TITANIUM BEAST!!!

Need a clearer listen to BOII but so far I actually like the old version better, it sounded harsher and more aggressive.

What's funny is he still won that match, with practically the same approach. So who's the fraud here? lol kaqn

See the bolded part? Now if I thought that ASW had done a good job with that bolded part, do you think I'd be complaining? I said it was harder to balance things around those types of systems, not impossible. My point was that not only are ASW using faulty methods to try and "solve" the problems with guard breaking in BB, but they're effectively failing to solve said problems because of it. Stuff like that can work in fighters, but why make your job harder than it needs to be, especially when you can't do it right?

Like I said, I addressed this in one of my posts. Go back and re-read. It's bad when it doesn't result in variety and affects character balance.

I figured it was pretty off-topic, which is why I didn't want to elaborate all that much, but as usual, I let myself get sucked in. Sorry about that. Won't go any further on the subject, other than to say that Hecatom didn't get it and needs to go back and re-read what I said, since I already covered what he's talking about.

This is what I'm saying, which is why I think it's a flawed system. Don't homogenize the characters, just don't implement cruddy systems like this. If your game must have a guard break, do it in a way that doesn't create these types of problems. The logic may have been that it was okay for him to have a short-range CT since he is a rushdown character, but as noted, his general ability to mix up without meter is pretty terrible, so he would have actually benefitted from having a good CT. Maybe not long range (since he already has good range and a long range GB move is kinda busted), but fast enough that he could set up situations where it would be very hard for the opponent to get away from it.

That's assuming they actually try to make up for it in other ways. You're operating under the assumption that developers try to balance games in logical ways, when their track record for doing so is horrible. What is (ultimately) wrong with a system like that is that it creates too many opportunities for the system to cause imbalance between characters. If you wanted it to be balanced out, you would have to make everyone's CT too weak (nobody uses CTs), or you'd have to make them all too strong (CT IS BROKEN YEARGH). What you have instead now is that some characters don't use their CT much at all, and the ones that do use it, it almost always seems to work out in their favor. This is especially evident with characters like Jin and Litchi, who appear to have really good CTs with long range. Compare that to say, Ragna, who has a really short ranged CT, which forces you to get right in their face to use it, but also leaves you susceptible to 2A mash since CTs are kinda slow. Let's go back to Guard Libra for a moment. It's a pretty simple system: you block, the Libra gets pushed towards your opponent's side, if it goes all the way, bam, Guard Break. This is a classic style of guard break system, with one twist in that it doesn't return back to neutral by itself over time. This is part of what made it unbalanced, even though it was kind of logical because BB was designed to be a game based on neutral play and you weren't supposed to be able to force people to block for long periods of time (unfortunately it didn't quite turn out how they figured it would). What's better about this kind of system is that it's balanced more around a character's overall capabilities, as opposed to just one or two moves, so not only does that make it easier for more characters to utilize the system, but it also makes it easier to balance out how characters use it, since it's focused more around the character's overall offensive abilities. GG's Guard Balance works the same way, except that it's much fairer since you still have to actually land the hit to reap the benefits. After Guard Libra got scrapped, we got Guard Primers. Here is where they started to go in the wrong direction. Now you can only use certain moves to get a Guard Break. This is harder to balance because it's very easy to make certain moves "too good" or "not good enough" for this purpose. So now it's more "fair" in that it's harder to guard break people, but it's also more "unfair" to an offensive character who might really benefit from being able to threaten with a guard break. Now we have Crush Trigger. It's a universal (sort of) move that everyone has, that can cause an instant guard break, but costs meter. That sounds really good on paper, but again, it's harder to balance if you want everyone to have a unique Crush Trigger. It's too easy to give someone a CT that's too good/useful, or one that's just not good enough. That doesn't bode well for a system that's supposed to encourage offense, in a series that is known for being slow and focused on a lot of zoning and defense. As I note above, Ragna doesn't have a particularly good Crush Trigger. It has short range and is not particularly fast. I suppose that could be seen as me playing favorites, but given the type of character he is, it makes no sense that he has a bad CT. Meanwhile some of the top characters have really good CTs, which may or may not make sense, given the strong options already available to them. But I would say that most characters don't have good CTs, which again, just points to how hard it is to balance a system like that. As far as Barrier being important, how often do you see people straight up run out of Barrier in a match? It's not frequent at all from what I've seen. Just seems like losing 50% Barrier to a CT is only a big deal if you already use Barrier too much. Mind you, I think CT is better than Guard Primers, so in that sense it's an improvement. But it's still a flawed system from the perspective of being encouraging to offensive play.

Not going into too much detail (since we're technically off-topic), but the main flaw is that it's still based on individual character specials, which creates more room for imbalance (if you have a bad Crush Trigger, you get screwed over, if you have a really good one, you screw over everyone else). Also still can be defended against with Barrier for the cost of reducing Barrier bar, which is not necessarily the biggest punishment ever.

Though implemented poorly, the Guard Libra is the most offensive version of guard breaking that BB has implemented to date. I would have much preferred it to have been tweaked instead of being outright replaced by Guard Primers and Crush Trigger, both of which appear to be faulty systems.

Stickied. I would like to edit later to make the list a bit more organized if that's okay. Thanks for gathering all this info!

