Look it as if everyone gained a 30% strength boost on Sent.
I know you, Nissan, only look at Sent’s pros and claim there may be Sent technology that beats the current Anti-Sent tech. Right now, there isn’t and no one can see into the future. All Sent did vs Anti-Sent stuff was get hit by guessing wrong the on high or low block 3-4 times. His redeeming quality was stupid damage.
His size is a huge liability (pun intended).
He’s more susceptible to chip damage.
I pretty sure every character has an instant overhead on him.
Specific combos to abuse his large size
I don’t think you know how bad these things are to have.
Chip damage is really good in this game, especially if you play a character who gets most his damage from chip damage.
Instant overheads are good way to get opened up, it’s 50/50 high low that you have to expect, not react to. Not every character is susceptible to instant overheads, even less crouching characters. You can’t just crouch block because character can hit you on the way up vs on the way down.
Sentinel specific combos (combos only on Sent, not combos for Sent) usually hurt a lot more since you can hit him more times in a combo due to the bigger hitbox.
He was designed to be hit more and now they took away a large piece of the life bar.
His assist is going to lose some utility, you can’t call him out all willy nilly which was on of the perks of the assist.
Why would anyone ever choose hulk over sent? Hulk has to deal with the same problems sent does and then some. Tag on the fact that his assist(s) pale in comparison to sent drones.
Sent did everything hulk did plus more, better with no drawbacks, and there us nothing wrong or bad about the hulk.
Something had to change and sent players should be mad happy it wasn’t damage.
As said above, health is a resource for characters like Sent. The same strategies don’t apply, because a big part of Sent’s gameplay prepatch was spending that resource knowing that Sent can take certain risks getting in on someone. The change completely skews the risk/reward on every single button Sent presses, which is huge.
Uhhh… Hulk has good assists, and they serve an entirely different function than drones…
The two characters themselves don’t have that much in common, so it’s a fairly bizarre comparison outside of that too… Nevermind that nerfing Sent does nothing to address the horrible problems Hulk has that makes him a suboptimal pick.
I’m sorry for a second there I thought you were justifying the nerf because two characters share simple similarities (big & high health).
If you really want to continue with that line of thinking, I have a whole list of similar characters that need to be brought up, or their counterparts brought down.
I really can’t believe people are still trying to argue Sentinel was overpowered. I think your inexperience is starting to show, hell I think you being able to just read through most threads on here is starting to show.
Even then once the super is in active frames she is basically like HD Remix Akuma. Off screen to any attack hit boxes. The only difference is that she is vulnerable during the recovery frames. Though from the point the super is active until it goes into recovery state nothing can touch her and if she touches the point character she goes into super regardless of whatever else is out. If you jump away from it or block it u can hit the recovery but the active frames where it can hit you and put you in a combo can’t be hit by anything. You can have someone mashing low short while an assist is beaming and she’ll just go through everything.
EDIT: Oh I see what you’re saying now. Tron’s assist basically acts as a second character box that pushes 23 away from the point character if u have her standing a good distance in front of the point character. Tron’s assist wont hit her but basically push her away from the point character who can then punish the super. Yeah that would be probably the best way to counter it if you’re trying to throw a projectile at her.
All in all a characters usually fit into some sort of role.
Power lacking mobility
Power lacking health
Speed lacking power
Zoning lacking effective dash
Grappler lacking projectile and effective dash.
Size lacking speed
Speed lacking size
Etc etc
How many did sent fit?
Hulk and sent should play similar roles they are power characters so from there you can then distinguish what will set them apart. Why one person would want sent over hulk and hulk over sent. Each should have things the other doesn’t. A good example is wolverine and x-23. Magneto and storm. She-hulk, hagger and Thor.
Basic gamplay and gamplan elements for both Sent and hulk are they have the same super armor normals (hyper armor for some of sents) they both want to get off a random normal into S ABCS super… When they can’t open up a turtle they fall back on command a grab, and then it stops because everything that hulk has problems with because he is big or is getting zoned sent has a answer for or atleast a way to deal with it.
So for two power characters, why would I ever pick sent over hulk outside of just liking hulk?
I’m not saying they play exactly the same I’m saying for sents role he was too good he had everything.
