All the V-Reversals who don’t score a KD got buffed actually (including Cammy’s). They might be the only “viable” ones now since you can’t get any true or fake pressure off the other ones.
Because why would Capcom actually try to live up to their professed mantra of having each character have unique things. It’s actually getting somewhat frustrating the amount of design space that Capcom seems to have decided that they don’t need. I would say that this (the nerf to VRs that knockdown) is an indirect buff for a couple of characters (Dhalsim, Guile, ?) because you’re doing them a favor if you launch them across the screen from you which means that they can more liberally apply pressure.
Indeed, a few of the changes in S2 seems to have been made to favour zoners (grey life being the most important of all). This might be in reply to the common complaint that everyone in S1 was a rushdown character.
On the other hand, mixup characters (except Mika) have been made even more powerful in this season due to the DP nerf and per-character buffs, so maybe we might actually have at least two different styles of gameplay now. We’ll see.
You can raw DP a lot of knockdown pressure, they need a near perfect meaty to stop the DP and some characters can’t get that from a few of their things.
How technical something is is relative to its context, and it doesn’t take much for something to be “technical” in SF5. Hence why, there should be more of it for everyone.
The rest are (mostly) still viable as defensive tools, which is what VR was supposed to be in the first place. It’s a low risk reversal that every character gets access to 3-4 times a round just for getting beat up. Shuts down many + on block moves on reaction and even clears your stun buildup if it connects. It’s harder to bait than a traditional reversal and even if you successfully bait it the reward is minimal since throws were meh in S1 and even worse now. There’s no reason for such a reliable defensive tool to give nuts oki.
I’d say zoning got a huge buff from character balancing/grey life alone. Guile, Akuma, Urine all definitely got buffed to make zoning much more of a playstyle.
If you look at the Alex changes -when people wipe the tears away- they
-Let VSkill buff vtrigger. this way he can buff VT faster for parry or VT - charge punish on reaction easier
-12 LP Chop (makes a difference midrange vs zoners)
-EX Stomp has frame 1 projectile invinc
They gave him these things instead of +3 on block st.hk/chops or whatever because they wanted him to deal with the overall buffs to zoning, while giving a frame or so nerf on most characters to probably curb more aggressive play.