I can't believe there's no pressure shenanigans potential, although they may behave differently on block.
Tried TG yesterday, spark range on these stings is just stupid lol.
There's definitely no pressure potential just from what I described. You're minus on block no matter which string or how long you hold it. However, there IS a pressure use for his chargeable strings that have an optional teleport extension. It basically works like this:
If your opponent blocks a string such as 112 or b112, you have three options to choose from. The first is that you can simply stop the charge at a random time and make them guess when to try to reversal. If you hold the full thing, you may hit them if they're mashy.
But the real gold comes with the extra 2 that causes Raiden to teleport. You can cancel the (b)112 into the second 2 at two possible points. The first point is almost instantly (i.e., you only get one or two ticks of the extra damage), and the second point is after the full (three- or four-tick) charge. This REALLY screws with people's timing, since they have to guess from basically 4 possible end points in the string, all of which have different timing, and all while they're taking substantial chip damage and you're building loads of meter. Even better, if you do the teleport ender of the string, you reverse their controls if they were trying to mash out a reversal.
Now this isn't fool proof. Both of these strings are unsafe on block no matter WHERE you choose to end them (1122 is safest at -9, all the rest are worse). But in addition to the eternal guessing game of the timing and which side you end on, they push back quite far AND you can cancel them at any point into any of several safer specials:
db1: chargeable and dash/run-cancel-able for more mind games and +1 on block after being charged.
EXdb1: +13 to +17 on block, and you can stop it early to put it between you and them if they're far enough away.
EXdb2: 0 on block. Just safe.
df2: -6 on block, but meterless. Only connects off of the first 2 of 1122 or b1122.
EXdf2: Unsafe on block (-13), but armored and grants full combo if you read a reversal.
EXdb3: 0 on block, armored, grants semi-full combo.
I encourage you guys to play around with these shenanigans. They're not at all flawless, but I'm finding them pretty strong nonetheless. There's probably more potential to be found.