I don't play at the highest level, and very very few people actually do either. I almost never see people back dashing after blocking b1, and when they show me that they will and that they know that's an option, I start staggering b1. He used cat woman as the example and that's not an accident. Not every character is going to backdash half screen and get out of range of a follow up b1. The OS mb b3 is kinda lame. Sucks that people can get away with that.
As for 2231. I've made posts questioning whether it's actually plus 1 in the past because it's pretty shocking how frequently a character with a 7f d1 seem to beat my d1 even though I mash d1 after 2231. I don't know if that's an online issue or if my mashing just ain't cutting it or what.
I do agree with Gross that 2231 shouldn't be so close to neutral on block and also have a gap big enough to backdash and punish. It should either have the gap and be like plus 2 so that it actually acts as intended as a pressure tool, or be maybe 0 or +1 and have no gap imo.
His zoning outside of mb bf1, traited bf1 slow and fast, and perfectly reversal timed OCL in specific matches and situations is just not good, or at least not good enough for pure zoning to be a viable gameplan for GL.
His wakeup game with wall is so easy to stuff for many characters and doesn't advance him out of trouble in the corner, and definitely doesn't lead to anything on hit unless you mb it and even then it's just a get off me with slow startup.
His oki game and ambiguous setups are cool and absolutely oppressive against some characters, but many characters get out for free with true invincible wakeups, fast multi hitting armored wakeups, and even just wakeups that move them far enough quick enough to render the setups useless. And because he does low damage on max damage combos the meta has been to favor hardknockdowns and setups over max damage. Delayed wakeup is another wrinkle where it just seems like between good wakeups and the different delay timings, the GL ends up having to guess nearly as much as the player that got knocked down.
And I don't think oki should be mindless and autopilot, the GL should have to be creative and switch it up, and bait stuff, but I feel like oki is supposed to be his strongest aspect outside of footsies (which Gross sort of showed aren't what they seem), and I just don't think his oki is so amazing to justify his other issues.
We know his backdash is literally unusable. I never backdash unless it's an accident. His forward dash covers a lot of ground and is a nice movement tool but because it's so long, it takes forever for mb roll to come out so in a way he'd be better off having a worse dash in because then mb roll would work more in the matchups where he absolutely has no other options to close space while getting zoned out. His walk speed in general is very good and between is nice back walk and b1, GL is deadly against impatient players who space attacks poorly or jump Willy nilly.
I used to be really bummed on his lift special because of it's issues AAing and some weird inconsistencies, but honestly , his d2 is such a good AA and even j1 is a good air to air that I've just adjusted my play to suit what he's got and he's still really good as a footsie, read react AA character in that sense.
I don't know. I think GL has been upplayed since day 1 when people were eating f3s on wakeup a lot and people have just continued on this idea that he's really good but not great. I've seen many people have him as top 10 and that's just simply insane.
I'd say at this point in the game GL is probably what....between 17-20 or something if you were to rank characters from best to worst and he actually got worse this patch as those characters around his level got better (beetle, firestorm) and the characters that got nerfed didn't get nerfed enough to fall below him. So though he received no changes, he's worse off now. And I think he will fall further in a sense because more and more average/good players really are learning how to fight him.
I still love playing GL and will continue to main him but I'm not trying to hear people say he's top ten. I don't think he's absolutely terrible, but he's closer to bad than good to me if we are going to say he's average.