Posted this already in the ID thread, but dunno if anyone checks that sooooo PSN: BeastOfFire Location: East Coast (NC) Main: Order-Sol Sub: Sol/Slayer/Axl Hoping to get some good games in, sometimes I can get some nice connections. Would be nice to get back into the scene, even if it's online now.

Shrug there's always PMs. Schedules don't have to line up exactly for there to be communication. But it is what it is. I'm not particularly dissatisfied with the end product.

Super late on this, but I would say that the HOS video is fine, given the target audience. It could use a little polish, but overall it gives good information for people who are trying to get into GG and are interested in the character. I do think that it was a bit strange that Brandino was helping with HOS though, given that I seem to remember him playing Millia back when he lived in NC. Surprised that he didn't think to contact me or any of the other more active HOS players...

This looks amazing. Can't wait for more information to pop up.

Rebellion playing now!

Why I say Ragna's pressure is bad: Ragna really has no way of making the opponent take a risk to counter him. This is because he really has nothing to punish someone for just blocking all day. His ways of breaking guard are obvious without meter (lol 6B), and now with the nerf to 6B's gatlings, if your mixup does get blocked, you can't do anything and you lose pressure completely. This would not be a problem if 6B were hard to block, buuuuut oh well. His options to reset pressure without meter are, again, obvious. You don't even need to risk using up-back until he pushes himself out of the effective range for his lows, which is why Barrier and IB Barrier are so good against him. The idea of trying to read your opponent and make the right decision based on that is sound in theory, but against someone who actually understands how Ragna operates, they won't be making the decisions that would give you the opening you need, and your attempt to "read" their actions will get you countered on reaction. With meter this changes drastically, but you're not gonna have 50 meter all the time, especially with the meter gain nerfs in CP. The reason I want old gatlings back (such as all his 6A gatlings) is to give him some flexibility in neutral. 5B-6A is his most damaging meterless combo route that works from 5B at somewhat reasonable ranges. It's most noticeable in pressure resets where you dash back in with 5B, since it results in a big combo whether it hits a grounded or an airborne opponent. This is the real reason that 6A received so many nerfs to its gatling routes in each revision; its anti air usage is irrelevant to those changes. In CS1, if you used this string and it was blocked, you could literally do anything you wanted afterwards. You could do a safe pressure reset/frametrap with 2C Fatal, you could go high/low, you could 6D to try and reset pressure completely, or you could JC it, which has its own applications. Now you can't even JC the damn move on block, which means your only option is to attempt a frametrap with a special. That is hot garbage in my opinion. Now you can't even use 5B-5C reliably due to the 5C hitbox nerf. It seems like they are trying to just weaken the character unnecessarily in the one area where he's actually good (neutral).

I was thinking more 22C DC -> DS DC -> etc, since that has more to do with proximity to the corner than which character you're doing it on.

I would expect it to be pretty good now still since 22C pickup midscreen can lead to a nice corner carry if you are the right distance from the corner and/or fighting the right character. Another post is forthcoming, Mash has already touched on some of my views regarding Ragna's pressure and why it isn't good, or really even solid. Just need to actually cobble together my thoughts on the situation as a whole.

Thing is, I don't see his pressure as being good. I would otherwise agree with you guys. Neutral, yes, he's awesome at neutral. But as soon as someone decides to just block his stuff and interrupt whenever you do anything slow/risky to regain pressure, his offense breaks down. This is my experience, anyway. As far as character concept, Ragna always reminds me of early interviews with Mori where he basically had the idea of making a 2D version of Soul Calibur, where the game was based upon the neutral game instead of advantageous pressure/oki situations. Hence why Ragna plays the way he does, super good neutral but overall most of his attacks are negative on block and the moves that aren't are slow or risky to do.

Sol's theme is also better in X than in XX, as is Eddie's.

I just don't get what the goal for Ragna's character is. There literally seems to be no positive to playing him offensively, and yet he's billed as a "rushdown" character by the game's own tutorial. He either needs a somewhat legitimate way to keep pressure, or better mixups. I personally prefer the former (probably cuz of being a HOS player), but it seems like he will continue to be the poster child for Mori's "ideal" of how the game should be played, and as such will continue to get bodied by characters who play outside of those rules, just like every prior game. I really wish they'd give back a lot of his old gatlings. Give me all the 6A gatlings from CS1 back please. That would literally fix the majority of my complaints. Also, give back the 6B gatlings too. Seriously, as slow as that overhead is, there's no excuse.

Random is a way to put it, I see it more as shenanigans. Tactics that only really seem to work when the other person doesn't know about them, or that cannot be relied upon in a consistent manner.

Yeah I was just kinda throwing out the fraudulence thing. I don't think you have to play that way regularly to win, but some of the stuff I see the strong players do seems that way. Example for me would be kogatan doing repeat IDs and trying to catch people with RC -> ID after getting one blocked. It just feels like his regular tools are so limited that against someone who knows how to fight the character, the stuff you have to do to win seems fraudulent.

He has very good zoning normals, but he loses to the actual legit zoners in the game, from my experience. Characters that actually control space well at a distance beat him at his own game. He also has problems with the really mobile characters who can just maneuver around him and then get into a better offensive position that he can't deal with. Incidentally, many of the characters in these two categories are some of the better characters in BB, and so you encounter them fairly often.

I think there's just a general aura of fraudulence that surrounds the character, which is why he always seems bad. If you try to play him in a 100% honest way, he sucks because of a lack of tools. So you have to be fraudulent to win with him.