Hehe. I’m trying to branch out from Vega now my EX2 has landed - I only dropped onto him because I can only really drive charge characters on the 360 pad! Maybe I should start trying with Akuma 
I’d put Chun in the cheese tier too (online), since she can do far too well against far too many pressing two different kick buttons, essentially. Offline, that crap doesn’t work, but online, her jumping short/forward is godlike.
Akuma belongs in a God tier on his own. In the hands of a scrub, he’s nothing - in the hands of a good player, he has a ridiculously huge margin of error that no other characters has.
Not all non-projectile users lose easily to Honda. He has more or less fair matches against M. Bison (dic), Rog (boxer) or Vega (claw).
It’s just Cammy, Fei, Blanka, Hawk and Gief that suffer badly vs. him. Really ony two of these are blowouts, with Gief and Cammy being beaten badly.
Vega, Rog and Sim each have more good matches.
Vega (claw)- nothing but matches he wins with a maybe boxer having a slight advantage. He doesn’t really have any total blowouts, but he really doesn’t have any truely bad matchups either.
Sim - he only loses to claw, has an even match with Honda and wins pretty much every other matchup. He has more blowouts than Honda too, beating Guile, Blanka, Dee Jay and Sagat rather badly.
Rog (boxer) - He only loses to Chun Li and Dhalsim and beats everyone else while enjoying somewhat of a blowout vs. Sagat. - Sagat is stronger now with his infusion of O Sagatness though, so I’m less sure about that one.
Not to mention that characters that Honda beats usually have just as big problems with other characters. Honda isn’t beating them because he is strong, he beats them because they are somewhat weak. Honda has mostly fair matches against the top tier, whic is neat, but he doesn’t really have an advantage in those matches.
The matches he does have a clear advantage in howerver are against the four lowest tier characters in the game.
Until Honda has as much overall success as the real top characters like Vega, Boxer and Sim, e characters, I think it’s pointless to worry about the five or six matches with low-tier characters that he wins.
Finally the manner or style he wins in is in the eye of the beholder. Personally I think it’s fun to have a character that can go from turtling like a Guile without a projectile, to grab-looping like Gief. To me that is interesting and fun. I do think part of the issue is that some people are annoyed or offended by a character that can turtle without a projectile.
Guile has an equally mindless turtle game IMO if one is to go about calling someone’s tactics simplistic. Of course in the end, expert vs. expert, most matchups have their deep tactics and exciting moments, which is why I only have my eye on Akuma, and him only because he kinda takes the thunder out of Ken and Ryu when it comes to tournaments if not casuals.
With jab headbutts in footsie range, more controllable jumping fierce to steer around fireballs and normals better, and easier slaps, and with Sim’s nerfed super hitbox, I think Honda v Sim is probably a slight win for Honda nowadays.
I could see that since sim doesn’t have anything that wins against the nerfed slaps that didn’t win before - but he’s still so good overall that it takes maybe a perfectly even match to a slight win like you said.
Still, I think my points overall that while he is certianly stronger now than he was before, he’s still not the biggest bully on the block, or even close really are still fairly valid.
I also never really accepted the easier slaps argument since I could get fierce slaps out fairly easy before by drumming two fingers on one button.
The easier slaps are big for me. I played ST in a tourney yesterday and messed up strong hands a bunch, let alone fierce hands. The fact that I can get either one out whenever I want in HDR really helps me out.
I think the Blanka matchup is basically even now, but apart from that I think you’re right to say that it’s not really that important that Honda beats the low tier characters. I mean, yeah, who doesn’t beat them? But I do think he’s still probably a high tier character.
I like Honda over Dictator, although maybe a tiny bit less than in ST because of the lack of ochio trap and Dic’s new devil’s reverse. And I like Honda over Sim, Claw, Boxer, and Sagat. Honda already went evenish with all of those characters, but they all got worse and Honda got better. I don’t think Honda dominates in any of these matchups, but I do think he has slight wins in all of them. I also think he basically goes even with Chun now; it wasn’t that bad a matchup in ST, and now with the new jab headbutt and controllable jumping fierce, I think it’s even. I also think he goes mostly even with Blanka now, since you can no longer punish horizontal ball. This is huge, because those are seven of the most common and important matchups in this game.
I think Honda still loses to Guile, Ryu, DeeJay, Akuma, and Ken (mostly in that order), but all of these are better matchups than they were in ST. While Honda had series trouble against all these characters in ST, I think reports of Honda’s death against them were greatly exaggerated, and now he can compete better than before. I think Guile is a roundhouse flash kick away from being even, while in my opinion Honda’s new worst matchup, Ken, is probably something like 3-7, which is totally manageable.
So I think Honda beats or goes even with a good chunk of the characters that are candidates for top and high tier and has bad but not too bad matchups with the rest. And he still owns Gief and Cammy and to a lesser extent Fei and Hawk. He’s a real good character in this game, in my opinion.
I get pretty annoyed that Gief seems to have no answer to Honda. If they would just let the kkk Lariat counter the Torpedo (as it does the Psycho Crusher and Blanka Roll) then I would be prepared to let everything else about Honda go.
