Best and Worst Characters in Beta

[SaltShaker]

Then idk what you’re arguing against. If you truly acknowledge that he’s a ridiculous character, then that’s that.

Ridiculous in what sense? Ridiculous in the sense of pretty much all the characters are ridiculous in one way or another? Absolutely. Ridiculous in the sense that he's superior to all or most of the other characters? Nah not at all.

Idk how many people have been saying he’s a “godlike broken character”, I actually don’t think I’ve seen anyone say that. Not that it hasn’t happened, I just haven’t seen it.

But, he definitely IS an overwhelming character to deal with especially when he has his puppet Sento out.

Not sure what you've been seeing, but there have been plenty of people crying to the moon about OP/Broken/etc. Johnny got some of it too, who also is fine imo, as no one has seen anything problematic on a game that literally hasn't released yet or even has shown the roster. The "overwhelming" part is going to lead to what I'm saying next.

Hardly any gaps ≠ no gaps. But also, even if there was a ton of gaps, that doesn’t mean they’re super easy to punish. Because all Kenshi has to do is block when there is a gap. You try to punish, then get blown up. Aside from that, the gaps aren’t super easy to read. Most of the time the only reason people find the gaps is because they’re mashing in block stun. Y’all don’t seem to understand the extent of what Kenshi is capable of which is fine. The problem is when you act like it doesn’t exist for whatever reason.

What you're saying, tbh just sounds like a lack of experience. You yourself state you're a lab monster. I feel like a lot of your comments here won't age well once you're in the lab working out the counter tech. I played 20 hours of the beta, exclusively Kenshi and Johnny. They both are strong imo, but both appear to be well balanced. To me, 5 out of 6 beta characters were very strong, which is the goal in balance. You make statements like "Y’all don’t seem to understand the extent of what Kenshi is capable of which is fine", but I do. I was DOING a lot of the setups you saw others do online. I can give you hard to blocks, armor breakers, frame traps, etc. on the spot. I had a 72% win rate. But while playing the character I also saw the weaknesses that most people, because they don't have a lab and barely/never fought Kenshi, were allowing to happen. Any character will look much better if opponents don't punish them correctly or don't even know how or when to punish them correctly. All of that resolves as people learn MUs over time.

Here is a good litmus test. Do you think it’s completely fair game, or perhaps broken to be able to attack with Sento while Kenshi is blocking?

The obvious answer is of course it's fair. Have you never seen a puppet character attack while the character blocks before lol? Kenshi MK1 isn't the first, and won't be the last.

It's a beta with 6 characters and 4 kameos, where almost all of them look strong. Overreacting to a pre-released game is a MUCH bigger issue. A good and recent example of this is in SF6 everyone from online warrior to elite pro had Manon in their Top 8, many Top 5, in June. After a few weeks people started to find a lot of her "strong dominating pressure" wasn't real and/or had interrupt gaps, making it difficult for her to establish her game by month two. Now the debate is whether she is bottom 5. That's all in the span of two months. Imagine if she had been nerfed like people were crying to do nonstop the first few weeks? Same situation here. Without MU Exp and lab exp things appear a lot differently than what they are fairly often.

 

[Immortal]

Some of you seem to be unwilling to do so, which is fine. Y’all just haven’t seen enough evidence to convince you yet, which is understandable. If I hadn’t seen enough evidence I’d be in the same boat. In due time, as they say.

You assume a lot about us knowing very little in reality which is weird.

You have no idea how much we have seen. Most of us actually played A LOT of Kenshi(i played only him, throu stress test and beta), which you didn't by your own admission. Maybe our own experience with the character + others we seen play him made us think what we think and wrote here.

Again there is no facts here, nobody is right or wrong atm, we can comeback to this once the game released but for now we disagree with your opinion and that's also fine.

 

[Eji1700]

The obvious answer is of course it's fair.

Can uh..can we stop worrying about "fair" in a tag fighter please. It's a crappy metric to begin with, and the amount of "unfair" shit we're going to see is absurd. Sub already has clone throw setups, we've seen the liu/jax unblockable (which is maybe not as real as it looks but still nasty), johnny has all sorts of nonsense, and so on.

