I will say it. I'm sick of Wraith trying to make Johny out to defend Johny everytime we bring out his negatives. I want Johny to be a character but he's not. A character can win with Johny granted they have skill but he has a lot of flaws. With most of his specials being useless, his whiffing issues, and projectiles. It's annoying.
I wanna see a patch soon. I still love Johny Cage as a character but I recently picked up Sonya because I got tired of people uppercutting me to death and only blocking low because of Johnny's very poor mixup game
I feel you, but at the same time I also feel like we have to see the good we have in him.
I been playing Johnny exclusively since launch, and aside from the obvious flaw in not having any worthwhile Krushing Blows I feel like what's missing the most is a conditioning tool. I'm not talking mixups here. I have no problem fighting most of the cast but when someone competent comes along playing Geras, Erron, Sub-Zero, you know the big bois - It's just an uphill battle for me personally. They don't respect my kit. They don't care about the nutpunch because all I can get is a poke before they do. We actually have some of the highest plus frames in our base strings - but we just can't make much use of them due to it overall being much more worthwhile to just crouch all day.
I will say that we have a really good hit confirmable string in f344 and this works wonders a lot of the time. This is the only thing that's been a sort of conditioning tool. I like the somewhat fast recovery of f3 alone and its advancing nature. If people tend to just crouch block I stagger the string a lot. When they start poking I just do the string. If they don't poke I'm at a slight disadvantage which is really good. However, skilled players see through this after a while and simply neutral crouch, but this is where f4 comes in. There are instances where people challenge f4 due to it being 14 frames and that's when thing get a little rough, and you dont get that much from it without making a hard read and cancelling into Nutpunch.
And let's not underestimate how impactful both f3 and f4 is against Noob's b1,1+3 (I think that's the command?). We get full combo punishes while others don't which is a big thing to be honest. He can space it a bit causing f4 to whiff and then you're fucked, but that requires some very precise spatial awareness.
And when f4 into NP whiffs but you end up triggering the Krushing Blow instead <3