Airk

I have a Saturday pass, and intent to use it.

I haven't had a weekend where I was both free and not sick in ages, but this one is looking kinda promising. Anyone planning to make the trip tomorrow?

Eh. Not really. I mean, yes, he has a "fireball" a "DP" and a "hurricane kick" but none of them really function the way those moves do in Street Fighter; I'm not even really convinced that it's possible to make a real SF-style "Shoto" character in BB - the movement options available just change the game too much. Jin's ice swords are mostly too slow to really zone with in a fast-paced game like BB and are more used for shenanigans, limited space control or weird oki. Similarly, his DPs all have weird blind spots (A version has no invulnerability, A&B versions whiff on crouchers, C version is super slow, etc.). I guess Ice Car is sortof like a hurricane kick though. :P

You could probably put Jin and Litchi in here too - technically they both have projectiles, but neither of them are what most folks would think of as a "projectile character". (Tager has a projectile too, so... ) Relius probably counts too, and if you liked Carl, he might suit. Lambda is perfectly good, and definitely easier for most people to pick up than Rachel. You could also try Mu or Hazama, but they're...different. Technically if you really want to be play a zoning character, Lambda is your lady, though even then, you're going to do your heaviest damage up close. Still, Lambda is definitely the character who is most likely to get her wins by frustrating her opponents with zoning. Rachel does some of this, but I'd say Rachel uses her zoning more to open up her approach.

This is totally true, but there are some characters who seem like they beat even my smartest air throw attempts. (Tao, Litchi, often Jin). I definitely need to use j.B more air to air; I use j.C too much because the CH results are too tasty. I don't know squat about Relius air-to-air game, but glancing at the screenshots and frame data, he looks like he basically has the same style air to airs as Tsubaki, though his j.B covers more space and is slower, it covers the same sort of space as our j.BB - i.e. big area, but not much reach. And his j.C is clearly downwards, so yeah. And none of this means you have to "Stay on the ground" it just means you shouldn't chase your opponent into the air. It's a significant difference.

It wasn't so much "taking you seriously" as "trying to get you to post this sort of answer instead" :P I don't necessarily agree with this - Guardian expresses my PoV pretty accurately - but it's much more valuable and interesting than a snippy one word answer.

There really aren't many cast members we CAN go air to air with. I'm trying to think of one and failing. Tsubaki is just not a good air to air character.

Sorry, but this answer doesn't work here. No matter how good your blocking is, by definition, by just blocking you let Ragna do whatever he wants. Unfortunately, the real answer isn't any more fun - it's basically "be significantly better than the Ragna player at footsies."; Though with Relius, you should just be able to pressure using Ignis.

5C is probably more CH fishing - the range is short for trying to catch backdashes even if it's 'meaty' but 5B should be pretty good for stuffing backdashes now with its increased number of active frames. Might as well take advantage of that.

According to SRK, this video is magnificent. Of course, according to them none of these are "true unblockables", so what do they know. :P Still, it's a damn fine video.

A little praise for you here, Kiba. Also, what announcer is that?

At least I own up. :P It actually sometimes does make sense to mash using 5A instead of 2A if your 5A is faster - namely, situations in which you know there will be a gap regardless of what move your opponent picks - but this particular situation (after 6B) is not one of them. So sorry about that. Now back to your regularly scheduled wrangling.

See? Playing the game has nothing to do with my ability to come up with stupid comments. :P

oh, cool! Thanks!

Ergh. Good point. Not thinking. Pretty sure advance input only applies to buttons and therefore can't be used for dashes.

Unless you're up against a character with a 5 frame 5A, in which case you're even and you trade. It's only 1 frame though, so you'd have to be pretty on-point with your micro dash. Right, but it's still not really in your favor; Their rewards for guessing right are generally better than yours because of the disadvantage that 6BB/22C leaves you with. So you have to be markedly better at mindgames than they do.

That's a really good idea. Edit: Though I wonder how it would work with the fact that different moves repeat prorate different amounts - some prorate things down to like 20% so it's like "Your combo ends now" and some only prorate down to like 80%, which doesn't really make a huge difference. As for the combo system feeling incoherent, I agree with where you are coming from - that's clearly how the system was designed - but I'm not sure if that's a BAD thing. It results in each character having a more different feel. While I wish they were a little more consistant with "loops=bad" and the like (Mostly just loops=bad, because I hate loops on the basis that they're dull.) I like the fact that character X might be focused on wallbounces in the corner, while another does lots of OTG stuff, and still another just does tremendous air-juggles or something. I feel that adds more diversity and well, character, though obviously it makes balancing harder than just putting in a bunch of rules and saying "Well, you're never allowed to wallbounce more than once, OTG more than twice, and so forth". OTOH, I dunno that they seem to be having that bad a time balancing things, and the things they ARE screwing up don't seem to be that closely tied to the combo "system".