I will 100% agree that kenshi is hardly the first, or so far, the best puppet fighter. Blazblue, JoJo, GuiltyGear have all had waaaay more oppressive puppet charcters (and they've found ways to keep them gross but still balanced).

 

[Rude]

If you time it right, there aren’t very many gaps, plain and simple. Idk what the point is of being delusional and not acknowledging how ridiculous the character is. No one is saying remove the puppet or anything, lol. He’s just clearly a ridiculous character. Again, not sure why that fact would make someone angry.

Stop! In the name of the law!

 

[Deleted member 59910]

Ridiculous in what sense? Ridiculous in the sense of pretty much all the characters are ridiculous in one way or another? Absolutely. Ridiculous in the sense that he's superior to all or most of the other characters? Nah not at all.




Not sure what you've been seeing, but there have been plenty of people crying to the moon about OP/Broken/etc. Johnny got some of it too, who also is fine imo, as no one has seen anything problematic on a game that literally hasn't released yet or even has shown the roster. The "overwhelming" part is going to lead to what I'm saying next.




What you're saying, tbh just sounds like a lack of experience. You yourself state you're a lab monster. I feel like a lot of your comments here won't age well once you're in the lab working out the counter tech. I played 20 hours of the beta, exclusively Kenshi and Johnny. They both are strong imo, but both appear to be well balanced. To me, 5 out of 6 beta characters were very strong, which is the goal in balance. You make statements like "Y’all don’t seem to understand the extent of what Kenshi is capable of which is fine", but I do. I was DOING a lot of the setups you saw others do online. I can give you hard to blocks, armor breakers, frame traps, etc. on the spot. I had a 72% win rate. But while playing the character I also saw the weaknesses that most people, because they don't have a lab and barely/never fought Kenshi, were allowing to happen. Any character will look much better if opponents don't punish them correctly or don't even know how or when to punish them correctly. All of that resolves as people learn MUs over time.



The obvious answer is of course it's fair. Have you never seen a puppet character attack while the character blocks before lol? Kenshi MK1 isn't the first, and won't be the last.

It's a beta with 6 characters and 4 kameos, where almost all of them look strong. Overreacting to a pre-released game is a MUCH bigger issue. A good and recent example of this is in SF6 everyone from online warrior to elite pro had Manon in their Top 8, many Top 5, in June. After a few weeks people started to find a lot of her "strong dominating pressure" wasn't real and/or had interrupt gaps, making it difficult for her to establish her game by month two. Now the debate is whether she is bottom 5. That's all in the span of two months. Imagine if she had been nerfed like people were crying to do nonstop the first few weeks? Same situation here. Without MU Exp and lab exp things appear a lot differently than what they are fairly often.

“…to attack with Sento while blocking” lol. He is no Quan Chi or Zod. He’s a puppet character. Moves independently, blocks, everything… I’m sure Juggs and the majority of MK community are not prepared for a puppet character, as I said before.
The crazy thing is that he’s acting like he knows everything about the character, even the gaps, while me, you, Immortal and others played all the stress test and beta with Kenshi. You can interrupt the “Sento 2, F22” inside the F22 with a nutpunch for example, while Sento is still recovering (look how many times Rewind did that during the set against Sonic Fox).

 

[Juggs]

Ridiculous in what sense? Ridiculous in the sense of pretty much all the characters are ridiculous in one way or another? Absolutely. Ridiculous in the sense that he's superior to all or most of the other characters? Nah not at all.




Not sure what you've been seeing, but there have been plenty of people crying to the moon about OP/Broken/etc. Johnny got some of it too, who also is fine imo, as no one has seen anything problematic on a game that literally hasn't released yet or even has shown the roster. The "overwhelming" part is going to lead to what I'm saying next.




