Character Balance Poll

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
41

I gotta agree with you on this Ismael01866. Honda is a character that always seems to dominatesat the lower to mid tier level of play because players are not experienced enough to deal his tactics, power, and ease of damage dealling. Yet at high to top tier, Honda really isn’t as “ridiculous” or “problematic”.

The opposite of this would probably be Dhalsim… who utterly sucks in the hands of low/mid tier level players but was top tier in vanilla ST and probably still very good in HD Remix. I think HD remix (minus all of the glitches) is definitely more balanced than vanilla so far…

42

i want to say no, but there are alot of people saying akuma is unbalanced. im not sure if he is broken or not but imo hes clearly top tier. id still say the game is balanced though.

43

You can’t say it’s balanced while at the same time acknowledging that someone is clearly top tier.

44

Balanced doesn’t mean that everyone is the same tier, it just means that no character dominates. Depending on how you define dominate, that could determine whether you think the game is balanced or not. In other words, Akuma is very good, but doesn’t beat any character (that I know of) 100% on paper. Is this the only condition for balanced? Some people would say yes, some would say “no, that is not enough, the matchup has to be at most 7-3—8-2 is too far in one character’s favor to be balanced” or something.

My personal opinion is that since I haven’t seen a genuine consensus in any of the character threads yet that say for any given matchup one side is completely screwed without any chance of survival, and my personal experience corroborates this, I believe the game is (reasonably) balanced.

Remember, the more variety that you introduce, the more imbalance you introduce. We could all play as 16 different costume colors of Ryu and that game would be perfectly balanced (not counting any weird corner inconsistencies that Capcom fighters always seem to have).

45

Oh, I’m not alone! Honda gained everything and lost nothing in the rebalance. He is now more viable against shotos and all of his other matches improved or stayed the same. I think Sim players got screwed the most. At least shotos still have a chance. Seriously, I’m getting sick of facing Honda. After I join a room there is a 75+ percent chance I face Honda on my first match because people see my Sim gamerpic. Constant butt slams and tick ochio throws for everyone! With a little helping of insane block damage from the hand slaps! I think I’ll use projectiles to zone him… oh wait BARF
I am glad someone noted that projectile zoning against a good Honda player is difficult.

Example:

Ryu runs away and throws a fireball. Honda jumps over it to close distance. Ryu cannot throw another since Honda is close enough to crush a fireball with the jab headbutt. Result, Honda gets another great way to close distance. Once he’s in, it’s chip/grab time.

Since projectile spamming doesn’t work against skilled Honda players, what else does Ryu have? Great anti-air and nowhere to use it since he has to keep Honda so far away. Great ground game, but Honda’s is good too. Ryu has a nice reversal on wake-up, but the reversal window is tight and if you miss, you are screwed. Honestly, if Honda gets a knock down he has a huge advantage.

If anyone here knows how to counter all this with Ryu please tell me. Every time I think I have a Honda player, they crush a fireball and once I am knocked down I am in for a world of hurt.

J

46

Yes. It IS as simple as that. And THAT, in a nutshell, is why many people are complaining about Honda. Honda was pretty much the most obviously unbalanced character in vanilla ST. It wasn’t any sort of secret that he destroyed half the cast and died miserably to the other half. It was almost as if though a good fight with Honda didn’t exist.

So if any character was ready to receive a major overhaul for HD Remix, it would have been Honda. But the problem is, he ended up in pretty much the same position. Which is sad. I’m not complaining he’s over powered, 'cause he still dies to a chunk of the cast. I’m complaining because I was really hoping that Honda would be more balanced and that he could fight Fireball characters better (which he can, to a degree) and non-Fireball characters can fight him better (which they can, but to a much lesser degree).

And yes, a lot of it has to do with who you are playing against, but it’s kinda moot from the people you named. Haru Tejyo and Alex Valle… of course they are gonna have better success! They are really amazingly good! The thing is, if I played my Cammy, I would die to their Hondas 50-0. So does that prove Cammy sucks against them? Not really. it just means I can’t beat them.

However, in general, when fighting Hondas, the uphill battle you have to face when using Cammy or Zangief or Fei Long is very steep, steeper than it should have been.

