TITANIUM BEAST!!!

I like this new OST very much. It's just very refreshing to finally have new music for GG. Most of the tracks are pretty good, I think there are a few duds in the mix but overall nice stuff.

Cheap implies something that is relatively easy to do in relation to how effective it is. That would make Sentinel a bad example of this, because even if he makes half the cast irrelevant, you still had to put in work to get your Sent to that level. That being said, partly in response to Destin, a lot of players don't distinguish between difficulty in execution and difficulty in decision making/actual play. This is one of the reason I have always disliked the puppet characters like Zato/Eddie and Carl/Relius, because it sometimes feels like you are exchanging actual experience and play time for training mode time. I personally have always preferred easier characters simply because I can get to the part of the game that actually matters much quicker. But then there are players who feel like more training mode time should justify a character being able to turn a match into something where they get to completely dictate the terms of engagement. I have no problem with different character types and their different strengths, but when you completely shut out the other player's ability to do anything, there is a problem. Thankfully, this is a pretty rare occurrence, but it's something that will always be a struggle because the entire goal of playing to win is to make the game as un-fun and frustrating for your opponent as possible, by whatever in-game methods available to you.

GG and BB are so different fundamentally that you can't simply classify it as a matter of easier game = less balanced. Even though Xrd has been somewhat simplified, the core of the game is still GG, and you can see that by how older, more experienced players are dominating right now. BB's issues are partly due to the core system and partly due to character designs which have no business being in said system.

Casuals (?) from G-Com Wajiro, over hour and a half of 720p footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5RA8qFsm74&list=UUrGNVruyuifBK_GeeWN2Rgw

lol pure does that all the time apparently.

There are some examples from the first combo video where 6P -> 6HS is used as a combo ender at the end of some extended combos, which implies it at least has a little more untechable time on air hit than it did in Reload.

There will probably still be the occasional AC vids that will pop up. I'm sure that there won't be anywhere near as much now that Xrd has dropped, but old games still get love in Japan.

Ah, so they probably wanted to eliminate it deliberately. How lame.

hatehatehatehatehate

Reading this statement makes me feel very old.

The high one is more like 6K height. He's got three levels, the middle one being 5P in height. That being said, I don't see it being too big of a deal at a high level. He has to enter and exit the stance manually, and entering it seems to take a fairly long time, combined with the attacks still having a hitbox and having to guess which height the opponent will be at. If you can't do the same strength back to back, then waiting for the middle one and IADing in is probably a legitimate way to get around it. Failing that, using projectiles or invincible moves to counter should work. Would be interesting to see the effect of using Blitz Shield on it, since they still have a hitbox would he still reel from it?

I never said the game wasn't balanced. The low character variety is there in the sense that a lot of the characters play the same (as you mentioned, the game is centered around infinites and dumb mixups). It's not that only a small number of characters are viable; almost all of them are viable, but they mostly all do the same thing.

Right, but that's not the kind of balance we're looking for, and it doesn't conform to the view I was expressing. That's why Airk bringing it up as an example was wrong, because that wasn't what I was talking about at all.

We'll just have to agree to disagree then. What you find personally entertaining to watch and what I find entertaining to actually do while I'm playing are two different things. Your example is flawed, because HnK ignores character variety (most of the characters seem to play very similarly), and also has things that are so overpowered they cause the game to be focused on that one thing (hello basketball infinites!). Good job taking only one third of my statement and trying to debunk it with an example that doesn't even fit what I said. When I say balance the game around Jin's level, that doesn't mean all of a sudden everyone gets braindead reset mixups. It means that they should get tools to reasonably compete with that level of character strength, because chances are that buffing characters is more likely to make them interesting than nerfing them. If you nerf everyone down to Ragna's level, it's going to make the game more boring because characters will have less tools, and the characters who have really unique playstyles would have to be toned down so much that there's a good chance they may actually be too weak. It's very difficult to have character balance while still maintaining useful character variety. Again, you're exaggerating to an extent. Kokonoe is well past the threshold of what's considered reasonably good. As a character she literally has every tool. That's not what I was talking about at all. The reason I'm saying what I'm saying is because, given that you play Tsubaki, your idea of what is reasonable is a lot lower than what is, you know, actually reasonable. Your concept of what is fair or not fair is going to be biased by that experience, whether you realize it or not. You may think balancing the game around a super basic character like Ragna is reasonable because when you watch people play him, you enjoy the fact that he has to work hard at getting openings (he is the poster child for the designer's intended playstyle for the game, after all). The issue is that as long as you want character variety, there are going to be character types that get around this playstyle, and people who want to do well in tournaments, or who aren't interested in playing the same way everyone else plays, will pick those characters. So by wanting to balance the game around a weaker character, you're not really going to change anything, because if you want to keep those unique characters viable, they're still going to be the best characters in the game, and now your standard characters are even weaker, so they're not as fun to play. I'd rather they take the GG approach and just make characters completely different from each other with over-the-top abilities. That tends to be much more fun when you're actually playing, and it gives the impression of a more level playing field. Having 'separate standards' for separate characters is a consequence of character variety. You can't balance everyone around the same playstyle or set abilities, otherwise the game becomes homogenous and boring. As far as most of the cast not conforming to the way the game is played, again, this is a consequence of character variety. The truth is that most of the characters are highly limited by the overall design philosophy of the game. Like I said, take Ragna as the poster child for Mori's vision of the game. Here is a character with good neutral tools, pretty lousy pressure, and very straightforward mixup. There's no overwhelming oki at his disposal due to the horrid ground tech system in this game, so he is pretty much forced to excel at the neutral game. This is all well and good when he is playing other characters who utilize this style, but as ASW decided to put more and more characters with different playstyles in the game, he's suffered for it. Looking at Jin, he really has the same type of tools at his disposal, albeit much safer. He still has pretty lackluster pressure, his basic mixups are not all that great, and he is focused on playing the neutral game. The freeze resets make a big difference, but these came about more as a result of players trying to find a way to make the character more effective; if the regular mixups, pressure, and frametraps are not a good option, then the players have to find a way to maximize their advantage, and freeze resets happen to be that way. Now let's look at the other characters. You have Noel, who again runs on the same basic concept, except now she has this unique Drive that allows her to chain moves together for more interesting mixups and pressure; still limited by the basic systems of the game. Then you get a character like Rachel, who has her unique wind gauge and the abilities that come from that; instant overheads, powerful projectile pressure, and guaranteed inescapable oki. Now you have a character playing outside of the rules of the game, and surprise surprise, she tends to be really good because of it. You can't really nerf her too hard because then she might not be good enough anymore (hello CS1 Rachel). So what do you do? This pattern continues with characters like Tager (almost always weak because of how much the game is focused on neutral), Litchi (actually plays well by the regular rules of the game, but then has stupid good oki so suddenly not playing by the rules), Arakune (plays by his own rules completely, and is either super good or terrible), Carl (puppet character!), Hazama (unique character design allows him to play the rules of the game too well, and then because of it they gave him more tools that work outside of the game's usual rules. Stupid!), and Valkenhayn (super mobility combined with dumb mixups that other characters can't have, again really hard to balance because it's easy to make him too weak). So again, what to do? You can have character balance or character variety. The way the base system of the game is set up, it's very difficult to have both in the same environment. And given the option, players are going to pick whatever gives them the most wins, in this case the characters that allow them to play outside the game's rules. You can either remove those characters or try to balance them out (most likely they'll get nerfed into oblivion this way), or you can buff up the more standard characters so they have a fighting chance against them. The first option will only make the game more homogenous, which will likely make it less interesting to people who like multiple playstyles, so I personally think the latter option is best.

I disagree with this completely. If anything, they should balance the game more towards Jin's level. If you balanced it around Ragna, the game would be stagnant and boring. This is what I was talking about earlier. People who like shitty characters should not be in charge of determining how good everyone else should be. The game should not be balanced around a certain "power level". You should give everyone the strongest stuff you can give them, while maintaining character variety, and without making anything so overpowered that it cannot be reasonably dealt with in some way. Unfortunately, BB is not balanced this way, instead being focused around making people play the game a certain way (but then inexplicably putting in characters that can get around that). Which is probably why they aren't going to do it! :P If a character is unpopular because of their overall design and playstyle, you don't buff them, because then they will become more prevalent. Not only will the character's fans do better, players who are more concerned with just winning will play that character, and people who don't like that character will be pissed and stop playing. If those people are the majority, your game dies. It would be better to change the character's design instead. It would be like if Arakune was just as annoying in CT, but lower tier, then they buffed him up to his CT tier strength by CP. Nobody would play the game. I never said I agreed with ASW's ideas. I have simply attempted to understand the logic behind the changes, because it makes me slightly less angry, and it allows me to enjoy the game more, which is more important to me. I have hated the way ASW decided to balance BB since day 1, and I don't like what I perceive to be their core concept for the game. But understanding why they do what they do helps. In spite of the funny comments people are making here, I sincerely doubt that ASW developers are completely dense about the game. They just don't really care so much about balance, and would rather make the characters play the way they think they should. They won't fix Tsubaki because hey, they probably think her funky normals and having crappy hitconfirms is part of her "charm". She's certainly not the first character who had to use character-specific BnBs for her primary combos; hell, if anything, character-specific BnBs were MORE prevalent in older fighting games. Older players just sucked it up and dealt. This new generation is pretty lame sometimes. In some sense, I would rather Tsubaki be lame and unique, than fixed and generic. Go ahead and fix the minimum amount of the problems you perceive with the character, and then tell me what really distinguishes her from the other shoto-style characters like Ragna and Jin. Slightly different combos? A charge system that arguably doesn't get as much use as you'd expect? Double chained normals? And I think your reasoning stinks too. This is why people disagree on things, doy. "I hate your reasoning for explaining why Azrael wasn't nerfed, even though I didn't want him nerfed in the first place!" Like I said, stop projecting your dissatisfaction with your character onto the rest of the game. If you really didn't care about Azrael's buffs, you wouldn't have said anything. But because the development team's design philosophy doesn't happen to extend its goodwill towards your character, you had to argue. As I said earlier, I hate Ragna's design decisions. But they're in line with how the devs want the game to play, so why fight it? That's why I'd rather just pick a different character. Whining about character balance seems like such a waste of time at the end of the day, it doesn't change anything and there will always be strong and weak characters. If the character you like is too weak for your tastes, either pick a new character or play a different game. Whether or not you like my reasoning, the fact that Azrael received no nerfs and a couple of minor buffs that don't really change the way he plays makes perfect sense. The way Tsubaki is treated may not make sense to you, but that doesn't suddenly invalidate my points on Azrael. Sometimes developers make mistakes. Sometimes, they really can't decide what to do with a character. Friggin' look at Blanka in Street Fighter! To this day, he's still a weird, gimmicky character with limited success at the high level of play. And Street Fighter has been around forever! Yet they still have issues with making him a consistent character (other than being consistently lame). Such is game design.

