America
[details=Spoiler]America got the much needed buffs he should have gotten. He still isn’t really like a super durp character or anything and average players will still need to learn the small, calculated things about using his special moves with assists to get the most out of him. He’s not really a character that has any like day one scary shit. You have to do something that requires thought in every situation to capitalize with Captain but once you learn those situations he starts to shine. His hyper charging star super does mad damage when mashed and makes up for the bit of nerf to some of his extended relaunch combos.
OTG shield slash helps him a ton and gives him the real frame trap throw game he should have had since Vanilla. He has the fastest, longest ranged c.L in the game and now he can actually use it to scare people with frame traps into back throw which you can now OTG slash into combo off of. Both air throws get OTG into damage also.
Cartwheel buff is nice and gives him FULL invincibility during the start up of the cartwheel. He’s vulnerable towards the end though you still need to call an assist and then carthweel right before the assist makes contact with the opponent to get the most out of this.
Captain America of course got his standard shield slash infinite removed in Vanilla, and now all of his XF infinites are removed in Ultimate. Making him even a worse choice as anchor. Just play this guy first or 2nd and save yourself the trouble of being one of the most unscary anchors in the game. My brother being a big fan of Captain America and combos…didn’t exactly love this change but he likes the buffs overall still. [/details]
Zero
[details=Spoiler]My brother has been maining Zero since Vanilla since he was a big fan of him in TvC but never got to learn him in TvC. He had a bunch of anime ass ToD combos in Vanilla that he absolutely loved doing cuz if he touched you you were probably gonna die. Well…long story short he was huffing and puffing about the new Zero. “WTF…I can only relaunch like once and then combo is like almost done? He has no hit stun on his normals anymore can’t do shiiit”. I was laughing at the salt. I was like "yo dude…he’s just like another Strider now you gotta do resets like MVC2. Of course he was just like “fuck dat, i want my combos back”.
Capcom must have listened to me or something at least for the time being it seems cuz man is it fucking good when Zero is struggling to kill X-23 at the start of the round. LOL. You really see the meter gain and HSD nerfs affect characters like Zero when they aren’t building enough meters to kill off 2 people from the start of the round. My brother hates characters with short, boring combos so he’ll have to find some other way to make Zero fun. I personally believe it’s completely warranted for a character that is a walking spaceship of hit boxes to have to hit you and reset you a couple to a few times to win. Especially when they basically buffed all of the tools that made him hard to hit in the first place.
The one other thing I’ll note that I love being a Doom player is that Doom’s j.S buff is bascially “anti sword durp”. Doom’s j.S works where even if a sword normal hits you, the hit box on the j.S is so big that you end up trading and hitting Zero’s vulnerable hit box and then he just slams to the ground…you bounce off and then fall to the ground and can self OTG into a whole combo. That shit was like Xmas for me to see for the first time. Finally Zero has to worry about which button he presses against Doom.
Now overall I still think there’s great potential in Zero and I think he has enough technologies where he could easily still end up being top tier. He’s still going to be one of the best battery characters in the game you just have to do a mix up or a reset sometimes. His tools for creating mix ups and resets and generally hard to poke at situations all got buffed so hopefully Zero players can learn to be more creative with their mix up now that they can’t kill off one combo. Zero did way too much damage in Vanilla and it wasn’t until recently that people started to realize it when they realized how they needed to adjust their combos so they do more damage. At least for right now he seems more like he was damage wise when the game was only like a couple months old but his mix up game and ability to not get hit basically got improved so I feel it will only take creativity to put Zero back up on the list of characters that blow up tournaments. [/details]
Felicia
[details=Spoiler]The kitty is still a menace and the nerfs to XF…believe it or not IMO actually BUFFED her XF. I thought for sure her XF would be toned down with the XF nerfs across the board but this character was basically made from the top to bottom for XF2/XF3 and she’s one of the characters where the changes indirectly made her XF BETTER. I was afraid the XF nerfs would mess up her anchor game but, man if there’s anytime to jump into her XF2/3 game…it’s fucking now.
Basically where I’m getting with all of this is that the XF obviously runs out faster now in general. Plus she is one of the only characters where once shes’ in XF she has a bunch of moves where even if you advance guard them she can still get in. She even gets her own assist that sets up constant overheads and can’t be pushguarded even by herself in XF3. The main number one reason why her XF got buffed though is that she still has her XF2/3 infinite. What not everyone may know about XF yet is that when you hit someone in XF…your XF freezes for a split second on every hit. What this basically does effectively is make your XF basically last longer as long as you keep scoring hits in a combo.