No one is saying Honda is overpowered. My complaint is that Honda is still the most poorly designed character in ST HD Remix. He went from the worst designed character to STILL the worst designed character, and that is where the shame lies.

  • James
47

Yes, that is what it means. I’m not talking relative balance (ie. Game A is balanced because game B is less balanced). If a character is “clearly” better or worse than 75% of everyone else, that character is not balanced. In a balanced game, it wouldn’t be clear who was top tier.

For the honda question, Honda should never be able to jump forward from full screen without landing on a sweep.

48

So even in vanilla ST, pretty much if you threw a Fireball at him and he could Jump over it without being easily punished, you were still in a bad situation. The key to fighting Honda is to make sure you can Throw Fireballs at him during Frame Advantage so he is always punishable if he jumps over, which is much easier than you think. So basically, your goal is to make sure you are always in a position to punish him when he gets around a Fireball.

Again, if he can make it over your Fireball by Jumping so that he can land and Jab Headbutt through your next Fireball, the problem is that you threw a Fireball during a time which he could make it over and you couldn’t punish it, not that the new Jab Headbutt can go through the fireball. The Jab Headbutt just turns out to be a way he can punish you greater for the mistake (in vanilla ST, he would still have been able to Jump the Fireball and kick you in the head, but it wouldn’t knock you down).

So if you can’t get Honda into a Frame Disadvantaged position (Meaty Fireball Block Stun, for example) before throwing a Fireball, you’ll have to play a trickier ground game. If you throw the Fireball from a screen away so he jumps over it, do Fake Fireballs more from a screen away. Get him to Jump and then Throw a Fireball… he won’t have time to charge if he lands and Blocks it. So throw the next Fireball and if he Jab Headbutts through that one, you can follow it and sweep him during recovery. So once he gets a bit wary of your fakes, a Fierce Fireball from across the screen may even catch him off guard enough so he can’t make it over in time. Once he blocks it, throw a Jab one, and you should be able to follow it and punish whatever Honda does.

  • James

P.S. If you are wondering what the edit on your post was, mrhumble, it was an accident. :slight_smile: I clicked edit instead of quote, but I fixed it back to normal. Sorry!

49

He does, but you’d need a “perfect” Akuma to do it. He doesn’t have any bad matchups really - his air fireball makes any matchup work for him as long as you can get a single knockdown.

He doesn’t completely break the game, but he’s in the god tier and would be scary good in the right hands.

50

So, from what I see here you are recommending I just spam the hell out of him with timed fireballs? Fireball after fireball and time it so he can’t jump over?

I understand that you know what you are talking about, so I am sure this is an effective strategy. However, that is also a pretty unpleasant way to win a match. I realize that is a personal opinion (and a flaw in my SF logic) but I play to act and re-act, not so much to corner someone and pin them so they’re in constant block stun. I have tried it and I am not very good at it for more than, say, 10 fireballs. If that’s the way to win then that’s the way to win, but I totally fail at that since I get bored and eventually mis-time something.

Oh well. Here’s looking forward to Feb 17th. :wink:

J

51

For Ryu against Honda, also keep in mind that the start of his jab headbutt is not invulnerable to fireballs, so if somehow he jumps over your fireball, you haven’t sweeped him, and you’re still standing, you can still throw a fierce fireball right away and he’ll eat it in the face if he tries to jab headbutt it.

You have to be pretty fast about it though. Honda relies on the fact that you get afraid of throwing fireballs to get in for free. Make Honda work for it!

52

@ jChensor:

Yeah, I see what you mean about unbalanced, in the sense that Honda wins for free against half the cast and loses for free against half the cast, yes, he is unbalanced in an “idiotic” way, and yes, I was also hoping that the matches against fireballers would be easier and the other matches would be harder than what they are in HDR.

It’s just that when I see “Honda is unbalanced”, MOST of the time the person means that he is overpowered. So I tought all the comments were leaning that way. But from James point of view, YES, Honda is unbalanced.

53

Honda doesn’t lose for free to anyone and doesn’t beat anyone for free. That wasn’t even the case in ST, where his winning and losing matchups were chronically overstated for some reason, and now in HDR, when he’s significantly better in his bad matchups and mildly worse in his good ones, it’s even less true.

