I was talking in general, not about Eliot specifically. I was referring to the general consensus of never nerfing a character, not Eliot himself. Sorry for not being clear. And, you're right, unique strengths do make the characters unique, but those same things don't have to be hilarious in a game to be any good. I remember when Sarah came out and some of the tools she had, people around the forum were dumbfounded, yet, wanted everyone to be buffed to her level, even though she was already marked as very, very top tier. What I'm saying is, those unique strengths are still unique strengths when less powerful, they're just not nearly as strong as their original versions, which, very well could be too strong in the first place. This isn't the case with Dead or Alive 5 of course, thank god, but we're talking in general here...
Just a little curious why everybody feels this way, not necessarily about DOA.
Here is some typical game design balance to help you understand why its a problem.
Strength values -- Character A: 5, Character B: 3
Feedback from bad players -- Character A is too powerful, Character B is too weak.
Retarded implementation -- Character A: - 3 strength value, Character B: +3 strength value
Post-patch strength values -- Character A: 2, Character B: 6.
This is actually how fighting game developers do things (hello SCV), because they are attempting to simply do whatever the fanbase wants. They take two actions to solve a balance problem instead of one, and it results in worse balance than the game originally had.
Thats why the best solution was to simply buff Character B and leave Character A the fuck alone. Worst case scenario the game would have had values closer to 5/6 instead of 2/6.
Now even if the game is full of "broken" abilities, everyone will have these "broken" abilities. That is balance. But no matter how hard you try to nerf the game into oblivion, you can never balance it towards the low end because SOMEONE will always end up standing out as better than everyone else due to some loophole like we had with helena/genfu in DOA 4. And they will smack the rest of the cast around like little bitches, resulting in an incredibly boring competitive game with no variety whatsoever.
That's how it always happens. Better to simply make everybody ridiculously good.
This design philosophy was already adopted by Blizzard/Riot Games/Arc Systems/Capcom. They are not exactly unpopular in competitive circuits, yet I could list quite a few developers who turn their nose up at that kind of balance and as a result, struggle endlessly to gain a foothold in the competitive scene.