Airk

Oh, yeah, and that's totally white costume Tsubaki. Looking forward to that being canon in the next game, because it looks way more badass than the old beige, and she needs to ditch the black.

BGS to timing. Everytime I show up to play online, there's like, 4 rooms with 0-1 bar, and some 8 man, no connection limit mess run by a green square with like 5 people in it. How the hell am I ever supposed to get decent at this game if my choices are "Play underwater" or "Play against people who might as well be training dummies" with the option of ALSO playing underwater and/or getting clobbered once by the one good player in the room and having to wait 20 minutes to play again. FML, and F Arc Sys for no training while waiting for opponents.

Yeah, don't you hate it when people make tier lists based on measurable facts instead of people's random BS opinions? ^_^ No idea why Tong thinks the game is closely clustered enough to have only three tiers. Looks like the usual "close spread in the middle with some crazy outliers" that we've gotten in pretty much every BB game since CS2 or so.

Mmm. Scandinavian Lag. (No idea how bad that'll be.)

This doesn't make sense; The one place it seems like this SHOULDN'T work is on wakeup, because a properly timed meaty overhead will just hit you while you're doing all that 1AB stuff. It only works once you're actually getting into a blockstring, because it depends on the greater delay before an overhead comes out.

But you'll notice that you didn't use the word "Better"; You used "More damage." "Better" is almost always subjective. For example, it's easy to say that a character does "more damage" from a given starter, but "Better damage overall" is much more subjective.

What the heck does "Push for game" mean? Why is this a problem, exactly? There are lots of characters in the game who can't get max damage off a "reasonable confirm" without some sort of resource. It's, y'know, the price you pay for having a drive that lets you do amazing stuff, instead of, say, a drive that forces you to precisely time your D Presses. :P Still don't know what this means...

Gravitons come back at a rate of one every... looks like about 9 seconds, unless the rate varies depending on what she's doing. That's more than bloody enough.

I have the reverse; I really don't mind if I know what I should be doing and can't make it happen. It's when I feel like I have NO IDEA WTF I'm supposed to do that I get frustrated. It's not helped by the fact that I have like... 10 matches of experience against most of the new characters for CP. I am so unspeakably bad at fighting Azrael, Amane, and Kagura it's not even funny, even though only one of those characters is actually good? (I struggle with Bullet too, but I think that's the matchup, it's just stupid for Tsubaki.)

No one's core game plan has changed in a meaningful way for CPE/CP2. It's basically just balance changes and combo routes. Kokonoe still has her same braindead gameplan, she just has to keep track of an actual resource now, and her tools are less good.

Thirded. It usually takes me 2-3 times to start going "Okay, I need to stop doing X." and then I KEEP DOING IT ANYWAY. WHYYYY?

I'm not sure what purpose that would serve. I mean, FFS, we can't even agree who has the best (okay, second best, because Inferno Divider. :P) DP in the game. It all depends on what you mean by "best". Trying to rank these pieces ...er...piecemeal doesn't really tell you much anyway?

Yeah. the hardest thing for me is quitting when I KNOW I'm sucking. I get a bit ragey and all 'No! I can do better than that! I'll play again!' but I'm really just too cranky and not doing good inputs at that point and it's just a recipe for frustration.

I'm still worried about Nu, because she seems to have the CSE Ragna flavor "all the awesome for half the work" thing going on right now. She's probably not CP Koko tier, but she shuts down a lot of characters without even needing to think about it.

Yeah? Having a good drive (A strong central feature) insulates you against changes to your character elsewhere. i.e. "If someone nerfs your normals, but your drive is good, you can still be solid, whereas if you got the same nerfed normals with a garbage drive, you'd probably be bad." You are reading beyond what I am implying. Nowhere did I say that a drive is the sole thing, or even the primary thing, but if you have something about your character that is strong, it buoys you up against other changes. That's what I said. The funny thing is that those adjectives are irrelevant. A strong drive insulates you from ANY changes elsewhere, stupid or otherwise. Stop getting hung up on irrelevant details and look at the big picture. Look: If you are Hazama, you have a strong drive. therefore, Arc could nerf your normals and you could still be solid. But if you are Tsubaki, and your drive is not strong, you suffer more from that nerf. And in reverse, if you have good normals, you can better survive a nerf to your drive. I remain baffled by you continued argument against what seems like the most obvious thing ever. Also, what does giving examples have to do with being objective? :P What is it about Terumi that makes his matchups bad? I know little about the character. (Because I haaaaate him on a strictly personality basis. He's even worse than Hazama, who is at least classy about being a jerk.)

