Character Difficulty Tiers?

I actually think General Raam is far and away one of the easiest characters in the game to pick up, right up there with Sabrewulf. I have no idea why people think he is so challenging. The only difficult thing about him is dealing with zoning.

Honestly I think the Tiers should be changed from “Top to Bottom” as that indicates (best to worse) in my opinion, to “New Player Friendly to Not New Player Friendly”… I think such a list would be fantastic in terms of giving new players a heads up before picking a specific fighter.

Good point :slight_smile: Just numbered the tiers to make them appear less evaluative.

Because he’s too straight forward, he has no gimmicks, no auto-cross ups, no overheads, and no + on block special. Without fighting game fundamentals and some understanding of the character’s frame data noobs are gonna get destroyed using him.

I agree. He also has weird rules you can only memorize to understand. You can only combo into a heavy stab if you open with a heavy kick? Also, he has only one opener and one linker. Also, his opener progresses along a full tradeoff continuum from fast+unsafe (light) to slow+safe (heavy). Everything about RAAM is knowing what your opponent is going to do and setting something up to make that thing a bad decision.

Even his OTG game is a mind game. When do you counter break? How many medium stomps before you flip out with the light stomp? What do you do after the flipout? If you make the wrong decision after flipout, RAAM is wide open for a spanking.

That’s precisely why I think he’s so easy to learn. Are you implying that noobs need to use gimmicks? If someone sat down and trained a beginner to do Raam’s basic mixups, it wouldn’t take long for them to learn the basics and start beating other beginners. It also helps that his combos are extremely easy to do mechanically. One opener and one linker makes him easier to understand for beginners, not harder.

But this discussion is about people simply picking up and playing the character. If someone taught them the mix ups then they’re no longer blindly picking them up. And yes he has one opener and linker but that one opener has rules (medium only combos off heavies, heavy only combos of st.hk) It took even me a while to adjust to those, heck I still occasionally ■■■■■ it up.

This is just a quick suggestion, feel free to take it or leave it. But both of my older 2 kids have had the same issue with Tiger’s Fury, and the best quickest way I can tell you to get it down is…

…practice. Yeah, nothing too special, but seriously, spend a little (not a lot) of time in practice and just try to pull them off. I’ve told my kids to try to get 10 in a row, no mess-ups in-between. Then perhaps try to alternate between fireballs & DPs so your muscle memory can learn the difference. Because that’s really all it is: muscle memory.
Anyway, if you want any proof that my methods get results, my son is 12, in gold ranking and mains Shago…so there’s that…

That’s literally everything in the game, it’s all about building muscle memory. The DP motion is just unnatural compared to the other motions and is a holdover from the early days where inputs for some specials were just ridiculous (Look at Ivy from Soul Calibur 2, her super was insane.) It just takes longer to learn than quartercircles or down up and requires more brainpower to do in a combo until you get the muscle memory. I’m working on it :stuck_out_tongue:

I looked it up…Calamity Symphony: :arrow_lower_right::arrow_upper_left::arrow_right::arrow_down::arrow_lower_right::arrow_lower_left: A+K

1 Like

I think for the purpose of picking him up and playing with him, he’s relatively easy to get started with.

Now, learning all the match-ups, mix-ups, resets, etc. That… that takes time and lots of effort to translate into wins. Don’t think he’s bottom tier or low tier at all, but I do think he requires the work.

if you make Tiers in terms of beginner level, than combo assist needs to be taken into account and “the difficulty of” openers upclose or the combo game has to be taken out of it.

That’s a good point about combo assist. But since the combo difficulty and the opener execution difficulty is not really substantially different across the cast I’m not sure CA would matter all that much. It might influence my thoughts on Jago, depending on which Enders you get. I still think his DP and Shadow DP are a big part of his game and bump him out of the truly beginner tier.

Yeah, the only character I would think CA would really have a substantial help with for beginners would be Thunder with his tripleax/sammamish issue I stated earlier.

Interestingly, I’m not at all a beginner and I often have trouble accidentally ending my combos early with thunders sammamish ender when I am going for a tripleaxe. Not sure why this is…

I dont consider Gargos difficult. My gameplan is pressuring with tele punches at distance and flying away when opponent gets close. Things require some timing skills when I summon minions but its not difficult overall.

IMO Tusk is more difficult because almost everything he does is risky.

It’s because his triple ax and sammamish are both forward movements…most other characters if you’re not thinking about it you can during a combo you can just fire off qcf/qcb moves over & over & land your attacks because their commands are spread out better, but with thunder if you’re not really…I hate to say slow…methodical?..with your inputs…well let’s just say the computer can find the commands for a DP in 2 QCF movements fired off in a row.

I’ve also found with DP motion, if you’re struggling with input, it can help a lot to simply slow down. I think in the heat of a match, it’s easy to feel a need to slam the input out really fast. And maybe sometimes you DO need to put some heat on it.

But for myself (and I love shoto characters, ever since Ken battles with friends in SF2 :slight_smile: ), I really benefit from conciously relaxing the input speed a bit, even in anti-air situations. It’s helped me a lot on player 2 side in particular, where I’ve struggled in the past.

Noobs do get along better when a character has gimmicks. Gimmicks are especially hard to avoid when you’re the noob playing against the noob using gimmicks. Fireball spam, Thunder’s i-frame dash, everything Shago does, Orchid’s amazing slide, and Rash’s cannonball are extremely helpful when noobs collide.

All one can do with RAAM is patiently wait for an opening and do the single appropriate move that doesn’t whiff or give the opponent ample chance to recover and punish. Because RAAM’s mechanics are so counter-intuitive (his stab special, his extremely situational i-frame charge, his flipout OTG…), waiting for a RAAM opening is nowhere near the same as waiting for openings with other characters.