What you're saying, tbh just sounds like a lack of experience. You yourself state you're a lab monster. I feel like a lot of your comments here won't age well once you're in the lab working out the counter tech. I played 20 hours of the beta, exclusively Kenshi and Johnny. They both are strong imo, but both appear to be well balanced. To me, 5 out of 6 beta characters were very strong, which is the goal in balance. You make statements like "Y’all don’t seem to understand the extent of what Kenshi is capable of which is fine", but I do. I was DOING a lot of the setups you saw others do online. I can give you hard to blocks, armor breakers, frame traps, etc. on the spot. I had a 72% win rate. But while playing the character I also saw the weaknesses that most people, because they don't have a lab and barely/never fought Kenshi, were allowing to happen. Any character will look much better if opponents don't punish them correctly or don't even know how or when to punish them correctly. All of that resolves as people learn MUs over time.



The obvious answer is of course it's fair. Have you never seen a puppet character attack while the character blocks before lol? Kenshi MK1 isn't the first, and won't be the last.

It's a beta with 6 characters and 4 kameos, where almost all of them look strong. Overreacting to a pre-released game is a MUCH bigger issue. A good and recent example of this is in SF6 everyone from online warrior to elite pro had Manon in their Top 8, many Top 5, in June. After a few weeks people started to find a lot of her "strong dominating pressure" wasn't real and/or had interrupt gaps, making it difficult for her to establish her game by month two. Now the debate is whether she is bottom 5. That's all in the span of two months. Imagine if she had been nerfed like people were crying to do nonstop the first few weeks? Same situation here. Without MU Exp and lab exp things appear a lot differently than what they are fairly often.

Who is “overreacting”? Lmao, calling a strong character strong is “overreacting” when that’s your main I guess. Can’t have YOUR character being called strong, nope, that’s just blasphemy!

But anyway, you failed the test and said all I needed to see. Downplaying beta characters is very strange. But to each their own I suppose ¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[Juggs]

“…to attack with Sento while blocking” lol. He is no Quan Chi or Zod. He’s a puppet character. Moves independently, blocks, everything… I’m sure Juggs and the majority of MK community are not prepared for a puppet character, as I said before.
The crazy thing is that he’s acting like he knows everything about the character, even the gaps, while me, you, Immortal and others played all the stress test and beta with Kenshi. You can interrupt the “Sento 2, F22” inside the F22 with a nutpunch for example, while Sento is still recovering (look how many times Rewind did that during the set against Sonic Fox).

Yes, and I’m saying you all aren’t nearly as good as you think you are, clearly. Either that, or you’re just downplaying your main. Which is fine, a lot of people do it.

 

[SaltShaker]

Can uh..can we stop worrying about "fair" in a tag fighter please. It's a crappy metric to begin with, and the amount of "unfair" shit we're going to see is absurd. Sub already has clone throw setups, we've seen the liu/jax unblockable (which is maybe not as real as it looks but still nasty), johnny has all sorts of nonsense, and so on.

I will 100% agree that kenshi is hardly the first, or so far, the best puppet fighter. Blazblue, JoJo, GuiltyGear have all had waaaay more oppressive puppet charcters (and they've found ways to keep them gross but still balanced).

I consider it "fair" in the sense that most characters are doing similar levels of dirt in different ways. Like it's fair that mostly everyone is unfair in their own way.

And in GGST I played the Axl/Zato duo, so I breathe the puppet LOL. Kenshi is like MK9 Sheeva tier compared to Zato.

“…to attack with Sento while blocking” lol. He is no Quan Chi or Zod. He’s a puppet character. Moves independently, blocks, everything… I’m sure Juggs and the majority of MK community are not prepared for a puppet character, as I said before.
The crazy thing is that he’s acting like he knows everything about the character, even the gaps, while me, you, Immortal and others played all the stress test and beta with Kenshi. You can interrupt the “Sento 2, F22” inside the F22 with a nutpunch for example, while Sento is still recovering (look how many times Rewind did that during the set against Sonic Fox).

Yea I think there's gonna be a transition stage or culture shock on puppet characters with MK1 Kenshi. Especially considering it's the first one MK/Inj has had.

