The emergency patch for Tekken 8 Season 2 just dropped a few hours ago, as version 2.00.02. And if you asked me, there’s actually a lot more here than I initially expected from the time Bandai Namco first announced the patch after April 1st. Frankly, the game is still a complete dumpster fire, but at least what’s in the patch notes is a step in the right direction.

Tekken 8 Season 2 Emergency Patch: The Biggest Changes You Need to Know

It’s a single baby step, mind you, but it’s something. Here’s what you need to know about what the emergency patch does, and what it says about the immediate future of Tekken 8 Season 2.

Heat Engagers

Hallelujah, I say: Heat Engagers are now just +9 on hit from +17 previously, which opens up more options for the defender during the attacker’s running animation. Now that they’re not as oppressively advantageous as before, 50/50 mixups from Heat Engagers will be more limited, as the attacker cannot just throw out really slow moves and still have them come out on top if the defender decides to challenge.

This was especially egregious when it came to characters that had while running kicks that also led to frame advantage afterwards. Devil Jin’s Leaping Side Kick (WR3) comes to mind, as he could freely throw it out after a Heat Engager despite the fact that it takes a whole 22 frames for it to come out.

After the emergency patch, defending players can actually use power crush moves or hopkick-type attacks like Claudio’s Sky Slash Nova (u/f+4) in order to beat greedy attackers after a Heat Engager. This is especially important to note because Season 2 added the ability for characters to access full crouch moves during the Heat Engager run. Having fewer frames to work with in this case makes the incoming mixup less of a headache to deal with.

This should have been the case for Heat Engagers since the start. The reward for landing one was just too good: huge health recovery, a possible wall splat, and massive frame advantage. Personally I’d still like for the frame advantage to be +7 at best, but I’ll take this change as a sign that the development team might have their heads on straight after all.

Universal Health Increase

I mentioned this in the article about the emergency patch and the additional changes that Bandai Namco teased, but considering the miniscule health buff that each character got in Tekken 7 Season 4, I wasn’t really expecting much from this in particular. But call me a doubter, because every Tekken 8 character just got an additional 20 health, for a total of 200 up from 180.

That doesn’t sound like a lot on paper, but in a game with chip damage and recoverable health, every little bit matters. According to the devs, this change is intended to make juggle combos mean less over the course of a round. It makes sense if you have to land more hits overall in order to win the round, so strictly speaking, this change does work in that regard.

However, like I mentioned in the same article, this undermines poking — which is already not that great in this game to begin with. I’m hoping this is just a temporary change and that we’ll see this reverted before Season 2 ends later this year. And of course, we need poking buffed overall after that as well.

Also, this change means that characters enter the Rage state earlier, at 47 health up from 43. This is still proportionally the same, though, since the Rage threshold is at 23.5 percent of a character’s total health rather than being a flat value.

Heat Dash and Chip Damage

Juggle combos after a successful Heat Dash are now worse overall, with the initial scaling going down to 60% rather than 70% previously. This means less of a reward overall for just Heat Dashing all willy-nilly in order to make the most of your Heat gauge. It’s also in line with reducing the impact of combos in general, like with the health increase mentioned above.

Additionally, the chip damage dealt by Heat Dashes has been reduced from 7 damage to 2 damage, which is great because Heat Dashes already give a +5 advantage for the attacker. It doesn’t need to deal any more chip damage (and to think it used to deal even more in Season 1) if it’s going to force a mixup on block anyway.

Speaking of chip damage, that has also been toned down across the board. Moves that don’t normally deal chip damage outside of Heat now do 5 percent less chip damage when Heat is active. Those that do so outside of Heat, meanwhile have also been adjusted to not deal even more chip damage when Heat is active.

Wall Stagger (a.k.a. Wall Crush)

The wall stagger state, or wall crush as it was called in Tekken 7, has been nerfed to provide less of an advantage to the attacker on block. For those unaware of what this is, some moves like Jin’s Black Wing Bolt (ZEN 3+4) or Heihachi’s Bone Splinter Kick (cd4) would cause a special “kneeling” animation if blocked with the defender’s back against the wall. The wall stagger would then lead to huge frame advantage — like we’re talking +15 or greater depending on the move itself.

In order to reduce the frequency of such situations, the emergency patch has removed all wall stagger states from moves that previously caused the state with an advantage of at least +10 on block. Any move that falls under this umbrella will no longer cause a wall stagger as such.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of this change. It’s already miserable enough defending in this game, so you can imagine what it’s like trying to block for your life when your back is already against the wall.

Eddy Versus Nina

So those are some of the important system-wide changes included in the emergency patch — but of course we can’t have a balance patch without some hilarious game-breaking bug somewhere. As confirmed by the developers themselves, there currently exists a glitch that allows Eddy to move around the stage before round start when fighting Nina in particular.

This makes plenty of sense when it comes to Tekken lore, given that Eddy has a grudge against Kazuya — who in Tekken 8’s story was Nina’s employer. But obviously this is unintended behavior, least of all because it only happens between these two characters specifically.

The bug is already under investigation, but Eddy and Nina players should bear this in mind for the time being. Hopefully it gets fixed sooner than the version 2.00.01 bug that allowed Anna to take on other characters’ movesets, and for other characters to copy Anna’s slap — hilarious as that glitch was.

The Devs Actually Said Sorry

But bar none, the biggest and most impactful change coming from this patch is that Tekken 8 co-designer Michael Murray has actually come out to apologize about the state of the game. Shortly after the patch notes were released, the man himself took to X to publicly say sorry about the mess, which is already a huge step up from his frankly arrogant tone over the last two weeks.

Not that anyone will even see his apology, because he’s blocked everyone who’s had a negative opinion of Season 2 since it went live. I’m kidding, of course; I’m actually not blocked to this day, surprisingly. But this is the right course of action when it comes to regaining the community’s trust. Murray should continue this by unblocking everyone that disagreed with him in a reasonable manner.

Kohei “Nakatsu” Ikeda also did the same when the emergency patch dropped, apologizing to the community for the mismatch in what the community expected versus what the patch ended up doing. I’m less convinced with his apology in particular, because there’s a huge difference between “not meeting expectations” and doing the exact opposite of what they told us they’d do.

Nakatsu, my brother in Christ — how did this patch even make it through playtesting? Your programmers must have been extremely confused hearing “we’re buffing defense”, only to be told to put in more 50/50s and homing, plus-on-block mids. Just admit that you lied to everyone because you want more offense in your game, and I’d probably be a lot more willing to accept your apology.

But anyway, here’s hoping for more changes in the right direction. Nerfing stance-based mixups soon, maybe?