As I mentioned above, the BE change is most likely to prevent players from doing air hitconfirms into BE and then continuing the combo from outside of the corner. For example, from midscreen I can do 5B-6A -> HF, then 5B-5C -> hj.C -> BE, and still have time to dash in with 3C into 22C. Depending on the way the bounce height and untechable time are changed, you would not have time to run in and would have to do something immediately that could reach the opponent. This would relegate BE to corner combos only when you do not have meter. The lower bounce height might be a change that would allow you to do dash 3C faster and have it still connect, since right now you have to delay it if the opponent is already in the corner when you do it. This would make sense since there is no real reason for them to remove this combo route, and it would be a compromise where you could still do the corner combos that are possible now while still limiting the combos where you are not fully in the corner. The ability to cancel the last hit with Distortions would be a work around so that the midscreen combo to CS is still possible (decreased bounce height and untech time make it impossble to do the way it's currently done).

Yeah, something like that. Or more like "they got changes, but it doesn't do jack for them". The note on Makoto is hilarious. I blame Goro. Low tier heroes, tell your idol players to stop being so damn good, then maybe your character will get buffed.

A lot of it depends on your definition of 'fine'. Ask the average Ragna player in the Ragna board and they'll tell you he NEEDS to be buffed. But with the huge number of Ragna players using him, combined with his general 'decent'-ness in Japan (if Xie's account is to be believed), it's pretty tough to get anybody to pay attention. There could be multiple factors at hand. Maybe the nature of Japan's complaining isn't her tier ranking, but just the way she works as a character (wonky normals, inconsistent hitconfirms and BnBs that are character specific). I mean, even with all her supposed terrible-ness, Dogura puts her only slightly below the middle in terms of character strength in his listing, and there are at least nine other characters who are worse than her on that list. She's certainly not as bad as Bullet or Izayoi. The Tsubaki players might not like the stupid aspects of her gameplay, but if changing that would go outside of the way ASW wants the character to play, it's not gonna change. Or maybe they feel like fixing those complaints wouldn't be as easy as you make it out to be, or maybe it would make her "too strong" in their eyes. Maybe, in spite of how much Tsubaki players like her, she is not a well-liked character overall, which would lower the incentive for ASW to make her better. Dogura's placement is also telling, because it may be saying that in spite of everything said here, maybe, just maybe, she's not as bad as Tsubaki players are making her out to be. This is why I draw the Ragna parallel, because man, I see tons of people complain about Ragna. It's rare to see anyone say anything good about him here, which is why Xie's tier list surprised me. After playing him for a while, I see both sides of the coin, because the truth is that while Ragna players bitch about him all the time, he is not a bad character. In some ways, he's better than EX, though EX version overall is still stronger. He has things in CP he hasn't had before. His average damage for CP is really good. His corner carry is nuts. OD gives him a meterless way to do huge damage off of his main hitconfirm at its max range on ground hit, something he has never had in any other game. None of this changes the fact that he got nerfed pretty hard from previous iterations, but he is working as the developers intended and he's not overtly weak. I personally think most Ragna players who continue to bitch about him are just at odds with his design and the way he is supposed to be played (this is part of why I'm starting to look at other characters). So my advice is, if you don't like the direction Tsubaki's going in, and you still really like Blazblue, make a serious consideration to change characters. Because bitching about her and calling for nerfs to stronger characters in order to bring them in line with her suckiness isn't going to change anything, as long as ASW thinks she is fine.