And I don’t think sent would have been the best of the best without the nerf later. But I still think he had to much for the role he was suppose to play and discouraged playing other characters because he had no disadvantages outside of being big.
The health nerf is important to Sentinel’s overall usefulness in the game specifically because it makes his assist considerably more vulnerable. Sentinel on point is more or less unchanged matchup wise. But 905 for an assist is dangerous. There are a lot of 2 meter setups that will kill him off very quickly and because he stands so tall, you can set the nuke off from safe areas on screen. Virtually any beam to Storm kills him off which is dangerous because hail is so safe. Akuma beam is a low damage super, but when you hear a character call an assist, you can set that thing up from 2/3 screen height+ and still get it off which blows up approach setups before they even get started. A lot of teams that depend on Sentinel to get in or keep out (Zero/Sentinel or Deadpool/Sentinel respectively) are going to be feeling the pain.
I think that Sentinel’s life nerf may set off a bit of an unforseen domino effect because a lot of characters (as currently played) depend on Sentinel for cover and being able to safely nuke him will make them much less effective. Meaning that the way I see it, Sentinel life nerf will hurt many other characters much more than they actually hurt Sentinel! We shall see.
Yeah even with like Chun Li’s assists she just glitches out into her hit box and then u can hit 23 when she’s recovering. Well…that’s pretty lame sauce. Especially considering how hard that assist is to hit unless u have a nice long low attack like Wesker c.M or can find away to jump behind it and hit her.
Again the reason behind not doing it, “because players haven’t had enough time to do proper research”, is a non issue. One, because balancing the game won’t prevent you from balancing it later and two, you’re presuming that whatever is discovered in the future will surely be hindered by the current modifications, without being able to define what is in the future.
No, I really do see it as you asking me to prove a negative. I’m presenting to you evidence from other games that wait until the game is, more or less, done evolving before they make their changes. Had changes been done within the first month, those characters I put as examples would have been worst off as opposed to waiting to see where they needed adjustments. I’m showing this to you as evidence. Evidence of a tried and true method. But what you’re telling me is, more or less, “Well, you can’t NOT prove that making a change in the first month is a bad idea!”.
That is fine, and you’re welcome to think that all you want. All I am presenting is facts based on previous games and how they have been balanced.
I’m not saying they won’t be in the future, because in this day and age for fighting games, balance and content updates are inevitable (Blazblue, SFIV). My problem is that this patch, providing it was intended as a balance patch to tone down Sentinel, sets a poor standard for balancing the game if things continue. Why not just say “Well Joe and Ryu are not very good, let’s just buff their health to compensate since that is an easy fix.”? If they’re going to make changes every month or every other month, then I, as a consumer, expect my expectations to be met as well.
I think the word you’re looking for is “degrading” not “stagnating”. Stagnating would mean it just brings the games evolution to a halt, which it’s not by any means. It does definitely change the game. For better or for worse? It’s hard to tell because changes were made so early; the game (or rather Sentinel) wasn’t given much of a chance to evolve before changes were made.
While I commend Capcom for “actively trying to make every character viable” (if that’s what they were even going for here), this definitely was not the way to go about it. Nerfing a character’s health did not necessarily change anything in terms of balance. All it did was ensure Sent dies faster and cannot take many risks, if any at all. Characters will, more or less, still play the same against him. It is a band-aid fix to a much bigger problem. You cannot solely adjust health totals for each character and call it balance. If we readjusted health totals to everyone about plus or mine ten to twenty percent, we didn’t really change much about the game other than characters living longer or dying faster. Health totals are sometimes adjusted to balance out a character (see: Taokaka in Blazblue: Calamity Trigger to Continuum Shift), but they are met with different changes as well.
Someone brought up World of Warcraft as an example to “knee-jerk reaction” balance because it does happen quite often in terms of the Player vs Player experience in the game. I don’t like to have to bring it up as an example because the much, much larger player base does factor in here more than MvC3’s, but Blizzard’s nerfs in PvP are sometimes done in reaction to something that may or may not be too powerful in lower ends of the PvP spectrum. It’s not the best example because unlike FGs, every time a class is changed in WoW it affects both PvP and PvE spectrums of the game and is very difficult to balance properly. The point is really this: every PvP season or seasons (usually a few months) there are “Flavor of the month” team compositions (there are 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 brackets) that tend to pop up and dominate for a while. It doesn’t really make for anything interesting and will never be balanced properly due to how the game is designed, but flavor of the month is far less compelling.