54

Lol, I didn’t mean to oversimplificate it that much. I’m lazy and didn’t feel like writing a bunch of paragraphs.

55

Since ppl seem to base threir opion on an imaginary defination of the word when discussing the ballance issues of HD remix and Akuma, here is the defintion of “balanced.” (I.E. The game Is/ is not balanced.)

bal?anced? [bal-uhnst]

?Noun: A state of equilibrium or parity characterized by cancellation of all forces by equal opposing forces.

Are there a set of circumstances or characters that cancel the dominating effect of Akuma? Are there any characters with a match up ratio of 5:5 or more in thier favor when competing against Akuma? Answer those questions and you have your anwser.

I personally am no authority position to make a judgement call.

I personal think this game is not going to any sibstantial long term succes due to the sheer amount of game play clitches and intricate character gameplay oversites as oppossed to balance issues. (Unless SOME kind of patch is released.)

The game is incomplete and has issues. It is fun as hell, but starts to fall apart with advanded gameplay.

56

The balance of super turbo has always been that every character has at least two or three bad matchups, if not more. It isn’t that all characters are internally balanced against each other character. It’s that every character has a counterpick, and all matchups are winnable (Except Cammy v. Honda, and Dhalsim vs. New Sagat, at top level play – two screwups is pretty awesome in the grand scheme of things…more balanced than any other fighting game).

There is also a wide variety of matchups types, and character win/loss diagrams. For example, Chun Li had very few bad matchups (Sagat, Ryu, perhaps Guile) but they were not very bad, but on the flipside almost none of her wins were huge (excepting Gief). Dhalsim had a number of terrible matchups (chun, claw) but on the flipside, beat other top level characters soundly (O. Sagat, Ryu, Bison) and utterly dominated a lot of characters 7-3 or worse (guile, fei long, ken).

Obviously different character are flat out better than others, but every character has a place (Fei Long, for instance, sucked generally, but could do 70% combos out of nowhere and pretty much had a shot against anyone, even Dhalsim (probably his worst match)).

In HDremix, if you add Akuma in, he’s obviously not a character on the same level with everyone else. He has no bad matchups. The majority of his matchups are large wins (7-3 or 8-2) and some are 9-1. His worst possible matchup is going even with Dhalsim (which I still do not agree with–I’d say it’s more 6-4 Akuma).

He also has plenty of Chaos factor, like Fei Long and Bison do, but he gives up nothing to get it. He can do 60%+ combos with crazy dizzy chances, in a safe, virtually risk free fashion on half the cast. He can beat any character in multiple ways – he can go nuts and do risky combos, or he can turtle down like crazy.

He’s kind of like a much, much much better version of Deejay (crazy combos, good turtling, very few bad matchups). Deejay pays for it with a hit-or-miss reversal, having to charge, and very few big wins (most of his wins are slight edges, 6-4 or 5.5-4.5).

Akuma pays for it with nothing. Hell, even Chun - the most universally winning character other than Akuma - pays for her power, with having to charge, a shitty reversal, and getting punked by Ryu (if you’re going to lose to a character, Ryu is probably the last losing matchup anyone wants).

57

It’s more elegant than that, but… essentially, yeah. Just have to make sure you play your Fireballs smart. if you do, you can punish whatever method Honda tries to use to get over (e.g. sweeping Jumps, Jab Headbutts, and Buttslams). Obviously, good Hondas will be able to get themselves into positions where you can’t punish them so that you can no longer throw a Fireball for free. So basically, that’s the battle: can you prevent Honda from getting himself into a position where the Fireball is no longer “free” for you? If you fail to do so enough times, he wins. If can keep it up, he’ll get Fireballed to death.

Yeah, I can admit I overstate it a lot because it’s so maddening to me, having spent a better part of the last 10+ years dying to Hondas in a sad pile of Cammy corpses. Though not every match was for free for Honda, that match ion particular WAS for free in vanilla ST. I mean… for FREE.

All the match-ups are definitely better in HD Remix. They are all pushed towards being more balanced than in ST, I have to admit that much. His balance is undoubtedly better than in vanilla ST – that I agree with 100% and it can’t be debated. But that’s not the point any of the Honda haters are trying to make. Well, I can’t speak for other people, but that’s not MY point. My point is that the balance just wasn’t enough, not as much as we were expecting, and not as much as it should have been.