Uh. That doesn't make any sense. You really think that, say, Valk's drive has NOTHING to do with his balance? or Carl's? C'mon. It's not always the PRIMARY part, but the whole gist of my point is that you have to look at the whole character, not any given part, so the drive is neither the only thing that defines the character, nor is it irrelevant.

Sorry. I was using it as a synonym for "drive" because BlackYakuza said "You make a game that centers around the gimmicks of characters and then you nerf those gimmicks to hell and back." - and I took that to be him using "gimmick" as a synonym for "drive" because that's what BB characters are built around. Otherwise, it sounds like you agree with me? Edit: Actually, it sounds like EVERYONE agrees with me? Who ARE you people and what site am I on?

I think this is obviously incorrect. When you have characters like Ragna, Jin and Bang running towards "high tier" in various games, it's obvious that the power of your "gimmick" is only part of your character. If a character has a weak gimmick, like, say, a button that requires precise magic timing, or a gauge they have to stop doing anything else to fill up, you just need to give them better non-gimmick tools. Or make their gimmick better in some way. It's really not that complicated. We've been over this ground dozens of times. The problem simply seems to be that Arc Sys doesn't do this. At least, not deliberately. Sometimes characters with a weak gimmick (I mean, c'mon, Soul Eater is a crap gimmick. It gives Ragna like an extra 1k health each round, at best.) end up top tier (CS2 Makoto says hi, even though her gimmick has only gotten BETTER since then.) and sometimes they suck (CS1 Tsubaki was hilariously bad). Having a good 'core gimmick' insulates you a little bit against stupid changes to other things, but it's not proof against being low tier either (CS1 Rachel says hi. And maybe CP2 Tao?). Tier list actually mostly seems to be a big blob around A and B tier for once. Except for Nu, who is in WTFDUMB tier. Also, I disagree with Tong - I think this game has PLENTY of system mechanics. It has pretty much the same number that GG does, and that's a LOT, IMHO. Adding more just makes the game increasingly problematic for new players while adding only minimal depth for experienced ones.

Because usually you've been playing for like an hour, you're kinda emotionally done, and you're pretty sure the one win was a fluke?

I always try to play one more match after the one I win so it doesn't seem like a "Nyah! Finally beat you, now I quit!"

It's also worth practicing one "flasy/situational" thing as a punish. Few things make me sadder than watching someone who is otherwise capable do a basic 2000 damage BNB after blocking an Inferno Divider or something. Learn yourself some swag 5k combo for this, it WILL happen.

You still can't beat the hatemail I got in Extend for using Tsubaki; I think the precise term used was "Baby's first rushdown character." Stay classy, Internet.

I assumed the implication was 'Make them not Asteroid Vision followups'. Which I think would make Lander Blow too good. and yeah, I guess Cosmic Ray would need to be +1 or something. Still, when you look at characters like Jin who are all "Yeah, I have three moves that are plus and a ton of other ways to make things safe and did I mention my 5C can be jump cancelled on block?" and you sortof scratch your head and go "This is okay for a character with all of Jin's tools, but Makoto gets nothing that's plus unless it's a weird followup or has 37 frames of startup(LOL 3C as 'pressure reset')."

That could make her pretty fierce. Maybe leave Lander Blow as is and make Cosmic Ray usable normally. But I'm not a Makoto expert, so...

There's nothing WRONG with playing "simple"; EVERYONE starts by playing simple. And you can win with simple stuff - up to a point. But sooner or later, you're going to think "Gee, I wish I had a better way out of that pressure!" or "Boy, if I had cancelled that move, maybe I wouldn't have taken 5k damage" or the like, and you'll start adding the more advanced mechanics to your game. Of course, picking the absolute nutso top tier character allows you to avoid that for longer, but at the very least, you're going to need to occasionally use Superball as a reversal, since you don't have any other options there, and anyone who knows the matchup can deal with teleport. And a lot of this stuff is going to be way less effective in the next version, so there will be incentive to step up your game.