OK, so I don’t know if you guys were watching the Break stream last night, but basically Art lost to KDZ and was salty over it. Abel-bashing, Brainless… etc.
I made a comment in the stream chat, that Art disagreed with, when I said that people bitch about Breathless all day, but that shit almost never hits.
So I decided to count. I might look at the rest of the videos later, but in the Arturo v. KDZ set, which lasted 2 matches, KDZ attempted Breathless 4 times, and he hit with it once… off a dizzy.
Obviously, that’s just one set between two players, so it’s not something we can draw conclusions from… but it’s the set that launched a pretty longwinded Abel bitching session, during which Breathless came under fire… and there was precisely zero reason for Art to have been particularly annoyed with Breathless at that point in time.
I understand that Breathless makes you change the way you play, and I’m not completely dismissing that, but in terms of the comment I made… I stand by it. Outside of the matches where it is genuinely brainless to use (like Gief or Rog… and honestly, even Gief isn’t brainless, because you have to push Gief into a corner before the set-up gets to be really stupid… and that’s not easy. And even still if you happen to guess wrong, you may have just given up your whole round, because Gief will put you on your back in the corner. Good luck fighting out of that), and there are very few of those fights… it is really difficult to actually land Breathless on a competent player. As random as the Abel/Abel fight is, I never get hit with Breathless in that fight.
Generally speaking, there was also overall bitching about Abel as a character, and I still argue that he’s not as bad as people say he is. Abel’s dumbass mix-ups are silly… no question… but they also carry huge risk. Even attempting a single TT is a HUGE gamble. A character like Rufus gets stupid pressure all day long, without ever having to commit to anything remotely risky. Abel doesn’t have that luxury. Abel’s are evolving to the point at which they are getting better at minimizing that risk, but it’s still there. Abel’s braindead 50/50’s carry a risk that other characters’ vortex doesn’t carry at all.
As for general tiering, I still think Abel is top 5, but I think Rufus, Chun and Akuma are better than Abel (and worse than just being better than Abel, I think they all beat Abel heads-up). The US lacks really strong Akuma/Chun play on a large scale, and Japan hasn’t had any real competitions yet, but I firmly believe once SSF4 sees arcade release, everyone is gonna see. Abel is good as fuck in Super, but he’s not like that.