Smoke is currently not tournament viable.
Let's take a look at his matchup chart vs. other top tier characters, shall we?
Cage: 4-6
Jax: 4-6
Kabal: 3-7
Kung Lao: 3-7
Sonya: 4-6
That is absolutely grim. I am stepping back from my role as a Smoke player in order to offer my take on this alleged "glitch".
I'm going to make a comparison here to Carrier Micro in Starcraft 1 vs. Starcraft 2. In Starcraft 1, there is a unit called the Carrier; it is a flagship that holds 8 small interceptors. the Carrier itself cannot attack, but the interceptors can. The Carrier shoots each interceptor out one at a time until they are all out, and stay out indefinitely as long as they are not destroyed. When the target is destroyed, they return to the carrier. With proper micromanagement, one can keep all of the carrier's interceptors outside of the carrier between battles and prevent them from re-entering the carrier. Some may call this a glitch, because it allows the carrier to send out all 8 interceptors to attack all at once, greatly increasing the damage they were capable of. I call it a feature. It forces the player to perform a large series of actions in a short number of time in order to make it work. Requires high "Actions per Minute", referred to as APM from now on. By committing to an action requiring such high APM, the player is sacrificing other aspects of their play in order to focus on doing this one key action.
The same is true for smoke's parry "glitch." I do not see it as a glitch; I see it as a feature. It gives smoke the armor he desperately needs, without making it stupid easy to use, such as other armors like bf2+blk. It is an armor that requires high APM to accomplish, but if accomplished it gives the opportunity for the player to inflict a large amount of spike damage on his opponent. Just like a Starcraft 1 carrier. And it still isn't even a good armor.
Where does Starcraft 2 come into play, you may ask? Well, let me tell you. In Starcraft 2, this famous "carrier micro" was stripped from the game. Carriers dropped to shit tier units because of it, they were (and still are) complete garbage that should essentially never be made in any situation. This is synonymous to Smoke's parry feature being banned. You are unjustly limiting actions that are otherwise extremely difficult to perform, and it is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction that has not been properly discussed prior to its banning.
By allowing smoke to use this feature, his bad matchups wouldn't even become better. He still has to hold the shake for 28 frames before he can cancel it, so it's not like he can use it to full combo parry Cage or some such nonsense. It's only use is on a whiffed dial string that hits high-high or high-mid that smoke ducks the first hit of, crouches, ex shakes at the first possible frame, and then just frame dashes out of, assuming that the gap between those two hits is 30 frames (lawl). But, oh wait! Smoke has a 9 frame 2 that he can use and combo off of anyways! So that blows the shit out of that idea.
This glitch is absolutely useless. It's only good on opponents with slow reflexes that cannot react to a shake on their jump in. Besides, it's abusable by anyone who know it exists. How deep is that jump in punch/kick gonna be? You've got no way of knowing. It's a complete guessing game that you have (let's say) only about a 1-in-15 chance of winning (counting frames there).
The glitch is too hard to perform to even make it useful. But, if somebody is ballsy enough to try it AND to hit something so ludicrous, why should they be punished with forfeiting their match? If it happened to me, this is exactly how I'd react:
Then I'd play out my matches and shake the guy (or girl)'s hand no matter what happened. Props to anyone that pulls this off AND can get a full combo into reset off of it OR time somebody out with it. You are truly a god of Smoke if that's even viable for you.
By banning this glitch all you are doing is nerfing the absoute highest spectrum of players, while keeping the scrubs where they stand.
