Yeah I remember that chip trait really made chip essentially zero. It’s a shame that tombstone piledriver pain chain wasn’t all that useful, easily the coolest looking one.
Really? Because I remember the few other Grundy players focusing on going back and forth between power and health chains. I never saw anyone use the defense chain. As far as what I did I remember timing how long it took Green Lantern (minigun) or Deathstroke (rifle) to match, in chip damage, the damage that Grundy would deal from an average anti-aid combo. Both took over five IRL minutes (i.e. longer than an actual game) to even come close.
Also, who you got today? IPS Finals probably still breaks down to Sonic Fox vs. the field, right?
Yeah I would say Sonic, for sure. I don’t think it’s necessary impossible for people to beat him at the moment, but as we saw with Bio at the last big event, no one seems to be able to keep it together against every one of his characters.
I would say semiij would be a good dark horse choice. He’s looked good the entire season and has really only lost to rougher paths. If matched up with sonic, and if he’s figured something out for captain cold, he could do very well.
I feel like Honeybee and Whiteboi are good dark horse choices as their respective mains have basically the same plan against everybody (get in do Flash things and get in do Scarecrow things respectively) and if they’re really in point with the ‘get in’ part of the plan any/or other matches break certain ways then they could make deep runs.
Against Sonic I don’t think that counting on him playing a specific character is a good idea as he plays too many characters at too high a level. What if you’re Semiij and you’re prepping for his Captain Cold but he’s figured out some amazing anti-Catwoman tech with Red Hood or Black Canary? In that scenario you would IMO be kinda fucked. What if he pulls out a Starfire? You’re probably better of trying to generalize the player [Sonic] as much as possible while looking at how the entire cast does against you.
As we can see so far, I didn’t think Whiteboi was going to get far. He’s a really good friend of mine, but his play has certainly stagnated due to the constant travel and it showed. He was bound to be outclassed, same as Foxy and King. Bio being out so early is pretty surprising.
Well even against his Red Hood, we don’t see a lot of adaptation into what Red Hood doe. The last time we did was evo top 8, where emiij beat him. And peaking of, Semiij has been on fire today, as has Hayatei.
Bio being out early was surprising. That said when I saw his first match I knew he was in trouble. He had a situation where if he had just gone for max damage against Hayatei he would have taken the first life bar (and had damage to spare). For some reason he went for a setup (hyena summon) which ended up costing him his first health bar and, if I remember correctly, ~25% of his second before he took the last ~5% of Hayatei’s first life bar. That was not a good look. I agree that Whiteboi stagnated a bit but I feel like the break between the last event and today’s would have given anyone enough time to recharge and analyze a bit of what was giving them trouble. 0-2 says “I guess not”.
Man, what a tournament. Absolutely excellent play. Semiij vs. Sonic is expected, but we’ll see if it will be a more back and forth battle. Gross vs Hayatei could literally go either way.
Also shoutouts to Hayatei cursing on the mic haha fuck E-sports.
Absolutely. Even in a loss seeing how much Dragon changed up his play from the first match against Gross to the second was very impressive. About the only downside for this event is the near totality of failure of Supergirl and Batman players to make an impact giving more ammo to the people who think that those characters are fine as they are. -_-
Giving the fact that someone probably decided to either waste some of his downtime before the ESPN2 broadcast talking to him about this or deciding that regardless of his performance to eschew interviewing him in the future I would say that it probably wasn’t worth it.
What’s wrong with Supergirl and Batman?
Maybe he got a talking to, but considering Wolfkrone said “Fuck” on national television, it’s probably fine. And that was malicious!
I personally don’t think that there’s anything wrong with Supergirl (I think I’m in the minority). With regards to Batman I am normally against nerfs but it’s probably easier to tone him (mostly his trait) down a bit rather than buff the numerous characters whose shit he pushes in.
I would like to correct this. Wolfkrone said “fuck” in a similar situation as Hayatei did; i.e. the streamed portion of the event prior to the televised portion.
Yeah I could see it if Batman and Supergirl were running the circuit, but at this point, should we really a nerf a guy who’s not dominating the tournament scene and might just smash a few characters? It’s Fuudo for thought.
Ah that’s right, E-League was only on TV for the finals. Forgot about that, ty for the correction.
I think that people are overestimating Supergirl a bit but with Batman I would say that it’s more than a few characters that he wrecks.
I would also add with regards to E-League vs. the IPS Finals that there’s a big difference between TBS and ESPN2 if someone does something dumb on live television.
I mean who’s he really smashing that it’s a problem? Like if he kills Grodd and Cheetah…I mean lol like what are we gonna do?
Now if only we can get on ESPN 8 The Ocho then we can finally swear on live broadcasts.
I would add Bane and Scarecrow to the list of characters Batman waxes. With the latter I would say that Batman and Deadshot are why I’d call him a top 10 character rather than, as many seem to think, a top 5 character as IMO a top 5 character doesn’t have “Pick another character” level of bad matchups which those two are for Scarecrow.
I think our best route to swearing on live broadcasts would be to convince HBO or Showtime that boxing is too corrupt (not a stretch after last night) and to invest $$$ in eSports instead. 
Yeah, just don’t show them the Grand Finals of ECT 2014 that REO and Tom pretty openly rigged. We want them to understand that NRS fighters are a nice, clean venture 
One outright rigged finals vs. some of the scorecards I’ve seen for high profile fights over past few years is a no contest in favor of the integrity of eSports. It’s really not even close.
Oh, I also realized I forgot to include Red Hood as a reason why Scarecrow isn’t top 5 cuz that matchup fucking sucks.
Red Hood does seem to be a bit of a problem. There’s no doubt to me that the dive has got to be top 3 or maybe even the best move in the game. Incredibly good and hard to counter.
Dive is really good. The mines are really good. It’s also just about how a character with kind of slow dashes (both forwards and backwards) and a floaty jump does versus a character with an excellent menagerie of space control options.
Raiden’s super is so cool. Huge props.
My guess is slow moving electric ball, cage storm trap and air teleport are gear moves. His character power could either be teleport or the Master of Storms trap from the previous game. Wonder if he’ll still have a pretty good overhead and low starter like he did in MKX.