Sagat Improvement Thread

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
1661

the QQing issue was pretty much implied in that entire post. “Devs are making changes and listening to the community HURRAH! Sagat got nerfed HURRAH! Guess what? Time to QQ about the next top tier.”

My issue was that I was blown away by the amount of QQs for Sagat, and already stated that i shouldn’t be surprised as this is the most mainstream SF4 and TONS of new people will be playing. Cuz he isn’t such a horrendous character, but did not mean that he shouldn’t be tweaked.

And until I see the mythical Sagat DOMINATE top level play, or hell win a top level event (World Cup, EVO, SBO etc etc), I will continue to go along and agree with Justin Wong in that he is overrated. Very Top Tier of course, but blown way out of proportion by the QQs.

1662

21 sagats in Japan top 50 in arcade is enough of a proof. It is well known that US dont have good sagat, did you expected capcom to only use US data?

1663

so a lot of people use sagats?

the top 50 ranking of the arcades are based off of arcade bp which work similar to ranked matches on PSN/Live i believe, could be wrong though.

how does that mean they are dominating high level of play? You grind enough wins and you’ll eventually get there.

Out of all those so called grandmaster Sagats, vast majority would say only Mago, Ojiisan, and maybe bonchan/rf would considered an elite player along with kindevu daigo momochi nemo nuki etc etc etc

Mago is considered the best sagat in the world and even he doesn’t dominate against other elite players.

1664

this. a million times this.

1665

If it was seven or even ten out of 50, but 21 and you dare say that they just grind more? Dont be ridiculous! Like only sagat players grind in Japan? The fact that they still lose against players like daigo etc… just means that they lacks the nerve, the mental to beat them despite their OP character. Which certainly means that if they didnt play sagat, 3/4 of them wouldn’t be as high in BP.

1666

Stop being such an idiot. The evidence is right in front of you and you continue to turn a blind eye to the fact that Sagat needed nerfs…

1667

i don’t see why people get so worked up about sagat anymore. just laugh it off. he’ll be nerfed in a month.

@jihad your sagat is awesome. i’ve played you on my alias psn id that i use to test out characters i fail with. i was trying to learn sagat and you whooped me 10-0 in the mirror matches, lol.

1668

You have no news on whether or not block strings or reversals are any tighter? Seth Killian said in an interview that “if you didn’t like SFIV you won’t like Super SFIV”. That means the fundamental parts of the game system are not going anywhere. Windows for reversals will still be large and block strings will still suck. If your block string doesn’t have a jab it will suck just like in the last game. There will be no reason to meaty people with any move other than a jump in unless it keeps your vulnerable hit box completely away from the opponent. They are only going to change the game enough to make it a bit more competitive and even across the board for real competitive players. They aren’t going to change the fundamentals of the game so a bunch of the 09 Championship Mode scrubs that still play this will pretty much be SOL for ever being able to beat anyone decent anymore. Capcom feels the game being easier to play and feeling less “dominating” when you are blocking or getting hit by something compared to other SF games is what keeps them in. They know there’s always a spot where they can just mash during any block string that doesn’t involve a jab and they know there’s always a chance someone will forget or just doesn’t know that they can mash reverse on wake up. Taking that out of the game would just alienate too many people from the confort they have grinding online now. The only thing Capcom felt was safe to do apparently was to just make the reward for doing that far less or in Ryu’s case basically you get nothing but the DP unless you land a clean one and FADC into Ultra.

I personally think DP’s being made safe in a game like SF (which just by default can’t really be as offensive as GG or BB) just makes for a game where when you finally get through all of the zoning and turtling to get in a good position you have to deal with someone using some shit that activates in 3-5 frames and is invincible to push you back out all over again. Oh and taking away a bunch of health while you’re flying back to the other end of the screen. Yeah shitty block strings and reversal windows just add insult to injury to that respect but personally I was never a big fan of invincibility frames in any fighting game. Especially if it leads to all of the free crap that Ryu’s and Sagat’s did in the original game.

