Of all the top tiers right now. He's the only one I enjoy watching/playing against or as. He's just got a lot more depth than Rog/Laura/Cammy etc etc. that being said he's gonna get mauled. I fully expect capcom to shit all over him because eventhubs demands it.
He's a three-dimensional character in a land of ones and twos. I feel like Laura has some depth but in a lot of ways its not real depth, its just a build-a-sequence style where she has little blocks of offense you can put together and arrange in various ways, so while it feels deep and interesting - and I do find it interesting - its really the same thing over and over. You just change the order of each block or add a tiny hiccup occasionally where maybe you command dash instead of repeating another block of offense, or blah blah.
Urien can just do different shit. You can play him like a shoto, or pressure/rushdown or zoning or very defensive or setplay based or blah blah blah. The problem here is most characters only have one viable road to success. You have one button you use for pressure, one button you use to CC and one button for interrupting pressure or punishing small stuff. You have one combo in neutral and somewhere in that combo is one place to vtrigger cancel to do your one vtrigger combo and you can almost always end that one combo with a CA tacked. You might have one mixup or side switch or somesuch. You have two jump normals, one that crosses up and one that hits hard. You generally have two distances to occupy, one where you have a long range poke that CCs and one that leads to your one combo. Thats all there is to it..
Urien though doesnt. He has numerous options. Lots of buttons. Lots of decisions. Lots of shit to do and ranges at which he can do those things. His playstyle can change and adapt. I mean, in our sets, during the very rare rounds that I was actually doing work against you, you were able to almost universally change how you played. You'd back up and play the spacing game some and keep me out, then once you had interrupted my momentum you'd either finish the round that way or head back in. You had OPTIONS to combat me when I started to get a feel for your rhythm that round and counter you. ALL CHARACTERS SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THIS.
My genuine gear is that capcom is going to decide how they want him to play and they are going to shred all his options until he fits the above listed template. Or they will destroy everything he has period and make him revolve entirely around his trigger and playing him will basically equate to running and poking until your dead enough to try to win the round off a trigger mixup sequence. I dont pretend to know what would bring Urien in line with everyone else but I would LIKE to see would be something that maintained everything he can do now, but made it more manageable. Maybe cut his meaty options back some so that he has to win the neutral a little more often (this is something hes very good at any way) and its less one KD into meaty pressure to end the entire round, maybe make his crossup.lk NOT combo into cr.fp (mp x cr.mp x headbutt is still very reasonable) and damage scaling to his trigger stuff). I feel like those would leave his options in tact and his playstyle would remain fluid and interesting.
