I really love what NRS did with him in this game, and I think aesthetically and GENERALLY gameplay wise, he's sick. I like the fact he's more of a samurai than a ninja in this game honestly.
However, competitively, I just think this character lacks a lot of things. I'm really tired of this NRS shit where we have top tiers who are super well rounded and have the best versions of everything, and than we have very narrowly defined characters like Scorpion, who I consider a pure footsie character more or less who are just not good enough at the one thing they do to feel satisfying to play or to feel competitively viable in a serious offline environment.
Basically, my problems with Scorpion are these.
1: Horrible abare (post pushback stationary button) footsies, which you need to have against all the top tiers. I just played a FT10 with Koisy, and you're basically constantly at the mercy of a character like Cetrion where ALL you can do is chip her down with D4's while she staggers you for days because your better buttons all just straight up whiff. He has this issue in a lot of MU's and it becomes super obnoxious. Scorpion's traditional whiff punishment is great, but it's pretty irrelevant in a game with fuck neutral wave dashing and the ability to give all your buttons a 25% range curve. He just doesn't get to do it very much. A lot of this characters footsie game against even slower characters like Kotal or Erron consists of throwing out yolo S4's buffered into tele when you smell the blood in the water of a f4 from either character.
2: Lack of mids. At the top level, everyone straight up says if you don't have a 9-11f mid you don't have any mids. I don't think he needs a super hit confirmable high damage mid, but B2 being safe and 10F would be nice at least. He needs SOME KIND of get off me option. On top of this, ALL of his mids carry degrees of risk. B1 is -16 if flawless blocked, it happens enough on accident and I'm now running into people who are getting the punish even on accident. F34, you're risking a flawless block gap for 3% if the second hit connects on the stagger, f32 is punishable no matter what, b2 is punishable no matter what unless it's Reborn. I fail to see where anything about this characters design warrants all these risky mids in the face of characters like Liu, Jacqui, Jax etc. This character's pressure comes from all highs, and that's really fucking obnoxious to work around. Not to mention that, if you're too far away to jail after a d1 or d3 on hit which happens often, you're more than likely getting flawless block punished on your mids. This issue has become all the more apparent since I started playing Nightwolf since he came out. Yeah, b34 is stubby, but it's still a 10f hit confirmable full combo mid that I can panic mash that makes opponents respect me. Scorpion just can't do this.
3: Inability to secure damage on breakaways. Scorpion not being able to D2 or fatal blow people out of teleport is really fucking obnoxious. I know some other characters have this issue with their launcher, and I think it's bullshit in those cases too. I feel like this should be a universal thing. Once again, nothing about Scorpion is strong enough to justify this deficiency compared to a lot of other characters.
I feel like, and this is just my take, if you make these super footsie/neutral intensive characters they definitely need to be getting better rewards off what they do. Honestly, I'd be happy with Scorpion if these things were done to him.
1: b141 was special cancelable
2: f423 was universally safe (-7)
3: Teleport launched higher so you can D2 and fatal blow people
4: B2 was 10f startup and safe if committed to. Low damage safe option, high damage high risk option except in Reborn in which case this being safe is irrelevant anyway.
5: EX Burning Spear to be a combo extender again
6: F34 to do like, 3% more damage on the KB. Everyone else gets more damage off footsie string KB's or do not much less with the benefit of the damage being unbreakable. As of right now IMO the only selling point of this KB is that you can always combo it into fatal blow no matter what. It just feels super niche in it's use.
I just feel like he's not a diverse character in a game full of characters who can do everything. I'd take all of this over even nerfing more things about him.
1: Spear is actually -66 point blank and scales accordingly to distance.
2: Reborn tele far cancel costs 2 defense bars
I'm definitely in favor of making his fuck neutral aspects even worse to make his actual footsie tools better and giving him more combo opportunities. That's kinda where I sit with this character.
