Ideas for Aganos Instinct Adjustments

Characters Aganos
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1

I want to preface this article by saying that I think Aganos is actually extremely well balanced in S3! Sure he has some difficulties in certain matchups but that’s the nature of the beast and it’s fun to try to overcome them.

Now, what I wanted to discuss was some things that I think could be adjusted about Aganos’ instinct to help give him just a tiny bit of help overall that I don’t think would be too drastically game changing for him, but all of his matches overall. These are more of just, these would be nice to have just to make some matches a tiny bit easier.

(Please let me know if any of these ideas sound a bit extreme or anything like that.)

My first suggestion would be to adjust how the club respawn mechanic works. As it is now, you use up the 3 hits of the Peacemaker and then it disappears until it gets respawned in your hand. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with how it is now, but how about this idea. If you haven’t used up all the hits of your club by the time the respawn timer would give you a new club, what if it just refreshed the hits of your club back to full? If you used up your club by throwing it, hitting 3 times, placing it as a wall or chunking up with it, you would still have to wait the full duration as is now, but if you managed to hold onto the club for the whole time, it would just give you back all three hits of the club. It wouldn’t stack hits like if you had one hit left and it refreshed you would then have four, it would just go back to three.

My second suggestion would be in regards to how many chunks Aganos has. What I was thinking was that if he happened to have more than 2 chunks in him with Instinct active, he would gain a small damage increase on his normals and maybe his specials outside of the combo system. The reason for this is that with Season 3, armor has taken an overall nerf in terms of usability with regards to standing heavies bypassing armor. I think this is fine and all, but if Aganos is going to receive movement and startup penalties for having chunks in him while also giving the opponent more meter on average, then I think a small damage increase with extra chunks would be nice (I mean, he is adding mass to himself, wouldn’t it make sense for him to hit a bit harder as well?). I’m not asking for normals to do 30% damage or anything, but maybe just add on an extra 3-4% to them for times when Aganos can’t successfully get the opponents off of him to place a wall or something. In S2 it made sense for him to have the movement penalty as you couldn’t beat his armor, but now with the changes to armor, I think a tiny bit of help would be appreciated for him for when he can’t use his chunks as intended. Maybe this suggestion could work outside of Instinct, but it might be overkill in terms of balance so who knows.

What do you guys think about either one of these changes? I’m not asking for both, but maybe only one of them. I’d be happy with either of them, or hell, even none of them as I still like his overall balance. I just think these would be a bit useful to him for his neutral game.

2

Okay. First, I’d like to say that these are nice ideas overall. Do I think we need them, though? Probably not - Aganos is fine as is, IMO (and I’ve mained the guy ever since he released).

Your 1st idea is good, but would be broken, as it would be far too easy for Aganos to zone with the peacemaker if its health regenerated over time (it’s also worth noting that the respawn timer doesn’t even start until the club is destroyed in the 1st place - I assume, however, what you’re suggesting is that it’s always active during instinct?); in addition the club does a lot of damage (something like 10% per hit). The opponent would be hard-pressed to get in and that’s against an Aganos who doesn’t already have chunk armor - with chunk armor, it’d be all but impossible. We’re talking about an easy near full-screen 50-50 overhead/low mixup that knocks down and can also be used to throw you back if you get too close right back to full screen where he wants you - and that’s assuming he doesn’t even have any walls in place to crash you through in the process.

With that in mind, your 2nd idea while it seems sound, also has the potential to be broken. Under the right circumstances Aganos can do 64-86% with a good combo. Walls, also do ~30% damage per wall. So, if I have 2 walls up that’s ~60% damage, which is MORE THAN half your lifebar. Now, add 4% damage per wall on top of that. You’re getting 68% damage! 3 walls? You’re dead, because that would total 102% damage (34+34+34=102). With the way it is now, you’d need 4 walls to do that, which is incredibly difficult to pull off (and that still doesn’t account for damage scaling on the combo or shadow moves). Going back to the “good combos” mentioned earlier, they’d be upped to ~68%-90% damage, making him easily the best character for damage as a whole.

I’ve been able to take an opponent’s entire lifebar in less than 1 second with Aganos as he is now (I have proof under my Xbox Live profile captures - 4 walls are awesome when they work) FTW. I don’t think these particular adjustments are needed.

3

Aganos’ instinct is one of the most boring ones, and the most liable to have no effect on the match unless he plays keepaway. I’d love to see his instinct changed to give him access to a unique tool instead of giving more of something he already has.

4

I agree in that I don’t think Aganos actually needs any changes, I love him just the way he is. I’ve been playing him since he first came out as well. I think he’s my most favorite fighting game character of all time, everything about him is amazing.

I agree with your assessment with the first point I made, the reason I suggested it is because I think just having a club isn’t super amazing right now. It’s an amazing tool, don’t get me wrong. I love just grabbing a Peacemaker and harassing the opponent with it, but I feel like you getting one in Instinct isn’t as useful as it used to as getting Peacemakers now is even easier than it is in Instinct. I know the point of his Instinct isn’t just to use the clubs to hit, it’s to give you an easy spawning resource that you can use in multiple ways, but it’s usefulness is a bit hampered when you’re getting pressured extremely hard (which is the point of Aganos, he doesn’t have a wakeup without meter). So on this one, I’ll concede that this idea isn’t the best in the world.

On the second idea though, I think you missed the part that stated that his normals would only receive a damage increase outside of the combo system. Just like how normals (since Season 2) outside of the combo system have a damage boost to them, this change would further increase his poke damage output outside of the combo system. Having him do extra damage while combo’ing is excessive what with his damage output. This change would help him with his footsies when he has more than 2 chunks. With that many chunks, he can’t really play footsies with people that know their spacing with their heavy moves as his fastest normals are as slow/slower than the other characters heavies. I don’t think the armor change is bad, but I don’t think Aganos really got anything to compensate for the change. I know the change was actually for Gargos, but Aganos suffers a tiny bit more as armor is his main “gimmick”. I know that he’s not supposed to have more than two chunks in him, but this change would be for the time you got a level 3 or 4 chunk ender and you can’t get rid of the chunks right away. This would just be a small aid to his footsies given the slowdown. Once again, I know it’s encouraged to get rid of chunks as fast as possible, but it’s not going to always be realistic to do so.

I’m fine with none of these ever being applied to him, but these are just some ideas I wanted to spitball with the Aganos community and see what you guys would think about it.

5

Aganos does a ton of damage as it is. I’d say too much actually considering how the character is.