I think they were a primary tool solely due to the reversal bug, which blanked 3 out of 4 options that would beat meaty grabs, reversal, dp, and backdash, which made them seem so much better than they were supposed to. The grab loops you’d get were crazy and it just felt like the opponent wasn’t doing anything.
Now they’re not particularly useful. Without a standing overhead their main use is going to be meaty timings and i think without the weird “when am i going to land” factor that other flip outs have it’s a lot easier to reversal.
Game’s all in the setups and meaties now. Though I wonder if there’s some unexplored space in really brute forcing your way in by long range heavy decimation and then try to beat a challenge jab with a grab or something similar. Also in pressure using s mk after a blockstring to get back in and continue pressuring, at some point ending into a grab. Forward moving + frames is pretty good, just need a way to get around the 13 frame startup
I see. To be fair, I am a fairly negative person by nature, so the message I get from that is that RAAM is simply too weak to stand on his own legs. Also granted, I’m by no means at a level where I can with 100% confidence declare a character to be too weak. The only things I have are my own anecdotal evidence about just how…Incredibly unfun some of his matchups are in addition to how frustrating some of his tools can be to use properly.
KagekaAkumu also has a very good point, the bugfix on his LK stomp will absolutely not do him any favors. The throw loops and his ridiculous instinct damage (which I personally was never a fan of) are probably the biggest reasons for why people were scared of RAAM in the first place. The least they could have done would have been to shorten the recovery time on successful MP and HP versions of Dominance, so that fake MK>LK stomp mixups would be possible afterwards.
Also…Crazy idea here, but what if they made it so that you could land a LK Emergence on an enemy hit by an OTG MK? It would be breakable of course, and it would lead to a soft knockdown. At the very least, it might make the LK version useful.
Characters have bad MU’s - that’s just a thing. Sometimes they matter for your tournament life, and sometimes they don’t. And people might have played Raam with his throw loops as a primary weapon, but I think that’s a fundamental misreading of what he’s capable of. The character has some absolutely disgusting set play off his grabs that have nothing to do with stomps. I think the stomp version of his pressure is actually incredibly suboptimal - he has mixups just as crazy and ambiguous, if not moreso, with no threat of being broken. Just requires a little bit of time in the lab to figure them out.
Admittedly, my own playstyle with RAAM leaned heavily towards meaty/fake meaty setups after grabs which was hugely successful so I agree that using stomps as your primary method of pressure is suboptimal, but the stomps were still a very viable option to hit your opponent with once in a while to keep them guessing. Having the bug stay/made into an official part of his combo trait definitely would not have made his game any worse. I found it very useful for setting up more MK mindgames for example.
Also, think of it like this: if it was suboptimal before the fix, how bad must it be now?
Speaking of MK pressure, the most success I had with landing a standing MK in neutral is after a blocked jumping attack, or during repeated standing HP pressure. Most of the time it gets blocked of course, but always remember that even a blocked MK is VERY dangerous for the opponent.
Eh, the bug had to go. Not being able to reversal with stuff with a grappler in your face does not make for a particularly engaging interaction.
I think Raam is probably fine, just really underoptimized right now. People don’t punish -1 moves with shadow grab reliably yet, etc. PD breaker change probably helps him since he is relatively easy to break (I think this change helps easy-to-break characters more than others).
MK>HP leading to a Decimation choke point is okay I think? He can counter break (some small percentage of the time), he can try to capitalize on lockouts the other half, he can tick into running bear grab or SPD, or he can drop the combo and do a jumping crossup/empty jump setup… that’s probably enough to force the person out of their comfort zone. You can also just do MK > shadow decimation opener as a link and eliminate the break point chance.
So the reversal fix didn’t extend to backdashes and instinct. So if your opponent has a throw invuln special they can do that but if they dont theyre still stuck in the meaty throw loop
funnily enough i called it back on patch day, just was too lazy to test
I am not knowledegable enough to address what precisely is wrong w/ the way they’ve gone about some of these bugfixes, but I am perceptive enough to know that they are taking the easy/lazy way about it. This, along w/ how they handled the side-switch bugfixes, is proof.
I wish they would take their bloody time and actually fix these things, instead of just addressing the most obvious and egregious of symptoms and calling it good.