Sagat doing less damage…well now that we know that Capcom wasn’t really intending to turn Sagat into Super Sagat like we said earlier it makes sense that their quickest fix was just to make him do less damage. You’re not looking at the whole picture with your comments though. It’s already known that Juri doesn’t do big damage per combo either. Seth already stated she’ll have to land multiple combos to win a match. Without an Ultra Juri’s BnB’s don’t do more damage than Sagat’s do. Plus Sagat still has a slight bit more health than she does and probably still better stun. If Sagat wants to do more damage in a BnB he can just spend one EX meter (meter that he didn’t need to use against a lot of characters) and his BnB does better damage again.

About Ryu…I personally just don’t care. With the way the reversal and trade system works in this game something had to be done. I would have preferred them to give Ryu other options that aren’t based on his DP. Though I guess they figure Ryu’s tools are strong enough without a great DP to deal with his matchups regardless. I don’t think Ryu’s DP will come down to the point of being useless. If you think about it…his DP’s were so good in the original game that you never needed to use his EX dp. It just wasn’t necessary. Why try to beat a jum in clean with EX dp when u can just trade it at any point in the air and get 450 damage instead? Ryu will have to waste a meter to beat shit on the ground and risk flying up in the air like an idiot if he doesn’t guess right? Oh that really hurts Ryu now. Especially when he already had the best footsies in the game and a c.MK that ducked under most jump ins and at least 3 or 4 other normals that were solid for AA that never got used. Ken’s DP being mashable isn’t going to be any more of a deal than it was in the last game. He still can’t land full Ultra off a HP dp unless he gets a counter hit. The only difference with Ken is that HP DP is a useful anti air and better on the ground now. No one was afraid to be in Ken’s DP range like they were afraid to be in Ryu’s DP range in Vanilla. A DP that doesn’t give him too much damage unless he uses it with smarts (counter hit). If Dudley is like he was in 3S his uppercuts won’t be that good minus EX uppercut.

In Super Turbo you could use a jumping forward jab to trade or beat Ryu’s LP dp easily. In SFIV (and coincidentally ST as well) Ryu also had some of the most solid BnB’s the game had to offer. Very solid damage BnB’s that mostly involved hard attaks and lead to untechable knockdowns. Ryu will still have arguably the best ground game SFIV has to offer and that goes a longer way at high level play than spraying and praying DP’s. LP dp in most any other SF game is supposed to ONLY be used during footsies. You had to use the ones that had more invincibility like the HP one for AA purposes. Having a LP DP that didn’t even require a trade (just a clean hit from high enough in the air) to land ultra was kinda stupid IMO.

What I said wasn’t as simple as “Sagat sucks now so don’t use him”. There’s no real context in my words that states that I thought Sagat was ass now or thought he wouldn’t be worth using. I even said earlier that I’ll still be using him just because I originally picked him just to counter pick other characters and then funny enough ended up actually liking his play style. I still feel Sagat will be better than a lot of the cast even in Super and with some work will have somewhat of a resemblance of the power he had in the original game. Sagat was too good in Vanilla to all of a sudden suck in IV. It’s just like how I continued to use Ibuki in 3S and did well with her despite everyone saying she was stripped of anything good she from 2I. Super SFIV Sagat will still probably be better than Ibuki was in 3S and to people leaving him cuz they “think he sucks now” then yeah there’s 34 other characters and Sagat isn’t going to suck either way so u might as well still use him.

I personally still think Ryu will have the tools he needs to survive when it was not just his DP that made him good. His ground game was still among the best the game had to offer. It was just in SFIV he didn’t need to use it as much when 2 meters and an Ultra meant he could just walk forward and scare you into his offense for free. Now he’ll just have to rely more straight up on his footsies and that’s completely fine by me.

1669

lol thanks man. whats ur alt Id?

1670

picking a character that doesn’t lose for free in a certain matchup is part of the game. even if those matchups were as bad as you make out (they aren’t), that’s only a free win for sagat in the same sense as your opponent choosing not to block is a ‘free win’. can’t blame sagat players for playing guys willing to throw away the match at the character select screen.

i of course agree he needed nerfing but within the ecosystem of SF4 if you lose to sagat you have only yourself to blame.

