Good stuff coming in. A couple of points I would like to make:
1) It's really disheartening to see Paulo talking about "managing your Venom", because there really aren't a lot of choices in Venom management at this time. You don't have control of when your Venom hit ends or for how long to use it, so the idea of "management" essentially comes down to either Venom use or Venom escalation, and it's pretty much universally agreed that Venom level 2 is very risky and Venom level 3 flat out isn't worth it unless you're going for a win. That's it.
I actually like the fact that Bane's trait can be a liability, that's fine, but the problem is that 2/3rds of the time the liability aspect either slightly or massively offsets any gains. Nobody else has to deal with this - their traits are 100% Awesome-O, so for goodness sake if you're going to add a liability aspect to his trait please don't make it a net negative. Again, I want to reiterate that if EVERY other character had a button that activated Level 3 Venom (with all of it's current liabilities), the only time you would see it is for a guaranteed combo that would end the match or a Hail Mary. And this is supposed to be an integral part of Bane's gameplan. Yeah.
You can bet your buns that if Bane had Superman's trait or Doomsday's trait (actual good stuff that these characters build their gameplan around) I would be riding that trait button like it was the Pony Express. We all would.
2) Here's an actual scenario you can watch at Civil War 5 - one that I feel demonstrates Bane's weakness - EMP Tom Brady is playing Aquaman on Atlantis, gets a life advantage, and then runs to the corner of the arena in order to meter-burn the corner interactable and blast his opponent backwards. It's a solid strategy and very hard to deal with and requires an opponent to have good zoning and tactics.
Unless you're Bane, in which case you literally have no way to deal with it because you have to pump L3 Venom to have any hope of getting through and breaking his armor to stop the interactable. If you decide to do this, you will have six seconds to answer Aquaman and get him out of that corner - which is not exactly guaranteed - BUT, for 7 seconds afterwards regardless, Aquaman will be able to drain out over 80 percent of your life on a full combo while you will be unable to mount any sort of effective offense whatsoever. Otherwise, you're going to get zoned until you move in and eat 20% damage from the interactable. Yowsers.
The developers did not seem to realize that superior opponents do not leave their rival with a lot of choices. That's the whole point. To make one of Bane's answers carry debilitating penalties when other characters simply DO NOT HAVE these problems is one of Bane's weaknesses. And his strengths do not make up for it. (his fun factor certainly does, but that's neither here nor there)
Bane has no answers to certain setups right now that don't require *massive* risks with Venom levels and full commitment to bad moves. A lot of Bane's strengths are due to the vast majority of people not having the knowledge to do easy escapes to his wakeup game (and really, guys, most characters do have decent answers to our wakeup game - notice I do not say great answers, but they are not nearly as much at our mercy as this forum likes to believe and the wakeup game is one of the harder aspects of I:GAU for new players in my humble opinion). I spent some time in practice and was shocked by how often my setups were getting stuffed by wakeup moves, even with timing variances. Players will eventually add these moves to their gameplan. As time goes by, Bane's wakeup/oki pressure against good players is going to get weaker, not better.
I know that this probably sounds very doom and gloom and that's not the case. I enjoy Bane and think that he's pretty good. The problems start occurring when you play someone who isn't a novice with the character - who has put in their matches and actually knows what Bane is capable of and has a plan for dealing with him. That's when you really start noticing that the lack of trait control and the limitations of some of his moves make him inferior. I would like to see that changed.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
