Ok incoming essay on my thoughts on Mileena's gameplay. Sorry in advance.
I've been playing her online a lot, and even though I've gotten quite good, I sadly don't think Mileena is very good this time around. She's super fun to play but a lot of characters literally shut her down completely due to her poor range and few tools to get in.
First up, she's great up close with some cool mixups and I've run into some people that have no idea what's happening when I get in. But after a while she's very easy to predict. Most of her strings are overhead and after you learn that, her moves are very punishable. 12 is great but has a gap that's very easy to react, and even if you try to use a Kameo with a low for mixup, it's still super punishable on block. Baraka literally punishes my 12 before I even try to mixup after, every single time lol. Plus her fast normals are all high, and her only mid starter is 13 frames and gets shut down by many characters when the low poke wars start. I don't know many other characters' frame data, but I sure get beat with their mids every time after low pokes. Range is also not great. 4, Jumping 1 and 2 specifically are mind-boggling bad, and for a character that needs to get in she doesn't have great advancing normals.
Now when your opponent knows how to counter her normal mixups (which to my experience, it seems they are quite easy to react to) or just walk back cause her range is not great, that's where all her issues start. In a kast with so many full screen projectiles, she's just not easy to get in. Especially with characters like Kenshi, Liu Kang, Shang Tsung, Rain, they can easily just keep her away and spam projectiles. And when you try to get in with roll or telekick, you still get stumped because they're so slow and punishable. I mean ball roll gets beaten by most other special moves that keep you out, like Kenshi's push or Sub Zero's clone charge as well as slide. And if you can't get in, you're out of options as her projectile stupidly enough has the range of Kenshi's normals -.- Her ex-sai also costs 2 meters and sure it combos after, but in a game with so many
normal projectiles that combo, it should absolutely not cost 2 merers. I feel like they had an idea of how they wanted her to play, but she wasn't tested enough to see if her tools to get in are strong enough. Or whether she can actually hold her own with mid-screen projectiles.
But the fun with ball roll doesn't end here. It gets beaten even by jump kicks or even normals sometimes. I will walk back to whiff my opponent's attacks and when I roll to punish, I actually get hit out of it by normals. Surely that's not how it's supposed to work right? I remember back in MK9 and MKX days (Idk about 11 cause she was too shit to pick up), I used roll punish jumping opponents all the time, and this time around it feels like they made it reeeaally weak. Even if you space it to whiff and get close, its recovery is super slow and you get comboed or poked before you can pressure. It's just not even worth using outside combos with how punishable and easy to react it is.
Telekick is plain useless. 21 startup frames for telekick down and 31 frames telekick up is utter trash. On top of that, their tracking is absolutely horrendous, I mean they will whiff a
jumping opponent! The only time you should use raw telekick with how punishable it is, should be when they get jump-excited, and it will whiff literally the only time you should be using it! And not only that, when you try and armor punish opponents that attack you when you get up...you guessed it! It also whiffs standing normals too when they are slightly advancing. Man I miss MK9/X days when telekick was a great tool to punish jumping opponents, into air sai, into roll, into combo.
Up telekick I never use because it's even worse. It only combos from 2 of her normals stupidly enough, and 31 frames is not it. Even if you try to punish jumping opponents, it's so slow that by the moment you react, your opponent is already down and you're
47 frames in recovery lol. But then again I use Scorpion kameo that combos well with her ex roll so I never even bother spending meter on up-telekick.
Air ball is ok in combos but again the range is so bad that a lot of the time it whiffs jumping opponents when you jump-kick-react them out of it. Ex air-ball I've never used cause again it's super punishable on block, and it doesn't even combo unless you hold it. Which would would anyone ever not block that?
Maybe I'm just not that great and I can't figure out how to use her properly this time around lol. My stats on KL aren't terrible (30W-12L) and I hope I'm not being a Debbie Downer, but I'm just baffled on some of the choices they made for her. She kinda feels unfinished to me with how often her attacks whiff or get beaten by other characters. I also made a quick video with a bug I kept running into online:
