@Scytheavatar:
The exposure level on Viper is incredibly low. There are less than a dozen people that play her on streams and although some things with her are immediately obvious most people with a Marvel background would have an easy time passing her up for a few reasons. IMO she is the first character in Marvel history with bad normals that’s still amazing, in every other Marvel game every good character had normals that were incredibly stupid for some reason or another:
XvSF: Storm everything.
MSHvSF: Wolverine everything, especially in berserker charge.
MvC: Wolvie everything, WM/gold WM lots of things.
MvC2: Sent everything except for ground throw, Cable SFSR and SFR, Mags everything, Storm Everything.
Now that it’s out of the way as to why a lot haven’t taken notice of her. The most important thing for these 2 characters: In their current forms they have incredibly good offensive and defensive tools that require minimal risk and can be cancelled into other things to further negate the risk. While their risk is so low on connection the reward is incredibly high. A lot of the issue is that these characters have game plans where if you have high enough execution your thought needs to be minimal to achieve overwhelmingly strong results. Perfect example being reverb shock into fireworks on Dante or Seismic hammer SJC seismic hammer on Viper. These are tools that can be used to mount an offense, secure a defense, and are over all strong in general, in their respective ranges they dominate equivalent tools other characters have for stupid reasons, both of them being pseudo projectiles have more durability than almost every actual projectile.
As for things in dramatic need of nerfs with them:
Seismic hammer as a move needs to be fixed, there are multiple ways to do this but in its current form it’s much too powerful or more accurately much too safe.
Bold cancelling needs to be tweaked, likely how it functions on whiff more than anything. Some of his move properties are inherently stronger than equivalent ones mostly with execution barriers to even them out. (fireworks, crazy dance, hammer, acid rain etc)
These characters were given tools that are really dominant, and neither of them have people scratching the surface of what they’ll be able to do yet. Dante’s decently popular so the progress on his things is coming along faster, but with the minimal number of people investing the time and effort into cracking Viper she’s going to take awhile to achieve as much of her potential.
@Kjunk: Sorry, you posted while I was typing, here’s some reasoning against your well put statements.
"S Tier for Viper is a big claim. The biggest thing I’m not seeing from her is how she gets in on people zoning her out.
Right now, I mostly see lots of:
[LIST]
[]Airdashing back and down back on her own side of the screen (looks like lots of fun…)
[]Random seismos that whiff, get blocked or punished
[]Predictable airdash pressure
[]Random EX Thunder Knuckles
[/LIST]
So far that’s not looking so good. Is the Burning Kick Ball hop going to help a lot there once execution gets better?
If you’re saying she’s S-Tier, she needs to get in as well *or better *than Magneto and Dante, and characters like them."
-On air dashing, the main time she should be doing a lot of this without seismos is fighting characters with fast full screen projectiles like Magneto where it’s more about maintaining a point to follow up with counter-zoning measures.
-Seismos when executed properly are massively frame advantage on block and safe on whiff being fully cancellable for incredibly stupid reasons. When they’re getting punished Viper was being greedy and/or failing in execution.
-For air dashes people need to be using her ADD and BKF mix up more, her air dash down A hits faster than Magneto’s and has more ambiguous mix up out of it, it’s just since her normals aren’t good executing things to space them correctly is less easy than Magneto.
-Random EX thunderknuckles used to be something I did a lot but I’ve all but stopped using it outside of combos, unless people are being predictable the only way it’s a good tool is to destroy the projectile then BKF/Seismo feint/Viper ball out of it for full screen higher damage punishes.
The super hop/Viperball will increase her already fairly amazing maneuverability, though executing it consistently isn’t happening from anyone yet, it’s especially useful being able to punish a lot of weird things full screen.
Those are good points, I just do not feel they’re accurate to the Viper situation. That said certain characters like Trish have good zoning tools against her, but all of the people doing ground or near ground based zoning don’t have that luxury against her.
She is better than Magneto in the vast majority of match ups, but she does have a few bad ones all of which can be negated either by starting the match against them with decent execution or killing the character before them correctly. Dante is the only other person in S tier with Viper for almost as stupid reasons. ^.^