I didn't say everyone was nerfed HEAVILY, but it's hard to argue that Noel wasn't nerfed. I've had people tell me (unclear on the validity) that Rachel took a damage hit. Platinum went up and down (better damage off random stuff, generally, though her damage there was terrible before, and less damage off certain magic hits.). Yeah, Tager got better, but he was so bad to begin with that he's still not in Ragna's league, etc. Again; When most of the cast stays the same or gets nerfed, Ragna getting -buffs- is a big deal. I don't think anyone's going to argue that he's not in the top 3 in this game, and he sure hasn't gotten any harder to play. A whole bunch of characters who were basically in his league in CS2 got no love, but he got damage boosts on just about everything he does, and a nice old hitbox improvement on his j.C to boot, so it shouldn't be too hard to grasp while people who play Lambda/Rachel/Mu or even Tao or Bang look at this and go "Huh. So MY character got X, but Ragna, who was no worse in the previous game, gets tons of stuff? And he's one of the easiest characters in the game to play? How is this fair?" And that's leaving out all the characters who got clobbered with the nerf stick. Re: Speeding up Blazblue - another way it could be approached would be to reduce the amount of hitstop in the game, which should, overall, reduce the length of time combos take, but at the same time, it'll make hitconfirming and comboing in general tougher, so again, not so newbie friendly. (Note: I've actually heard people complain about the hitstop in BB and say it was better in CT, but honestly, I can't really tell.) Shortening combos could work, but would be, well, a lot of work. I don't really know that there is a way to fix this without fundamentally altering the game. (GG, from what I've seen of it, features shorter combos overall and therefore lower damage. It seems more "oldschool" in that regard.)

When I can get it used, I'll buy it. That's all there is to it right now. It's not like I'm the only one suggesting this stuff.

Right now, it's not really that good - if we had a super with decent minimum damage that we could put on the end of combos, we'd be ignoring all this 1 charge mugen stuff because it'd be safer and easier and use fewer resources to just do a normal combo with a super ender. That's not what I'd call "good". I... don't understand what you're saying here. The gist was that if you got hit while in Mugen (like, say, by a burst) you'd stop losing your charges. No one uses Mugen outside of combos anyway, really, and even if they did, it'd still be valuable for it to shut off on hit. Disagree. It needs to be a LOT better than it is now before it approaches broken status, IMHO. Right now it's "worthwhile only because we don't have a better option for heat -> damage"

Valk and Platinum are both perfectly fine characters. Valk is probably higher, but the difference is unlikely to matter except at the highest, most bleeding edge of skill.

Yes. Because damage on the rest of the cast, except, apparently, for Hakumen, has gone DOWN. Compare most other characters' damage in the same sorts of situations. To sum up: Ragna inexplicably got buffs when 90% of the rest of the cast got nerfs.

I heard someone mention an idea that I thought would be good for making Arakune less painful to fight against - remove primer breaking during curse. It's not like his curse damage and mixup aren't already insane, so how about we don't punish people for bursting to try to avoid curse? As for Mugen, it's only looks good as a 50 heat option because, frankly, our other super sucks just that much. Aside from the good amount of invulnerability on C version, it's probably one of the worst supers in the game, and features inexplicably bad minimum damage. If this super were any good, Mugen would be less competitive because, frankly, throwing an (unburstable) super on the end of a combo for 800-1000 damage is better than getting 800-1000 damage by burning your extra charges AND having to do it while the combo is still burstable. You'll note that NONE of the characters with a "mode super" use them frequently, even though I would argue that both Blood Kain and Real Mugen are better than Tsubaki's install super. (FRKZ doesn't really count, because it lasts forever.). Things that might improve this super would be (Note: These are just ideas, and I'm not really sure which one/combination would produce a balanced result): Minimum damage on D moves. D moves become unburstable. Mugen is fixed duration regardless of number of charges (But 236236D still only does damage for the number of charges you had when you started). Mugen 'shuts off' immediately if you are hit (saving your charges, but not your heat.). Mugen drains the gauge slower (Reduce gauge drain from 100pts per frame to 80 or so?). I'm not convinced there is a good halfway mark for moves like this - if there is Arksys hasn't made any effort to find it. Regardless, basing a character's game around something like this as Mori-san seems to be implying is a terrible idea.

Japan players haven't EVER really been using Mugen; Like, every once in a while you'll see someone break it out and then get bursted, or drop the combo, but it's super rare. Come to that, I don't see Bat or Kiba using it much either in the videos they've posted. This might reflect poorly on its usefulness.

The EX Frame Data basically doesn't have ANY of the hitstop stuff in it that CS2 did, which is why all kinds of things make absolutely no sense if you try to figure them out (like, the frame advantage practically every 236/214/22 special). This is part of my conspiracy theory that says that Arksys doesn't realize they forgot to fix all the hitstop stuff, and that's why our frame advantage is so bad now. And yes, 6A is just THAT slow. There are literally no normals where normal>RC>6A is safe from being jabbed/thrown. You just need to condition them to die if they mash.