1671

flowchart_scrub lol

1672

Whatever your opinion on Sagat is, in 1 month he WILL be nerfed. Fucking live with it. If you feel he’s too weak now, you’re fully within your rights to chose a different character.

1673

yea that HAS to be it

use sagat = you are mentally weak and no good at the game

Mago has ALWAYS been a top tier player even during CvS2 he was godlike. So a guy with top tier abilities using this supposed mythical OVERPOWERED UNBEATABLE GODLIKE character who isnt dominating the scene clearly mean he is a weak minded inferior player

must be it

1674

i said sagat could use some tweaking

all i see from the BP rankings is that a lot of sagats have been grinding BPs

none of those grandmaster sagats have been dominating the tournament scene at all and I have the blind eye? seriously?

1675

cut these guys some slack most of them probably didnt even know cvs2 existed and if they did they mashed with their scrubby friends/against the cpu

1676

He also said that everyone had been buffed, including Sagat. Doesn’t seem to be the case. I doubt that anything’s been made tighter, but at this point I don’t count vague PR statements as proof of anything, and I haven’t heard one way or the other from anyone who has played the game yet.

I don’t see how it makes a difference if instead of not being able to do it, you can, but it doesn’t work, or isn’t worth it. What I’m saying is it’s a cop out. Making it so that DP was still worth it, but the attacker has to actually drop their blockstring for you to be able to mash it out probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference at all to your average Champ mode scrub. Nor would making it slightly harder to mash out, though the Champ scrub may be able to tell the difference.

In that respect the sentiment is your preference more than anything else. I. frames are pretty much a staple of 2D fighters in general, and it’s only really the fact that they can be easily mashed out all the time to cut through any semblance of offensive pressure in SFIV that made it stupid and overly defensive, not the fact that you can sacrifice a 50% meter FADC to avoid the punishment of failing one. The fact that it can be done it what makes you have to deal with it, making it safe at a cost just makes it a better option.

The point with that was that Juri’s a low health character, not that she doesn’t do big damage per combo. The guts scaling when a character gets low on life is what, 5%? If Juri has 950 life, Sagat’s BnB at guts scaling damage wasn’t enough to do more than roughly 140 damage. Granted, he needed a damage reduction. But he’s gone from obscene damage output to low damage output, and Sagat’s not the type of character that can completely do without decent damage output. Unless the big picture is that most of the cast does low damage on the majority of their stuff (doesn’t seem to be the case) it’s apparent to me that Sagat does pretty bad damage in general now.

It needed to be nerfed, but not by that much.

Hence, a cop out. Instead of addressing the problem with the reversal and trade systems, they just crapped on the moves that benefited from it most. They did address the trade problem, but even then not fully. My problem with that is they didn’t do it for everyone. Sure, as a Ryu player I’ll make do, but what did Cammy do to deserve her Cannon Spike getting crapped on, when they made Ken’s DP even better equipped to abuse that very system? It doesn’t make sense.

Solution: Get rid of Trade Ultra (which they did). EX DP isn’t used because unless you needed the extra invincibility to escape or beat something invincible out, there wasn’t any advantage over his normal DP.

s.HK, cr.HP, and cr.MK all had their uses as AA, but none of them are good enough as AAs to replace his SRK, just used in conjunction with. It won’t hurt his AA game much against certain characters (like Viper), and having to waste an EX meter to beat out stuff on the ground from blockstun or wakeup doesn’t really bother me at all. What is a problem is if you have to spend meter just to AA certain jump ins, or beat out certain pokes without trading. So hopefully his DP won’t be useless like you said, but it could be pretty bad. Guile Somersault Kick bad. And yeah, that would hurt his game, because the best footsies in the world don’t matter if you can’t force your opponent to play them. If you can beat out a meterless Ryu for free with jump ins at certain distances, there’s no need to play his ground game.

That’s a far cry from stuffing it with a jumping forward heavy.

Fine with that too. But the reports on his lost DP priority don’t specify that it was just the LP one, which is what I’m worried about.

I guess I can see where your coming from, but it’s just a meterless Ultra setup. One that required your opponent to jump in on you, no less. Plus it’s a low damage Ultra. Are all the other meterless Ultra setups in the game stupid to you too? A lot of them land even if your opponent just stands there. Looks to be the same in Super, with even more of them (Dudley, Makoto, Ibuki).

