[SliceOfWaifu]

You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward. It's like doing perfect EWGFs in Tekken. I played Ivy in SoulCalibur II, and could do the Summon Suffering input pretty consistently if I buffered it during another attack. It led to a fun mixup since the other player would hear my joystick switches actuating as I did the motion, and crouch to avoid the throw. Instead of finishing the input, I'd hit them with her 2 A+B overhead instead. God, I love SCII. It's a shame the sequels kept trying to reinvent the wheel with the gameplay.

[Blackthorn]

> You just said yourself that doing them frame perfect yields a better version of the move. The input is difficult because of the potential reward.

I also said the other half of that: that the result is that people grind until they can do it 100% in their sleep, and thus all it forms is a "you must be this tall to play this character" barrier.

Unlike the example in Street Fighter it actively works against having a balanced game, since now you have to nerf the move because the people who ground it frame-perfect are too strong, which wouldn't have affected anyone who didn't stick their nose to the grindstone but now they get to eat the nerf too, so the character ends up about level with other characters when you're frame-perfect, which isn't demanded of other characters. We saw this exact antipattern happen with Ivy in Soul Calibur 6.

There's an argument to be made that the arcane input provides a tell to the opponent when it's used outside of a buffered section in some other move's lag, but that same argument would work with a less pointlessly arcane input, like a double half circle.

[SliceOfWaifu]

I don't get what you mean by "you must be this tall to play this character". Equating height to skill is a false equivalency. You can't get taller by practicing. Either way, it sounds like the devs just messed up the initial balance. It ain't the fault of the players who were serious about learning the character. That's the modern conundrum of games in the post SFIV era; constant balance patches before the full meta has been explored. Personally, I'm often dissuaded from trying to learn top tier characters in new games because of the fear that all the muscle memory I build will be useless when the game gets patched. It's gonna be interesting when Street Fighter 6 gets its first big balance patch a year in, and all the Ken and JP players take to their keyboards to complain.