I'm currently 120th on the ranked leaderboards on PS4 with only Kano and I'm hoping to break top 100 today. It'd make me the only Kano in top 100 who only uses Kano lol.
Kano is a good character who isn't unusable, but I do believe that against higher level competition that knows how to abuse his shortcomings, it's pretty uphill. His risk/reward is just so much more lopsided compared to the rest of the cast, and I'm not just talking about the obvious top tiers.
From up close, the safest mid option he has is his retreating B1, but in most matchups giving your opponent more room to breathe is exactly what you don't want to do as Kano.
Thankfully, Kano's D4 option select into Lumbar Check is his savior up close imo. Even with this though I'd say that Kano is a character that is good at mixing and Oki, but other characters are better at it and don't have the short-comings in neutral or up close that Kano has.
This all might come off a bit pessimistic, but it's also realistic. I'll say again though, Kano isn't horrible and he actually does pretty well against characters like Cetrion who some characters struggle against. Many of these things I'm saying only apply to the higher levels of competition. Once the dust settles though, I think in the
current meta he is realistically going to be lower-mid tier or low tier.
After ruminating on it, I think a few small changes could help Kano out big time (I'm gonna be making some Baraka comparisons here, since he's another character I play).
All of his safe, confirmable strings are highs, but his low pokes don't give enough advantage to consistently jail opponents into blocking the highs, and Kano gets d1 spammed all day as a result. If his d1 or d3 had something like 14 frames of advantage (like Baraka's d3), then he could more reliably transition into his high attacks up close.
Additionally, speeding his OH up to 20 frames would be fair. That's just on the edge of reactable, and is balanced by the fact that his f2 low is unsafe.
If these changes aren't enough, speeding up his b3 would help immensely. Baraka's f4 is a 12 frame advancing mid that's safe and leads into a KB. So, by comparison, it wouldn't be crazy to make Kano's b3 12 frames.
I feel any 2 of these changes could bump him up a tier, and even with all 3 together he'd be worse than Baraka and other high-tiers.
Dude, the speeding up of B3 idea is probably the best buff idea I've heard so far for Kano. 12f would be a Christmas miracle, but personally if it were even 14f startup it would make me so happy. The move is good, but the fact that it's so slow makes it so it's only good when used paired up with a quick dash from a distance.
It would also give Kano a tool against opponents with good back-walk speeds who abuse Kano's shortcomings from mid-range in neutral. At the moment there are some characters with good pushback on their moves/strings that are allowed to throw out something hit-confirmable against Kano and retreat safely away to try again unless the Kano player wants to take a radical risk with something punishable to reach them. B3 and B4 are currently okay for this, but again, the risk/reward and the spacing/advantage afterward is largely in the favor of the opponent attempting to whiff punish or out-neutral Kano.
This is my current wishlist for fixes and buffs. I really don't think they are too unreasonable.
Possible Kano Fixes:
- Fix the whiff issues on F1 (whiffs on some crouch blocking opponents).
- Fix the whiff issues with the second hit of 11 (whiffs on some crouch blocking opponents).
Possible Kano buffs:
- Slightly speed up F4
- Slightly speed up B3
- Make D4 safer on block
