Well, they got around to fixing the major elements of the grind, though the soul grind is still a bit of a chore for the 10k chest. The towers got majorly toned down in terms of the spammability of the consumables by the AI, but more than half still are packed with annoying effects on the AI. But, its at least somewhat playable now if you want to grind the SP stuff.
The game itself? Well, a lot of current competitive play revolves around pokes into throws, which has almost entirely replaced the 50/50 shit that permeated all of the previous MK. The projectile spam of Injustice is nerfed to the point where zoning is basically impossible for anyone other than Noob. The speed is a touch slower, which helps cut down on the mash and rewards good reads or hit confirming. I like most of these adjustments, but the community reaction is somewhat mixed. The main issue is that there a couple of characters who still kind of play by the MK10 rules in certain ways and/or have key tools that the bulk of the cast lacks. A good example is Lui Kang (by no means top tier) having both overheads and easily spammed combo strings that start mid with good frame speed, but then you have Jade with nothing that starts mid except with ludicrously punishable startup times. A handful of characters with quick starting mid strings combined with descent overheads are fairly dominant at the moment, namely Sonya, Erron Black, Scorpion, Scrub Zero, and (strangely) Gerras. Outside of the Gerras, the big bruisers suffer from their big hit boxes and a lack of options that the seemingly more flushed out characters have. This is further magnified by them only having two presets of each character, one of which is always hot garbage.
I think if they tweaked down frames on a couple of the mid openers on the five upper guys a bit and allowed full customization, the game would have as close to balance as you could hope for. As it stands now, everyone is playable for the most part (only Shao Khan and Cetrion are hot garbage) but some characters definitely play with more tools on the table than others and are at the top of the heap as a result. In particular, Scorps teleport and Sonya's front punch frame data need to be nerfed (along with some of Noobs teleport startups) for online to be long term viable.
They are close, though. Its fun and methodical enough that you know that when you lose its generally due to a bad decision, not spam or dropped execution. For me, that's a better fighter for the masses of casuals and its interesting to watch. Some of the community feel differently, however.