And it was SO glaring that his balance was wildly inconsistent in vanilla ST that the fact that the changes made to Honda in HD Remix seem to be focused only on making him better against Fireball characters is frustrating for those of us who have been dying to Honda for so long. Only the Hand Slap nerf was an attempt to help the non-Fireball characters, and it doesn’t feel like it had as much affect as was hoped. There were so many simple, elegant solutions to make Honda weaker against non-Fireball characters that it’s strange that it feels like there was no effort made to help non-Fireball characters. Of course, this isn’t true, because those who died to Honda were buffed up in hopes that they could match-up better, but in the end, nerfs to Honda seem like the best way that it could have gone as the buffs to Cammy and Fei Long and Hawk and Gief just haven’t been enough.

I totally apologize if I seem like I’m harping on Honda sooooo much (so much, that I’ve basically turned two threads into Honda rants). But it’s tough not to feel a lot of anger when characters like Cammy and Fei Long, long time cellar dwellers when it comes to tiering… well, even THEY got nerfs to their best moves whereas Honda kept his Jab Headbutt 100% intact… or rather, it only got BETTER. So maybe I’m just taking it out on Honda right now. So again, I apologize.

  • James
58

I totally agree that the characters Honda beat still aren’t close enough to beating him. Gief is my 2nd character, so I totally feel this. Nerfing the ochio more wouldn’t really affect Gief all that much (although I think it should probably be done both for consistency and to mildly help the other characters he beats), it’s Gief’s inability to deal with headbutt and slaps that really kill him. I was extremely surprised when I found out that Honda’s jab headbutt wasn’t made worse in any way and even more surprised when I found out that Gief was basically getting shenanigans to try to deal with his problem matchups.

In ST, Gief lost to varying degrees to most characters; the only characters he went even-ish with or had slight advantages against were Ryu, Ken, Boxer, Dictator, and Hawk, and everyone else was a bad matchup. The reason for this was that almost everyone could set up walls against Zangief, be they normal-based walls (ie Claw, Cammy, Fei, and Blanka), normal+projectile based walls (ie Guile, Sagat, Chun, and Sim), or mobile walls of doom (ie Honda and Blanka). In these matchups, Gief has to guess his way around these walls, try to beat them with his limited footsie games, or in some cases just take damage from them; two-thirds of the cast range from defensive forts to defensive fortresses against Zangief. The only characters who can’t do this are Ryu and Ken, who Gief can play footsies with, and Boxer and Dictator, who Gief can actually set up walls against and ruin if he gets close. Basically, Gief needed things that beat walls without making his own walls stronger.

What Sirlin gave him instead were more predictive shenanigans. A punch lariat with a sick starting hitbox, only useful if you predict an opponent’s attack; a kick lariat with temporary low invincibility, useful reactively in a few situations but mostly to guess his way around a low attack; a green hand with slightly less recovery but still only useful on a guess; and a new hop that’s again useful almost exclusively as a guess (he also got a couple of nice new normals and a better running bear grab, but that’s mostly useful when he’s already up close, not when he’s trying to get in). These things are mildly useful against normal-based and normal+projectile walls. Yeah, you can guess a hop into spd over a Fei crouching fierce or a Guile crouching forward is gonna work sometimes and guess a green hand when you think Guile is gonna throw a boom in expectation of a hop, but those are shenanigans, and shenanigans don’t win you a matchup. They’re also basically useless against mobile walls of doom. Sorry, a hop isn’t going to help me get around slaps, jab headbutt, or Blanka ball. These better guessing games help Gief out, no doubt, but in my opinion he still loses all the matchups he lost before and for the same reasons. Sorry, guesses are not going to get it done a reasonable percentage of the time, plain and simple.

This is all a long way to say that I agree that the balancing wasn’t enough. Gief still dies to Honda not just because Honda wasn’t changed enough but because Gief wasn’t given tools to deal with Honda, and that’s too bad.

59

Gief needs full mid-body invuln on the PPP lariat and full low invuln on the KKK lariat IMO.

60

That would annihlate Vega (Claw’s) chance to punish with a slide though. Gief would spimply just kick lariat all day against him for very little pain.