With Felicia still having her infinite even with the nerfed XF damage…her XF time barely goes down at all when she is hitting you with the infinite and can still kill you from an XF pop on a hit confirm with 3/4’s XF3 meter to spare. Plenty of time to kill off 2 more poeple especially with kitty helper in the corner. My friend’s Dark Wesker was running out of XF fast because the time you’re not hitting the opponent in XF with like standard XF bnb’s really starts to add up and waste time on the XF clock. Especially when you like have to relaunch and stuff. This doesn’t affect Felicia’s XF as much especially if she lands the infinite which basically freezes her XF time. Long as you find situations to land the infinite in XF2/3 (like hit confirm into pop on ground hit into infinite) if you have Felicia towards the back, you’ll notice your XF basically outlasting the other characters in length.
IMO generally standard point Felicia is just clearly less of a threat than XF3 Felicia. Even Wesker with assists can be just as scary as his Dark Wesker game. Felicia can be a nice batter in the front but she has no real like scary shit like X-23’s kill two people for killing one dirt nap + assist stuff or like Vanilla Wolvies just rape everybody by pressing 4 buttons stuff. XF3 Felicia is literally better than Dark Wesker now. I can say that with complete confidence especially with XF anti air gun combos gone. Air delta kick basically gave her the one buff she needed in XF to help catch people laming out and with all of her tools against advance guards, the unreactable tick command grab setups to TOD combos, plus the XF time saving infinites…I really hope someone does this shit right in tournaments soon.
To get into her point game though the air delta kick generally is a nice buff especially if you call an assist before doing it. It’s needed for some of her combos also now that her toy touch’s combo potential got nerfed. Toy touch is still awesome for resets but if you want raw damage you gotta do air delta kick or sand splash OTG now (sand splash is not OTG capable). The air delta kick on point is generally a slower to start up and recovery than the fast ground ones but become a bit scarier with assists or XF3. The move generally isn’t as fast as I thought it was outside of XF and is rather easy to dash under and punish on reaction without an assist. It acts more methodical like her Darkstalkers air delta kick and not so much like you’d expect a Marvel dive kick to work.
Not too much to talk about outside of that mostly the same character otherwise. [/details]
Morrigan
[details=Spoiler] I really like the buffs to Morrigan. Being able to do shadow servant easily off air throws helps her point game a lot. Plus if you don’t wanna burn meter on shadow servant the extra time gives you more time to set up mix ups with assists.
The biggest buff she got is EASILY the air dash minimum height reduced. I feel pretty comfortable with Morrigan’s movement because I mained Doom in Vanilla and Doom basically has the same movement problems as Morrigan that you must improvise to overcome. It’s just people learned to overcome it with Doom and not as much was done with Morrigan IMO to circumvent such issues. There’s so many issues with Doom’s movement that you have to learn to overcome and I’m pretty sure they just gave Doom’s air S a hard knockdown property cuz they knew how often he got air thrown out of his movement.
Morrigan already has a powerful move to stop air throws with her air S coming down on people so she didn’t really need much change there. Mainly what she needed was a lower minimum air dash height and that’s basically what she got. It takes a little getting used to but you can definitely normal jump then air dash down much lower to the ground. Once you get this down you can…just like Doom…basically throw away her standard dash and just hop dash in with a low wave dash. This basically simulates Doom’s ghetto wave dash except she can actually attack during it and each dash moves her farther across the screen. It’s also generally less execution intensive. It’s basically just u, d+S really quickly until you get in and you only need to do it 2 or 3 times to get in from a far distance and then start setting up mix ups with assists if you have them.
People say the air dash nerf hurts Morrigan big time…it also hurts Doom big time because Doom has the exact same issues for getting in from super jump height that Morrigan has now that you can’t block during dash. It’s nothing new for Doom players to deal with even with having an 8 way air dash since Doom basically had no air normals that were scary from a horizontal range (not until Ultimate) so having an 8 way air dash didn’t even really matter that much. Doom players had to learn to protect their air movement with air photon shots and then air dash down from them with M to keep themselves from getting air thrown and start a safe offense.
Morrigan can basically do the same thing except it’s just a bit more execution intensive. If you’re at super jump height and need to get you just do a couple fireballs and flight cancel them both then air dash down with S so that you are can’t be air thrown and have 2, 5 low durability projectiles raining on the opponent on top of that. It’s movement techniques like these that really got unexplored especially with assists that will help Morrigan greatly even with the air dash block nerf.
Morrigan got some other small buffs here and there but the minimum height reduction on air dash is HUGE. Finally can safely move across the ground without jumping to an abnormally high height first. Her standard press 2 buttons together ground dash is only useful for mix ups and not really necessary for moving along the ground anymore.[/details]
Arrowmaster Clint Barton
[details=Spoiler] I’m using Hawkeye on one of my side teams and I feel being he’ll most likely be a power character game I should pick him up to understand him better. He’s a bit…like taskmaster. Like as in you definitely have the zone game and all of that but his commands are completely different. I don’t really know if he has a mix up game or anything and at least from initial playing it seemed like he traded even less of a mix up game than Taskmaster for better movement and potentially more annoying lame game. If people thought taskmaster lame was annoying this is basically taskmaster that can put more shit on the screen without supers and can SF Vega/Claw style runaway from you also basically.