SFIV Sagat was never as high up as NG or 2I Ibuki was, so there’s no way he’s falling that far. And yeah, he’ll probably be better than 3S Ibuki was by far, if for nothing else other than SFIV (and most likely SSFIV) is a much more balanced game than 3S was. Also I doubt he’ll be the worst character as well, because even though he looks like he has damage output problems now, he’s not the only one (based on SFIV), and has a better toolset than most anyone without good damage output, with the exception of Seth.

My whole thing is that I also doubt he’ll be anywhere near top, as they killed his tool to combat footsies, took away his damage on everything, and raped his TU damage to the point where you need to spend EX meter to make it hurt one way or another. Sagat needed good damage output to be anywhere near as good as he was, and it looks like he has everything but.

No doubt Ryu’s still going to survive. but damage and priority nerf on his SRK also hurts his ground game if he can’t reliably AA without meter. It’s much like SFIV Chun. s.HK is only a good AA at a distance, or rather to snipe a jump. cr.HP is a good AA at close range, but it’s nowhere near as good as say, Guile’s or Sakura’s to be completely reliable. cr.MK doesn’t duck everything. As long as at least one of his meterless SRKs beat people out of the air, he’s fine.

But none of that really matters here. Back to Sagat, and as far as the points I’m trying to make, it’s really simple:

-I think they overdid it with the nerfs on Sagat, and have taken a bit too much away from him for him to be anywhere near top 5 in Super. It’s not that he won’t be viable, but I don’t see how he takes a top or even high tier spot if your average character outdamages him.

-Crapping on DPs instead of fixing the problems with the system that made them abusable is more a cop out than balancing or a system fix. Just make the profit on it less and act like the problem went away. That sucks.

-What sucks even more is that they didn’t do that for everybody, which just means a different set of characters get to take advantage of the faults in the system, and the problem with mashable DP isn’t even remotely resolved anyway.

-Overnerfing characters is Bull, and I would have hoped that Capcom would have stopped doing it by now. Even though as a fighting game vet, you’re used to seeing the reversal of fortune in what’s supposed to be a simple rebalance, it never sucks any less.

1677

It is so easy to forget that I said 3/4 of those sagat, and act like I said that mago sucks.
It amazing to see how people can willingly ignore the truth and say that when almost half the players in a top 50 are sagat player, it just means that they grind more. Lol Im gonna sig this. Anyway, it doesnt matter if you recognize the truth, what matter is capcom. And capcom’s answer is pretty clear.

1678

I agree, it’s bull. Capcom got lazy and didn’t give the low tier any new moves. They nerf Sagat instead so that the noobs stop crying.

1679

I don’t get how capcom could have buffed everyone in the game without having everyone die in like 2 combos.

1680

go ahead

its pathetic when people think that BP somehow translates to skill. Out of these 21 sagats, which one of them have reached or done anything remotely close to mago or ojiisan level of play or accomplishments? I swear some people just read a top 50 ranking and just take that at face value and completely ignore tournament play and results

Quoted from Sabin

Sabin: Depends on the Battle Point disparity.
I beat Daigo Umehara several times and got 300 BP each time.
Battle Points don’t tell the WHOLE story. It’s just like XBox Live/PSN, people can have a crapload of points and still be average, the average 20k BP player at Bigbox Arcade is usually better than a 50/70k BP player from another arcade. Reason is it’s so hard to go on a winning streak at Bigbox so they can’t rank their BP up.

Yet people are still going to rant and rave and act like BPs actually mean something when the tourney results speak for themselves. Maybe they have been playing longer than others, maybe they play in an arcade located in an area where the competition isn’t as strong. BP is hardly an indicator of anything except for the fact that you play a lot, therefore tournament results and accomplishments are better indicators of a character’s skill level.

Momochi (ranked 21) fuckin shat on Mago(ranked 1) in the last GOds Garden tournament. Nova is a ranked 39 sagat, and wtf has he done? Who the hell is he anyway? People continue to believe and act like this whole BP ranking actually means something? What tournament has he won? What has he actually done?