Yeah she’s been shown to have some good setups, but that’s like par for the course for this game since everyone is designed around running in and setting up. Becomes less unique. Like A.Gohan or Cell snapping you in is bad news also and they’re just better on point.
Barrier has some ok uses on point, but its not even worth bothering with as an assist IMO. EX negate assist just way too situational for the meter burn and there just aren’t enough strong neutral assists to make it relevant any way. If you’re not fighting a Vegeta assist player I dont even see why you would bother with it.
I think 18 is a par above everyone on snap back setups. Not only is it easier for her to snap back but she can make the left/right mixups very ambiguous and also makes you have to deal with a command grab on landing.
I think the negating assist is should be looked into more. If I wasn’t on a yamcha kick, I would go into the lab with her
I have seen a few good uses of barrier assist, mostly to cover long start ups for moves you usually only see after hkd. Ginyu assists or Chiaotzu telekinesis.
Barrier is 100% better as an assist than on point.
I haven’t seen anyone apply it as well as my friend does (don’t want to hype him up too much but he’s likely one of the better 18 players on the planet currently, definitely best 18 in the EU), so I can see why people are still sleeping on it and still think it sucks, but imo it’s the strongest defensive assist aside from Vegeta… Used correctly you’re completely denied a button press on the ground, and at the same time it hides the Dragon Rush animation which becomes a problem when you realise you have to respect when it’s out.
And, not to be overlooked, if any other assist hits the opponent and starts a combo, it scales the combo heavily. If you land a hit while under 18s barrier, it does NOT apply scaling, making it amazing at blowing up random buttons.
It’s still not a great assist since you can’t extend combos with it, but it’s definitely a useful one.
Yeah it’s not bad, but it’s still not good because it doesn’t really enter hit boxes into the neutral. You have to make it a supporting assist along with a beam character/Vegeta. If you have 18 2nd and Hit in the back, barrier is not going to do any magic for you vs top tier + Vegetables. You still have to have a supplementing assist that puts a line through the neutral. Even Sonicfox’s team eventually gets that once Black gets DHC’d into support role.
It’s not like Morrigan’s harmonizer where you’re getting a passive buff for using something that doesn’t have an attack hit box. If it’s baited it’s rather easy to maneuver around since it doesn’t stop you from moving wherever you want to move. The whole point of strong assists is they lock up where you can move and allow people to do unsafe/stupid things behind something that locks people down.
If an assist cant clear a line on the screen that automatically puts it down to secondary tier. Barrier only activates on the ground so it can only armor through so many types of attacks any way. If you could call an air version of it, it would have a bit more presence.
This is really the minimum for why Chris G’s team is at least solid. 18 is an assist, but only used as the secondary assist to cover his rushdown with a barrier (like how Storm whirlwind or Vergil rapid slash fills gaps for Doom beam/missiles). Then still has Vegeta as the ACTUAL neutral assist. 18 then becomes a compliment to the team and to Vegeta assist, rather than trying to be forced as the main assist and leaving holes in neutral.
Even then I’d still personally prefer something like a Kid Buu lockdown or another beam over barrier for secondary assist. Not to mention prefer to play someone cheaper than 18.
Well I mean, the assist tier list is something like:
Super Sayian Jesus tier: Vegeta
Top tier: Black / Goku
(large gap)
High tier: Trunks, Buu, Tien, Yamcha, Cell
You probably don’t care about their assist-tier: everyone else
“I’ll throw this rock at those aliens that blow up planets before breakfast, that’ll teach em”-tier: Krillin
It’s been repeated ad nauseam in this thread already but I really wish there were more viable assists. The two best ones just eclipses everything so badly, it really limits the team building options because a lot of teams are plainly kept together either by Vegeta or beams. Hell, my main team run both.
As far as assists go, what’s the real difference between Trunks and Frieza? I know they work almost interchangeably as far as combo extension goes, but are they that different in neutral?
imo it’s more or less that the characters with meh assists may just be meh in general compared to the top. Then there are outliers that might be decent, with non-worthwhile assists. Only reason I’m thinking this is that most of the Goku/Goku Black users I feel would just be better off with switching with another top tier character/Vegeta.
Frieza’s assist has a deadzone close to him, which is kind of a huge deal and makes it WAY worse. Had he used his L-version of death slash rather than the M-version, Friezas assist would be great, but the M-version makes it useless as a pressure extender outside the corner and doesn’t really provide stopping power, as well as being difficult to convert from unless you commit to a super dash.
Trunks is easier to hit out of his assist, that’s about the only thing worse about it if you compare it to Frieza.
I don’t know the frame count, but it does provide pretty nice lockdown. Only problem is that it occupies such limited screen real estate that it doesn’t seem to have any significant application in neutral.
16s assist is good. Comes out fast, he moves far forward and stops if he collides with an opponent so it pseudo-tracks, has a year of blockstun and a lot of hitstun. It’s just not comparable to the ones above him.
I have seen people claim he has a top 5 assist, but I suspect those people have been smoking some funny shit.
You probably should have included it in high tier then. But that is neither here nor there.
We’ve established how much assists suck. How do we make them not suck. and do we really need to make them not suck? Got to be constructive with our criticisms else we just bitching to bitch.
I like Fat Buu and Nappa’s assists. Not claiming they’re top tier, but they come out fast, occupy very useful space, and are really flexible in combo extensions because they pop the opponent up like Tien’s assist does.
Yeah that’s pretty much what it is. The only way you can not have Vegeta assist on your team and expect to win a tournament is to have a team with set play on the level of Sonicfox’s where people just dont get to play for a long time after they get hit by 16 (which is big part due to how 16’s oki is an outlier from almost everyone else in the game). Otherwise if you have a standard team that eventually resets shit to neutral, Vegeta is required.
You gotta have at least a beam to cover the minimum for assist neutral in this game. If you’re running around with Kid Buu and Krillin in the back, you’re not even in the meta.
I’m not sure since I didn’t get to play the beta, but I think they nerfed a bunch of other assists too since then. I heard Friezas assist straight-up tracked, amongst other things.