you would want to land from a command grab is step forward > TC5 xx EX lunge > Ultra1. Oh guess what, they nerfed the damage on TC5 as well.
These are the palm changes, in laymans terms these mean less meter gain, and less damage, and fewer active frames, and more recovery, and less stun, and less chip damage. There’s even more recovery on the FAKE palm. The not so obvious change here is that the extra frames of recovery and the reduced active frames mean that you now can’t use palm as a safe meaty against characters with slow reversals like EX messiah. Previously a perfectly timed meaty that hit at the end of the active frames meant you recovered in 7 frames, so you could block slow reversals, and had a lot of frame advantage. Assuming the reduction in active frames is done to the end of the animation (Which would make sense) this now leaves a straight palm at -2 on block, removes the double palm juggles from the game, and pretty much makes meaty palm a waste of time. By association that also makes ‘fake’ meaty palms less useful, as you aren’t going to be using real meaty palms commonly enough to fake anybody out, and the removal of that makes it less likely that you’re ever going to land that meaty command throw gimmick (Which you now cant get as much damage off anyway).
Since meaty palms would be largely pointless outside of some novelty like stuffing counter armour, and you can’t do the big damage juggle combos with palms anymore, and faking a palm isn’t really useful anymore, and they’re now less effective and less safe at building meter from range… it begs the question, what the hell do you even use the palm for outside of Gineijin?
HP shoulder wasn’t even used outside of oddball setup combos, as it’s too slow to beat projectiles on reaction and is completely unsafe on block. The EX change is an overall damage nerf as it used to be used for extra juggle damage after some combos, where only the 2nd hit connected, it’s now not going to be worth the meter to do so. The change to the hurtbox is almost certainly to change Yun’s collision detection with other players, and i’ll wager it removes crossunder shoulder setups due to Yun no longer slipping underneath.
So yea, summary: **ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING **is gone. This isn’t some slight damage nerf on a few big combos, it’s a fundamental breaking of every single strength he had that was exploited in high level play. If the changes pan out the way they are written, there won’t be much point to the character. However like i said at the start, i strongly believe that this was just a giant brainstorm of everything Capcom could possibly think of nerfing, and they want to see which of the above they would like to leave in at retail. I’m assuming they are not that stupid.
My personal pick from the above would be:
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Upkicks recovery change only on LK upkicks, to prevent LK upkicks > Gineijin and make that version less safe, as it’s quickest to recover, leaving recovery on HK or MK upkicks so that his Oki game is not broken.
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c.lk hurtbox change to fix a few matchups
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Damage reduction and meter reduction on palms, without the frame changes
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EX lunge -1 on block and the associated removal of lunge > ultra, but make the lunge startup slightly faster so that you can actually use it for something. This reduces command grab damage, but leave command grab frames so that it can actually be landed.
That takes out 2 of his main big damage setups and makes people stop ranting about that bloody +1 lunge even though it’s an incredibly minimal part of his game.
This post was too long and you didn’t read it, and you still don’t know how Yun works.