Even if I’m wrong, you’d be surprised at how often I can bait a combo-breaker into a counter-breaker. 
And yes, you’re right - more hits, FTW, in S3! 
Aganos’s kick doubles are faster than his punch doubles (by quite a bit). They just sped up his punch doubles to match the kick doubles speed, I think.
Until S3 you should basically just always use his kick doubles.
1 Like
I have a question: Given that Aganos is really slow when fully chunked, but now grounded heavys beat his armor… isn’t a bit obsolete the slow penalty?
I don’t know, I simpy see a lot of scenarios where most of the cast can beat a 4 chunked Aganos with a far reaching heavy normal. And it’s hard to punish a 2 chunked Aganos(but possible), but a single MP could be fatal with the current speed penalty.
@TheKeits, the speed penalty was understandable when amor beated any type of hit, but do you belive it’s reasonable with the heavy buttons ignoring armor?
1 Like
[quote=“Infilament, post:28, topic:4443”]
The other massive change that I don’t think you guys are considering is flipout combo breakers;
[/quote] another huge advantage I noticed is that Aganos being flipped out does not count as a knockdown and therefore does not damage walls. That is BIG.
The doubles may be the same speed, but his linkers are substantially slower.
Also I just realized, characters with heavy overheads are gonna be a nightmare because they could go for that or a sweep, both of which will ignore armor.
1 Like
Big question: Does grounded normals include command normals?
If it only standing and crouching hp/hk, you can block low and absorb the overheads.
If it includes the overheads, then Aganos is vulnerable to the high/low game like the rest of the cast…
Don’t know how to feel, in paper sounds fair, but also Aganos is reaaaaaly slow with more than 2 chunks, so what’s the point of carryng more than 2?
Before the balance changes came out, I thought they should’ve addressed this, especially his 4-chunk state. In my opinion, having 4 chunks is more of a disadvantage than it is an advantage, which sounds really weird considering that you’re FULL on resources. For every other character, being full on resources is an undeniable advantage.
I felt that if you reduced the maximum number of chunks from 4 to 3, he wouldn’t really play any differently, and might even be better. If you have 4 chunks in Season 2, it’s probably because of these two situations: A) a successful counter breaker or B) a free combo to end a round (because you sure as hell didn’t pick up that 4th one). If you ever have 4 chunks, usually the best thing to do is immediately get rid of one.
However, you couldn’t do that for situation B, and still can’t in Season 3. Between rounds, you can try to run away from your opponent, but they can easily dash forward and catch up to you because of how slow you are. When the next round starts, you’re in a throw/Shadow DP 50/50 mixup with buttons too slow to do anything about it.
Now that placing a wall is much faster in Season 3, situation A probably won’t be so bad. Overall, armor is devalued because of the heavy normal change along with recycling, so you might even regularly place two walls after a level 4 chunk ender. Situation B might be even worse, though. Your fastest button is still around 10 frames (I’m guessing), which is as slow as a lot of heavy buttons that will not only out-prioritize your jab, but also ignore your armor.
1 Like
This makes a lot of sense, since I only use the HK ADs upon a lockout.
Regarding the HP/HK attacks that get past Aganos’ chunk armor, I thought it was STANDING heavy normals only, not grounded heavy normals. If it includes overhead AND low attacks as well, then that’s far scarier than I originally thought and makes me think they’ve nerfed him more than they’ve buffed him.
It’s grounded heavy normals, so that includes heavy command normals, crouching normals, far and close normals, etc.
This change hurts him a lot, for sure. He might actually lose matchups he wins right now because of it (Wulf, Orchid, etc). But it might not be all bad, because heavy normals are usually quite laggy, which brings its own disadvantages if you know the opponent must use a lot of heavy normals.
But I think he’ll be too fun with new uses of chunks for you to be too bothered by it.
@Infilament, do you know if Shadow ruin infinite armor it’s also affected by this new ignoring armor mechanic?
Can Aganos shadow ruin be stopped by by a long reaching attack like Riptor’s HK(even more in instinct!), Kan-Ra c.HP, and so?
Not talking about starting frames, I mean for example a fullscreen shadow ruin(without his new invulnerable frames)
They made shadow ruin fully invincible until it hits so it doesn’t matter that heavies break armor.
1 Like
I haven’t played with the change, but yeah, it probably loses after startup to heavy attacks like all other armor does.
Actually, not quite, they only made it invincible during startup. After he starts to move I think he is just armored, no longer invincible.
I don’t think you’ll be able to use shadow Ruin to go through, say… Kan-Ra’s stand fierce on reaction from a distance, for instance. You’ll just get tagged.
As far as notes says, it has 7 frames of invulnerability, not until hit 
But Keits said on the stream it was until the hit. (unless he just wasn’t accounting for the move traveling and not instantly hitting the opponent on the first active frame.)
I think what he meant was that if somebody was doing a meaty fierce attack on you, shadow Ruin’s invincibility will be enough to get you through it. But I don’t think it’s going to work very well tagging far fierce attacks.
I dunno though, I could be wrong on this.
I wonder if it would make more sense to map controls differently while holding peacemaker. Specifically, what if we keep default normals bound to default buttons (HP and 2HP) while peacemaker normals become command normals 6HP and 3HP?
I understand that this was made so it doesn’t mess with dedicated Aganos mains habits, but what do you guys think?
Also I see people mentioning things such as “ground heavies, especially overpower” and “all overheads”. I thought that only 5HP and 5HK of all characters are armor breaking now. Is this also true for grounded heavy command normals and specials?..
Normals yes specials no.
Keyword for this mechanic is “Grounded”. That means any heavy normal while on the ground. We don’t need to start sub-dividing normals.
You can combo break sweeps in s3