 

[SaltShaker]

Who is “overreacting”? Lmao, calling a strong character strong is “overreacting” when that’s your main I guess. Can’t have YOUR character being called strong, nope, that’s just blasphemy!

But anyway, you failed the test and said all I needed to see. Downplaying beta characters is very strange. But to each their own I suppose ¯\(ツ)/¯

I'm pretty certain I have called Kenshi a "strong character" in every post I made.

But I guess these beta characters need to be nerfed because we've seen all we need to see and fleshed out the MUs, concluding he is too oppressive.

 

[Rude]

Who is “overreacting”? Lmao, calling a strong character strong is “overreacting” when that’s your main I guess. Can’t have YOUR character being called strong, nope, that’s just blasphemy!

But anyway, you failed the test and said all I needed to see. Downplaying beta characters is very strange. But to each their own I suppose ¯\(ツ)/¯

What's even stranger is up-playing them and telling the people that played him how their character works.

Man. We need smarter mods. Bring back Eldriken. :-(

 

[Juggs]

What's even stranger is up-playing them and telling the people that played him how their character works.

Man. We need smarter mods. Bring back Eldriken. :-(

Yup, calling a strong character strong is definitely “upplaying them”. What a smart analysis from the big brain Rude that everyone knows and loves

 

[CipherJ]

JAFO here. I watched quite a few streams during beta.

Saw a Kitana player trading matches with Foxy while he was using Sub. The player was very good, but had to put in work. Her fan sweep was key in keeping clones in check. She did not seem too under powered.

Hayatei used Kenshi in some streams and was getting 42% combos with puppet. He was playing vs a good Johnny and was keeping pace with him.

The Li Meis I watched play seemed to have difficulty opening up skilled opponents. This included Foxy when he used her. Sonic tested her out and said she is not for him.

 

[DarksydeDash]

I primarily played Kitana in the beta and had no one else play her in any of the matches I played. That side, I feel like the kameos we had just didn't fit her so far. I feel like the Scorpion or Sektor Kameo have lots of potential with her though based on the the fact that the sector kameo is a tracking launcher, and Scorpion potentially had an overhead + the armored pull back.

Frost felt like there is potential for orb setups and made it possible to combo.into wind bomb, Jax was huge damage and potential unblockable setups, Kano was pressure and whiffing air Square wave while calling knives to make it safe, Sonya was huge corner carry and air combo extensions.

The entire time I was playing, I desperately wanted to be in training mode to experiment.

 

[mrapchem]

But about Kitana though - she hits hard as hell, especially at 12:30 in this video:

 

[Shania Twain]

I personally thought Kitana played well, however, I do not like the back forward motion for the fan throw. Sonya seemed to be the best Kameo in the Beta for me for her. It also seemed difficult for me to get her out of the corner. She really needs the Forward Forward motion for it like old times or Down Forward. I did encounter a couple of Kenshi's but it seemed they largely were zoning. Sub-Zero and Frost seemed to be who I encountered the most. Lots of Johnny Cages. I will say this....nearly all matches I played online felt close. I rarely saw or even used Jax. I think this is where Kameos will be possible game changers. I can see Jax maybe being used more maybe with a character with a teleport move which we did not have in the beta.

 

[haketh]

It feels very foolhardy to judge character strength at all off of a beta where people didn['t have access to training mode and didn't know a lick about how to defend against anything. Offense always progresses faster than defense (Which is why the calls for 3 out of 5 from jump are unwarranted) and no one was using things like Upblock and only used Armor on wakeup generally.

A better question is what did people have fun with in the beta.

 

[chrisisnice]

It feels very foolhardy to judge character strength at all off of a beta where people didn['t have access to training mode and didn't know a lick about how to defend against anything. Offense always progresses faster than defense (Which is why the calls for 3 out of 5 from jump are unwarranted) and no one was using things like Upblock and only used Armor on wakeup generally.

A better question is what did people have fun with in the beta.

The point was which character was best in beta - it was not asking who will be best on live. I think we have the ability to have an opinion who we felt the best was in beta given that we will never have access to it again.