You have to understand that the market of fighting games, and video games in general, is much different now than it was ten years ago. Ten years ago, video games were developed differently and the audience was not filled with Timmy the Casual. The video game industry still ran as a business, but the market did not cater to someone who wants to put very little effort into playing and still have fun. In addition, there was no DLC, as the average game console did not have an internet connection and broadband was less relevant then than it is now.
I’ll tell you exactly why SFIV did so well as a fighting game: franchise name and catering to casual players. The video game market now caters to casuals, and that’s exactly what Capcom did when they developed SFIV. They added Ultras, a mechanic that gives you a powerful super the more you get beaten up, huge reversal windows, and pretty much gave everyone a DP/special move (be it EX or not) that has invincibility, all of which make the casual player, a player that does not want to play the game competitively and is satisfied with just throwing out special moves or looking cool, to make it feel like they have a chance, no matter how small, to win. ArcSystemWorks pretty much did the same thing with Blazblue (catering to casuals, not necessarily having similar game mechanics) but was a bit later on release.
What Capcom did with SFIV, however, is to put enough depth into the game so that it kept the more hardcore/competitive players around. It’s not impossible to please both audiences but still catering to the casual, and SFIV has pretty much had a new version every year so far because it’s successful at doing both. It’s not like Capcom is “shoveling something out and waiting for shit to evolve on its own”. If that was true they would have just left SFIV by itself and moved on to other projects. You have to realize that fighting games are very complex and take time to progress and evolve; that is just the nature of the genre in the spectrum of competitive play. It is and always will be that way.
SSFIV is not “a totally new game” though and SSFIV had a balance patch only 2 months after its release. Also the notion that a character needs to be game breaking in order to get balanced is silly. The notion that your skills won’t progress because of a balance patch is also silly.
Yeah Timmy the Casual existed. Many of them. I was one of them. But what did I know. There was no online, no Youtube, no Interwebs, no DLC, no balance patches. If I could beat up my friends at the arcade and at home, I was king.
Fast-forward to today… people get beat up because they’re living in the past of thinking ‘if i can beat my friends, I should be good at this game’. That was never the case, casuals were just oblivious to the fact that games could be played at high level. People naturally think they should be good at something because we delude ourselves until we get beat consistently. We then try to blame the easiest thing (the game) because we’re such self-centred beings.
Very few take a more mature route and go “I think I can beat these folks if I try this!”
Basically what you’re trying to get at is that a lot of characters that possibly counter Sent by also using Sent with his assist will have trouble when their assist gets blown up faster? Which therefore would make Sentinel stronger because then people will decide to use him on point more as there being less counters? It sounded like that’s what u were getting at any way.
^That a lot of characters benefit greatly from drone assist, and making Sent much weaker as an assist character in turn makes those other characters indirectly weaker.
Except it’s not a nonissue. Again, being able to correct a mistake later is not as good as simply not making the mistake in the first place. Examine the evidence carefully, give the game time, and then make informed alterations based on the evolution of the metagame.
It’s both. Saying “It’s too early to tell” and “It’s too early to patch” relies on having to wait an undetermined amount of time and claims that making any changes now will drastically change the game’s metagame, without being able to define the metagame in the present circumstances.
The counter argument is that balancing can be ensured to help the game evolve for it’s something that can be applied at any time and is not constrained by time or variables that have yet to be determined. Thus if character X loses footing versus character Y in metagame, one can adjust character X.
That’s why it’s circular logic and it’s simply absurd.
simple example in SSFIV match: sim vs guile. st. hp vs SB is in sim’s favor iirc, but if they nerf sim’s health so that the trade will be in guile’s favor then the match-up will change.
The fact that you’re claiming that we won’t know if Sent was overpowered, balanced or underpowered is absurd. The metagame will still happen regardless and one can still apply a balance process at that time, thus making your point moot. By your logic we should do away with balancing during the devellopment stages as well, because that line of circular logic could easily be applied to that scenario as well.
It’s already unpredictable. Saying that balancing makes the game unpredictable when you don’t even know what the metagame will look like yourself is absolutely absurd.