There was a match where the girl in the black dress played Millia versus Akira's Bedman. Nothing else really, other than the same intro we've seen already.

No, but I think it's mad hilarious. Plus it's not like Tsubaki players are keeping the community afloat anyway, nobody plays BB regardless. I've been frustrated with the way my main character has been handled pretty much since CS2, regardless of tier rankings. The current version of Ragna is not bad at all, yet every Ragna player on Dloop has been complaining about him forever. I really, really wish ASW had taken the opportunity to make him more interesting to play with this update, but all signs point to fairly insignificant changes. Sometimes, your favorite character just sucks. This is why I gave up Soul Calibur, I felt like they couldn't get my character right. You can whine about it as much as you like, but honestly, ASW doesn't give a crap about how much people on this board complain.

The more I read this thread, the more I think they should just keep nerfing Tsubaki. The salt level is just fantastic.

...I never said Tsubaki got "mostly buffs". I said she got two obvious buffs (they are minor, but it is pretty obvious these are buffs), two obvious nerfs, and one questionable change. After your post, I can correct the last one to a very minor buff, and the projectile change to "middling" (could be overall buff or nerf, needs to be seen first to determine). So...yeah. I agree that no really significant improvements were made. Like I said, this is probably a case where the developers are happy with how the character performs overall, even if the players aren't, so they're going to maintain the status quo. I just think the whole "my character shouldn't get nerfed, they're low tier!" idea is unrealistic. I realize I just spent the last three or four pages having an argument about how Azrael doesn't need any nerfs, but if he had gotten a couple of nerfs similar to these, I wouldn't be complaining either. People always tend to blow this stuff out of proportion.

6A can't be Emergency Teched is a buff, albeit a very minor one that mainly deals with people who try to chicken guard their way out of mixups. Again, this is not an obvious or really significant buff, more just a way of enforcing the playstyle that the developers want. They expect you to sit there and deal with her mixup. Same concept for Makoto 6B not being Emergency Techable; it's a way of eliminating an easy way out of a situation that the designers didn't intend for you to be able to do. As a side note, these changes also punish people who are not precise when changing guard, and tend to overshoot to the up back position when switching from a low to high guard. Could be seen as a nice way to reward the player using Tsubaki or Makoto, or it could be seen as a mean way to enforce proper execution when switching guard.

The people who really like the character will always complain more when the character is not as good as they think they should be. I should know. Here's another thing. Are those nerfs really going to have a huge effect on how she plays? People acting like buffs and nerfs should solely be based on tier lists, which can be very arbitrary things. Hakumen and Azrael are both A tier. Azrael gets nothing but buffs, Hakumen gets nothing but nerfs. This doesn't sound fair, but you really don't hear anyone complaining (except for redsilversnake and Airk ). So because Tsubaki is not as good as players want her to be, she should get nothing but buffs? Looking at the list, it looks like she got two obvious buffs, two obvious nerfs, and one change that seems irrelevant, for now. One of her nerfs (increased SMP on D moves) actually makes sense within the context of how SMP works, even if it might have a slightly negative effect on the character (and really, I doubt it makes that much of a difference). It's more important for the changes to make sense for the character. If a character is pretty much functioning in a way the developers like, then don't expect a whole lot.

In terms of outright reacting without any cues? Sure. But 5D is the type of move where you can look for it and react to it in certain situations. If the Azrael player is using it properly (ie not so close that random 5A/2A mashing would beat it), then typically it will come off of certain moves, like 5A. In this case you should be able to anticipate it somewhat, especially if you already have upper weakness applied. Typically, when I play against other people, the first 5D I do is pretty free, but once I have upper weakness applied, players look for it and block it accordingly. The exception is when I do it in spots where it isn't expected, like when I'm point blank and people expect me to 5A or something to check their guard. If you get hit by 5D in that case, well, you got outplayed, sorry. Doesn't seem overpowered to me. For 2C, there will ALWAYS be situations where certain characters simply don't have a good answer to certain moves. Again, this is a consequence of having variety in character design. I would expect melee characters to have a tough time with Azrael because he is supposed to be good at close range. This doesn't make those moves "too good". As far as blocked 2C putting you in Azrael's pressure, that move is -3 on block and its optimal range is well outside of Azrael's typical good pressure normals. It helps to know which melee characters you've played too. I wouldn't expect Ragna or Jin to have too much trouble punishing a whiffed 2C.