 

[haketh]

The point was which character was best in beta - it was not asking who will be best on live. I think we have the ability to have an opinion who we felt the best was in beta given that we will never have access to it again.

We can never truly figure that eh? People had three days and no way to truly figure stuff out lol. So many people for example let that fill Kenshi B2 string rock despite it having a gap the size of a state.

 

[Eddy Wang]

ppl saying Kitana is weak, i honestly felt like she was the most technical character of the beta, and isn't for lacking options, just time to mature and a proper training mode.

 

[kabelfritz]

ppl saying Kitana is weak, i honestly felt like she was the most technical character of the beta, and isn't for lacking options, just time to mature and a proper training mode.

i was mostly impressed by her range when facing her in the beta, other chars didnt have that reach by far.

 

[Juggs]

We can never truly figure that eh? People had three days and no way to truly figure stuff out lol. So many people for example let that fill Kenshi B2 string rock despite it having a gap the size of a state.

You can absolutely have an opinion on which characters you felt were the strongest in the beta. People don’t seem to understand that tier lists are ALWAYS subjective. Even for games that have been out for 20+ years, the tier list is still subjective.

I obviously was being hyperbolic when I was saying that it was a “fact” that Kenshi was ridiculous, which of course upset some people. But it’s been longer than 3 days that some people have had with Kenshi and the other characters like Sub, Kang and Kitana. Aside from that, you absolutely can say, within the confines of the beta and all the limits everyone had, like no training mode and lack of time, based in those limitations, which characters seemed to be the best and worst? To say it’s impossible to determine can only be true if the question was “which are the best and worst characters of the beta characters in the full game”. That’s definitely something we can’t know. Also, just because someone says for instance that they felt Kenshi was the best and that Kitana was the worst, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Kenshi was the best and that Kitana was the worst. Again, these things will always be based on opinions. Even with the more legitimate tier lists that are based on MU numbers, the MU numbers are subjective. Which in turn still makes the tier list based off of that subjective.

But I guess these beta characters need to be nerfed because we've seen all we need to see and fleshed out the MUs, concluding he is too oppressive.

See, you’re catching on, now you’re being hyperbolic too! Because of course, no one here (afaik) has suggested any beta characters need to be nerfed or have said much about MU’s, and certainly nothing about them being fleshed out.

Anyway, glad you came around. You complete me.

 

[Bloodfang]

With Kitana, just B24Fanlift J112 does like 29% damage. She definitely does have some easy damage and I think she'll be pretty sick with setting traps and her other tools after combos to stifle wakeups and such. That said I really wish Fan Toss was DF1 instead of BF1 personally, lol. On a non-Kitana note though I'm hoping when we get full game my man Scorpion is as good as Sub-Zero 'cause damn. lmao.

 

[Lex Luthor II]

Sub-Zero was probably the easiest to use, so I’m thinking people were closer to playing him how he should be played than other characters by the end of the beta. It takes 5 seconds to see he had a mid, an overhead, a low that launches with kameo, and some zoning and mobility tools. 5 more seconds to see he has two really easy ways to convert off of any stray freeze. And just keeping it a buck, people are out of practice or just panic with the ice klone. Sub is very intuitive and pairs well with every kameo (some more than others), but I don’t know if he will be better than Kenshi or Johnny when we all learn what we’re doing. It’s possible though, I’m very happy with him.

Anyone remember if Sub Zero's overhead can cancel into Frost's low hit for a combo? I remember you can low into it, but cant remember if he can overhead into it. Unsafe of course, but still

 

[Dankster Morgan]

Anyone remember if Sub Zero's overhead can cancel into Frost's low hit for a combo? I remember you can low into it, but cant remember if he can overhead into it. Unsafe of course, but still

Honestly I never tried. Wouldn’t surprise me if you could. Raw B3 won’t connect into deadly vapors but it will with Frost low thing, so B2 could be the same.

 

[mrapchem]

Anyone remember if Sub Zero's overhead can cancel into Frost's low hit for a combo? I remember you can low into it, but cant remember if he can overhead into it. Unsafe of course, but still

You can. I did it.