The frustrating part is that it’s such an easy win for Honda…hold back and shoot torpedoes, and Zangief has a really hard time stopping this simple strategy that even a person that has only played SF for a day or two can pull off. I notice that whenever I get a good win streak going with Gief, the opponent will invariably pick Honda to counter it. Even Chun, Vega and Guile are beatable; tough but beatable…but Honda is super human tough to defeat with Gief.
Dude dude dude yes yes yes.
To do strong HHS in vanilla ST I’d more or less have to focus 100% on the mashing, diverting all my attention away from what was actually happening in-game. I never ever tried using fierce HHS because I couldn’t rely on it consistently. I’m probably not the quickest masher in the world here, but I couldn’t get it to come out at all unless I flexed/vibrated my arm as hard as possible, and then waited for the planets to align.
It does take less concentration to make sure they come out than before…
But I got them when I needed them previously, and never, ever had problems with the medium, so nerfing the medium also annoys me.
Bear in mind that I’m more of an HF player, so diffacult slaps are how I was raised so to speak. Sustaining the fierce slaps in HF can be obnoxious - not so bad on arcade hardware, but forget it on a pad.
I don’t think dic is much worse than even these days, sometimes I think Bison has an advantage when playing against Sirlin, zaspacer or dEkor.
Blanka I still think Honda beats, you have to be more careful with ranges to slap the electricity now, but it still can be done, and I never relied on punishing rolls much. Trading against them with chips is enough. He still beats Blanka’s jump-ins, so there’s still not much Blanka can do once Honda is ahead.
Sim, I’m less sure of because the strong Sim opponent I measure with, Sweet JV is so good, it’s hard to seperate the man from the matchup.
Still having even to slightly advantaged matches against the three top tier characters as well as sagat and dic - beating the low-tier characters everyone beats anyway and losing to the chuckers is a nice spread to have. Not top-tier by any means, but still very nice.
Maybe he’s upper mid instead of mid mid after all…
Crouching jab the torpedo, you don’t have even to time it, just spam.
And Lariat does counter Torpedo, it’s just a bit random, or at least that’s what happens to me usually.
Honda’s fine. The top tiers are fine. The mid tiers are fine. It’s the bottom tier that needs to be improved (more). Specifically, Cammy, Zangief, Fei and Hawk. And Akuma needs to be patched. That is all.
That. Basically sums it up.
It’s not 100% (probably closer to 50-75%), but even if you hit it 75% of the time you still come out behind in the long run.
After the first 7 frames, Gief’s punch lariat only hits in the front 15/53 frames, so less than a third of the time. Honda can throw out a headbutt any time after the lariat starts and be pretty confident it’ll hit.
Are the hitboxes different? (I assume they are) HF lariat, not just the KKK one seemed better vs. headbutt.
Also I was looking at frame data and saw gief’s crouching jab has 4 starting frames, 5 hitting ones and 0(!) recovery frames. This puts gief’s odds at slightly higher than 50%, but it seems more likely to stop the headbutt than that. Am I just seeing atypical results? What’s the solution to my mystery regarding this observation.
Rog’s standing punches are similiar, only he actually has recovery frames. That should result in the headbutt hitting 2 out of 3 times, but the punches usually win - is this because rog is cancling away his recovery and only has to recover when he stops, making the start-up frames and the hitting ones the only issue?
Yeah, Rog is rapid-firing his jabs, canceling their recovery frames. You can still hit him with headbutt through his jabs occasionally, but it’s rare and not worth trying. My success rate for hitting Honda’s headbutt with Gief’s crouching jabs is probably between half and two thirds of the time, which makes sense from that frame data.
Thanks, that makes sense.
And come to think of it, about 2/3 seems right for the lariat. Just that getting knocked down vs gief is so bad, that the 1/3 scares the hell out of me, making me not want to make that exchange.
Maybe what honda needs is to lose his charge when doing the handslap?
I like David’s idea of giving him O.Honda’s normals (keeping cr.LK/MK and neutral HP of course). Jab torpedo invencibility needs to go away. It was stupid in OG ST and now it erases fireballs. Something has to give. Stored Oicho should go away, but making it whiff would be overkill IMO. With that and what he got in HD he would still do better against fireball characters but wouldn’t rape low tiers as much.
Oh and from way earlier in this thread, I still think that DeeJay vs Honda in OG ST is 9-1 at best. Against a DJ that fully knows the match it’s more like 10-0.
Not meaning to crap on Honda, just asking: why would a whiff animation on oicho be overkill? (At the moment I’m seeing it from the consistency point of view: other command throws have whiff animations, so it would make sense to me that his has one too.)
Another thing I noticed with Honda is that his super has been improved to hit with all hits after the first connects even if they’re in the air…this is kind of curious given that some other supers that juggle don’t do this (dictator, ken, deejay to name a few). That having been said, I think this isn’t so much of a problem as something curious, I think that by making supers fully connect on grounded opponents in range who do not block the first hit is definitely good (Honda, Deejay).
In conclusion Akuma needs to go diaf and Cammy needs more options. 