Orchid - Her design and gameplay is weak and completely uninspired. She needs her freaking LASERKIN projectile back and her face and hair desperately need to be touched up for S3.
TJ Combo - After the nerfs he may have the most boring and predictable combos in the game. Speed him up drastically and give him a real command roller coaster (not the current useless one) move that can be shadowed as a linker and opener.
Boxing gloves, maybe?
I really wish Maya had grappling moves/ was a grappler when not having her daggers.
Heh, I hope they do get rid of the dud. I’m not sure it really serves a gameplay purpose; the change will make playing Omen less frustrating without making him immensely better.
The thing is, a lot of characters in fighting games “hit you, do damage, repeat”. For some characters, how they hit you changes (which is the interesting part), but once they hit you, they’re doing roughly the same damage with roughly the same enders. Cinder not only changes how he hits you, but how he does damage, and I think that uniqueness is great. If he hit a little harder and lost burnout, he’d lose a lot of what makes him fun and interesting. There aren’t many fighting game characters that can “force” you to stop pressing certain buttons, and the gameplay variety this brings is really deep.
If it is about gameplay I would say:
If it is about cosmetic changes my guess would be:
Look, I’ll cut you a deal: get me a GIF of Omen throwing a triple dud, and I’ll give removing the dud my blessing.
You’re saying two different things here:
I think you could satisfy 2 by bringing Cinder’s regular damage more in line with, say, Jago’s, and then changing burnout so that it causes no harm – potential damage or otherwise – until you press a cursed button, at which point a hefty chunk of PD immediately flairs up. That way, you get the discouraging specific buttons aspect; a Cinder player still has to decide that the button curse is more useful than extra damage or meter in a given situation, which could be balanced for; and as an added bonus, there might be far less confusion among newbies about what they’re doing that’s turning their lifebar white.
Of course, you give up 1 if you go in that direction.
TJ has the best combo trait in the game. I could see them getting kick doubles to work with barrage again, but that kind of improvement is almost cosmetic in nature, and I don’t see the doing anything more meaningful than that.
Well, ok, your proposed character design here does let a character do “regular” damage while also allowing the curse mechanic to exist, it’s true. But I guess it does sacrifice something important about how Cinder works; he forces you to be scared of potential damage and the stacking of burnouts (and resets) that follow because of it.
If burnout caused PD only when you pressed the button, it would be easier to defend against, because there isn’t an immediate threat to your life bar (ie, you aren’t being pressured into losing 50% if you don’t make a gut reaction). The realization that you have a level 4 cashout sitting on your life bar does really interesting things to the flow of a match, and I just think you wouldn’t really see it happen that often without the burnout effect causing continuous PD. I think it’s already fairly hard for Cinder to catch someone running away while burnout is on them (unless near the corner), but burnout in its current state makes it more threatening (and lasts longer than the burnout itself, since the PD also takes extra seconds to heal). If they could run away and not press the burned out buttons and be immediately fine after (and combos don’t hurt any more even if they get caught during it), I’m not sure it’s very scary.
So yeah, I think the “PD over time” mechanic is important to burnout and it falls under the “different ways to do damage” thing. The character you designed wouldn’t be a bad or unfun character, because Cinder’s other tools are also fun, but I think it forces fewer unique/interesting situations on opponents.
Do Cinder all over again really, I don’t like the long finger nails and the armor, on top of that he’s just to weak to me. I like his mask and color scheme and give him better memes, " I would not want to be you today" come on man. I don’t expect him to say something clever but at least keep it related to fire. I don’t care if they do nothing to Omen or if they work him, I do my best to pretend he doesn’t exist. Other than Cinder, I’m fine with the rest of the cast.
Kan-Ra should be redesigned completely IMO.
I would generally agree but I think at this point, his image has been fixed to my mind so I’d say it’s too late now at least for me.
Fair points. I guess my worry as is, is that even when a competent Cinder chains together burnout combos, it still seems like death by a thousand cuts: first he has to open you up and get up a decent ender level for burnout, then he has to open you again and end it (probably with another burnout ender) in order to capitalize, ad nauseam – and if he gets broken at any point, the engine shuts down and he needs to open you twice again to get back on track with the damage. Balance issues aside, I just think that’s gameplan is a bit too slow as is.
Or maybe he is just overdue for a damage buff, and then it’ll be fine. I don’t know enough to really say.
Okay, this sounds like you’re basically saying “Kan-Ra sucks.” How would you like to see him reworked? What doesn’t work for you and how would you like to see that changed?
Personally, Kan-Ra is one of my favorites, so I’m curious what your issues are, why, and what type of solution you’d propose.
For me, I think that there are some smaller changes that could be done to each character.
TJ needs a redesign for auto barrage that doesn’t lock you in to the combo. Can’t count how many times I’ve entered auto barrage by accident and while I’m no pro, I’m fairly convinced that if I do it enough, there are probably others that do it as well and it probably turns them off to the character as well.
Orchid does need a face and hair upgrade, no doubt. Cinder could stand to lose the claws. The original six characters could use more flash and what not in their move sets, as they seem rather Spartan in comparison to season 2 characters.