The weird thing about him is that you can’t just jump in the air and shoot arrows and get 45 degree angle arrows to shoot at people. He shoots straight at a 90 degree angle with all of his jumping arrows so unless you called an assist pixie characters are gonna be running under you like crazed monsters blowing up your jumping arrows. Multiple short pixie characters seemed to have no problem ducking or Jill/She Hulk sliding under his standing arrows also. Luckily I was using him with Doom’s hidden missiles so Doom was taking care of the vertical issues while hawkeye was doing fine taking up the horizontal axis.
In order to shoot in a direction that will stop smaller characters from ducking or wave dashing under all of your shit you apparently have to use these trick movements which allow you to shoot at that nice Taskmaster style angle. I didn’t get a chance to check his moves list to see how the tricks all worked but the only trick I could get to work was the one where he jumps to the far back of the screen and then shoots arrows at the 45 degree angle you want. Unfortunately I couldn’t really get him high enough in the air during this trick to really cover the length I wanted with that angle.
He seems like he has the potential to be a better Taskmaster but it’s definitely going to be a bit of an unintuitive process for people used to Tasky.
His assists are all great of course and his “gimlet” level 1 super is crazy. It shoots one big arrow that basically zig zags to find you where ever you are on the screen. You’ll see it release andif the person is above your or slightly behind you…the arrow just kinda quickly zig zags and tracks the opponent. Funny as shit to see.[/details]
Mr.Uroboros
[details=Spoiler]I used to main Wesker when the game first came out and had my own impressions of him. Watching iNerd play him and seeing his reactions…he’s generally still very solid. Personally I feel the other characters have too much cheap shit and he got nerfed too much in places where it really hurt for his buffs to matter.
The bottom line though is that Wesker is still way better than too many other characters and that’s what has people up in arms about him. It’s also generally why he’ll still be solid. Dark Wesker is still scary…he goes away faster and because of the strength/speed buff he got…XF1 and 2 Wesker may actually be better than XF3 Wesker (XF3 Wesker will die in one combo to any character that also has XF on and won’t really take advantage of the buff as much).
The issue I have with him is that unlike Dante or Zero…I haven’t seen anything tool wise that’s more powerful out of Wesker. He got better as far as random gimmicks like mini XF when he’s low on life but what does that matter when he’s basically a weaker Wesker as far as tool set? Dante got new dumb ass mix ups in DT and Zero got new dumb ass mix ups period…but Wesker got nerfed counter super and buffs to moves that will still be bad like tiger uppercut. Supposedly Justin has found some use for his jaguar kick but I’d like to see it first.
Even with those issues…still going to be a strong A tierish high/mid character easily and some of the right things brought out could bring him back up to the top. I personally don’t see him getting past high/mid in this game…but that’s hardly bad considering there’s characters like Tron and Hsien Ko in the game.[/details]
Peter Parker
[details=Spoiler]iNerd being my local sparring partner in the game was excited to play Spider Man seeing he’s basically one of the only tournament going players that still uses Spider Man. He went on a long tangent of using Team Ryry/Marn or variations of it (Magneto/Zero/Akuma) but, he wanted to use Spider Man more and didn’t like Magneto’s nerfs so he went back to having fun with Spidey. Not to say that Spidey isn’t a solid character but…
Basically it seems like he felt Spidey was better in Vanilla (at least combo wise) and it seems he felt the changes to the HSD indirectly nerfed him and now he’s just an annoyance character that can barely get any real damage. He really missed the web throw loops and how he needed to have a wall bounce assist or some type of assist from a character like Chun Li just to get damage regularly off the OTG web zip. OTG web zip is probably the weakest point character OTG I’ve seen in the game. It barely does any hit stun on its own and nearly impossible to combo into maximum spider off of without XF it seemed unless you had an assist to help with the push. Using a character that already has enough technical issues as Chun Li’s lightning legs assist just to guarantee it wasn’t looking too hot.
In general he loves Spider Man but was really down in the dumps about his damage based changes which make him more reliant on assists than he already seemed to be (it was funny seeing both my brother and him huffing and puffing about the changes to Spidey/Zero).
He really did like the buffs to web zip and what not but was too down in the dumps about the combo changes to really care. He’ll still most likely play him because the team he’s using currently tool wise is very solid Spidey/Wesker/Doom. It’s just the HSD nerfs technically force the team to be weaker from the front outside of mix ups.[/details]
