Lasher has more than just "Oh look i'm jumping all over the place!" he has everything that makes Takeda a solid character, he has good damage, some characters can not handle DF1 like AT ALL and it is special cancelable into a full combo. You HAVE to respect the space that this character controls which is damn near the whole screen. There is literally no character in the whole game that has normals that can control the space that Lasher does. You talk about having to play the character's game, that's exactly what Lasher does to you, he forces you to play his near full screen footsies game that most of the cast can't answer.
Hellfire WOULD be in Tier 1 if his lack of good defense was made up for in a significant way. He's got the setplay yea but in some matchups, his armor being the way it is makes for some TERRIBLE times. He is on the very cusp of Tier 1 (he's pretty much the best character in Tier 2)
Ethereal could be Tier 1, i'll have to look at that.
Konjurer is NOT trash tier. Holy crap. Okay, ignore the SOMETIMES having whiffing issues on facehugger (they aren't extremely common and are only common in the places they should be, jumping and low profiling.) he has solid space control, some quite disgusting setplay and just really good buttons that Alien has. There is absolutely no way in hell that this character is Tier 4.
Smoke suffers from a lot of people just not playing the matchup right. They let B2 walk all over them from fullscreen when there's plenty of people that can answer it. Smoke bomb on block isn't blown up nearly as much as it should be. Don't get me wrong, Smoke is dumb and super good but I don't think he's QUITE among the best in the game.
Cyrax having good setplay but only okay neutral (yes it's only okay, it's not complete trash but we can't ignore the problems with it, I should know, Leatherface has the same problems but worse) makes him struggle in a good amount of matchups (Mileena, Smoke, Liu Kang) All in all, the character has potential and I am 100% behind the "cyrax isn't trash" train but Tier 2 is a bit optimistic.
Low Pokes into special, while cancerous as hell, isn't going to bring Hat Trick to Tier 2. At the end of the day, it's a gimmick on block. His oki is pretty good but in the neutral he doesn't have a ton of meterless tools to help him out like Tempest and Buzzsaw have. In the corner he certainly becomes scary after a knockdown but we can't ignore his problems.
Metallic has Tremor's solid tools and loops you back into needing to eat those tools with restand. That's most certainly on par with Flex and IA Quake imo. Also huge damage, like, unbelievably huge damage, for no meter.
Unbreakable doesn't have that many risks. Literally he has two. B2 and Slide. Everything else is safe, plus, or neutral on block. He can slow down the game and make people think twice on oki. He also has the only one bar armored launcher which means he has the best armored move in the game (that isn't an over-exaggeration, there's a reason NRS took them out of the game)
Warrior has dirt, but the only problem with Warrior (and it's a fucking big one) is that his dependence upon meter is possibly the most out of any character in this game. He is absolutely USELESS without meter and that wouldn't be so bad if he had an actually good way to build that meter. He's never close enough to actually get anything off of his plus frames. The only thing he has going for him in the neutral is good armor. Which is fine for the most part but that armor no longer launches, which is a huge deal considering he actually just lived and died off of counter poking with EX Flip and trying to get you in the loop off of that. I can take another look at him but he honestly just doesn't get to play MKX for more than half the match.
FINALLY! Sorcerer. Now I know I said bad defense was holding back Hellfire but here's the thing. Sorcerer has way more to make up for that than Hellfire does. Sorcerer forces you to not have breaker throughout the entire match. If he lands one hit on you, meterlessly he gets a free purple rune and just strips you of your meter entirely. Secondly, armor rune IS THE SINGLE BEST MOVE IN THE GAME. Full screen, pretty much only one character in the game has a consistent answer to it (full auto) in the corner GOOD FUCKING LUCK. It's worse than Crystaline being in your face. Some characters have literally 0 answers to it in the corner other than just guess 10 times in a row. You can only guess right so many times. You say Cyrax has the best setplay in the game, Sorcerer is right next to that. Not only that but outside of knockdown situations, Quan's defense is actually pretty good. Backdash is godlike, pokes are really solid, his ONLY problem is on knockdown. That's his literal only problem. Everywhere else he is air tight.