But when I hear “rework,” I think of more substantial changes. I suppose TJ would be a bigger change, but rework screams one character in particular:
Omen: the issues are well known. The recycled animations, not having the wings out, the random fireballs, the Chun Li kick, the masks… Some people have some issues with him while others have other issues .
Personally, I think that he needs a more imposing look (horns, wings present, cloaked in him like in Gargoyles, taller, thicker frame, no mask, glowing eyes etc).
I also think that his moves could be more original looking, also more imposing. I like his big throw move, but his other moves could each have a more unique form of delivery that both looks and feels like they’re coming from a powerful force.
Kan-Ra is a cool character. But I feel some of the worst matchups in the game revolve around Kan-Ra (Sadira especially). There is just so little that she can do when he plays runaway. And he can pressure her up close and all she can do is block and hope the opponent messes up. There is no shadow countering him and then he has the inescapable setups with the traps and the command throw.
I don’t think there is a way that he could be changed slightly so that the lopsided matchups become more even. And if they nerf him he will become too weak in his own bad matchups, if he is not already (Fulgore matchup? Spinal maybe. I can imagine him struggling against teleport characters).
So I wish to see him get reworked. Make him more of a generic type of zoner; give him a good anti-air and remove some of his pressure tools. Just some randm suggestions, I have no idea how they’d have to change him, to be honest.
@Iago407: As a Kan-Ra player, how do you feel about his matchups?
Lots of people wants a rework in Kan-Ra, and its sad because he is so unique! He requires more patient than other characters of course (and as an Aganos player, I have learned the meaning of true patience)
Maybe some of his MU are very loopsided, but a total rework its going to far. Maybe an special meter is enough.
Special meter: bugs
Kan-Ra can stack up to 3 charges of bugs (he starts with 3). Each time he uses a swarm, one goes out (not mid combo, only in neutral). Shadow swarm doesn’t count. Kan-Ra regains one stock each 4 seconds or full replenish them after a swarm ender.
Consecuences:
Kan-Ra cant mindless spam swarms fullscreen and them play runaway/spam sand. His resources have to be managed. He still could restart his offense with a swarm combo ender, so his offensive plan stays mostly the same (less preassure tho) but his defensive plan its a bit weaker.
His opponents need more patience than he does. No one likes those seemingly endless block strings.
When I said he requires more patience I mean fighting against him.
With my suggestion he has a limited by time amount of swarms for his blockstrings
Oh, OK. I misread.
And then he runs away and starts over…
He has to wait 4 secs since his last swarm, then another 4 secs… thats a lot of time where you can get closer, and even a jab destroys swarms, so a jab negates 4 secs waiting. Sure he still has tools, but we talk about balance, not destroying the character.
He can take the risk and perform a combo, tho. But if he gets broken…
Honestly? I like that his matchups are a little more varied in terms of strength. This game is incredibly well balanced, so it’s kinda nice to have someone that’s a slight outlier in that regard.
For Sadira though, I tend to think that the matchup is more her issue than Kan Ra’s. I know I’m probably alone on this, but I really think that she needs more to do in the air. If this means less damage output, then so be it, but I’d like to see her get an air throw as well as another special that she can do in the air.
I’ve debated the idea of giving her a strictly contextual recapture (a special that drives opponents to the ground and only allows you to do an ender when you hit the ground, and ender that cannot be followed up) but perhaps that’s going too far.
But regardless, to me, she’s the “air character” and it’s starting to feel like more and more characters can do stuff in the air to the point where she’s not quite as special as she perhaps was in season one.
Bottom line, I think that a lot of characters will be rebalanced a bit, maybe given a move or two here and there. I’d like to see how the roster shakes out against Kan Ra before I say that he’s the one that needs to be reworked. I personally see others in more need of it.
But if he’s still so spammy after everything’s said and done, then I wouldn’t mind seeing him get a sand meter that fills with sand every time he uses sand related moves. Perhaps a minute amount of sand fills in the meter for his less spammed moves and more sand for those moves that tend to get spammed more.
Perhaps sand compounds faster if a move is used repeatedly before the sand in the meter has time to drain. If he doesn’t use sand, then the meter reduces a little second by second, but once the meter is full and the limit is reached, he simply can’t use sand-related moves anymore until the meter trickles back to being completely empty. Something like a 12 second burn off. It’d have to be punitive enough to discourage spamming, but not so punitive that people can’t play with him as he’s “intended.” Would that help, or would that be too much?
Kan-Ra is a tricky character to play as. But he’s a zoner, so when people get good it’s really frustrating to work against him. It’s a totally different matchup than everyone else in the game. In essence, whatever game you play against other characters goes out the window and now you are playing against Kan Ra. He dictates the match, always.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing, and, frankly, I don’t think he needs radical changes. He already has low damage output and relies heavily on setups. I think his teleport (and therefore his instinct) may be a bit OP - since he depends so much on keeping his distance it’s pretty incredible that he can just blast out of it once you close on him (although, again, this does require some setup).
It took a long time for people to realize how good he was, and initially there were a lot of people saying he was too weak as a character to be viable.