What I’m trying to say here is that you’re looking at the results and not the reasons for those results.
But before I get into that, you’re not just saying that health is the least effective form of balance. You also said that you’d prefer if they made everyone equal health, which I’ve mentioned would remove character archetypes from a game. That’s my primary objection.
In any case, maybe I’m assuming things, but I doubt you’ve made an exhaustive list of the methods designers use to balance characters in fighting games, and determined that variable health was the least effective of those. It sounds more like hyperbole.
Remember that designers are humans with a lot of goals for a game. The #1 goal is not top-level balance. This is a fact, and has been for the majority of developers of competitive games going back as long as you like. There will be exceptions, but not usually in the games that come first to people’s mind when they think of competitive gaming.
It’s extremely easy to see in Capcom games. You cannot possibly look at the Marvel 3 cast, and the UMvC3 changes, and tell me to my virtual face that Capcom did not intend for Magneto to be good and Hsien-ko to be bad. Who were the characters that got hotfixes? Sentinel, the Day 1 newbie-crusher, and Phoenix Wright, which is something I could point to if I wanted to summarize this entire post in one patch note.
In your own lists you named a fair amount of top tier characters who had average health or even above-average health. What you might notice is that, even then, you didn’t name any grapplers. Which leads you to the real reason why high-health characters are usually bad. It’s not because health is a useless asset. It’s because designers are afraid of making a game where grapplers are top tier. That’s pretty much the worst-case outcome.
How grapplers are feared:
[details=Spoiler]Imagine what “grappler syndrome” in SF games would be like if the grappler was actually #1 in the game. How deeply would that character dominate the beginner-to-intermediate scene? To a grappler main, or a player who wants to be a top tournament player, that might not matter, but it absolutely matters to a developer. It’s not just that, either. The designers know what makes the grappler archetype tick, and that knowledge makes them nervous for their high-level game if the grappler turns out to be good.
Why DOES a grappler have high health? The primary reason is because command throw mixup is inherently risky, and in order to make the grappler comfortable with those risks, they need something to tip the risk/reward in their favor. For an example of what it looks like when this risk/reward breaks down, look at any of Abel’s bad matchups. It also helps them get through keepaway tactics, and this is what most people point to as the reason for high health, but that’s a secondary benefit and an optional side effect of their design. Makoto has just as much trouble with keepaway, and doesn’t get any of that health buffer.
If a risk-heavy character like that is top tier in a game (any game, not just fighters), it tends to set off a warning flag in a designer’s head that something is wrong with the game. Tournament players are supposed to favor safe characters! You might disagree with their opinion, but the effects of that mindset are apparent in the way that these games are balanced. There have been designers that have said this outright.
It’s not hard at all to make any character good, even a grappler. Look at grapplers in early USF4. How long did it take for that to get changed? In Arcsys games, Potemkin has been good before, and Tager was top tier in a recent version after being utter bottom of the barrel for the majority of the game’s life. If you want to know why it doesn’t happen with more regularity, why not go with the simple explanation: designers are REALLY hesitant to overtune them.[/details]
There’s no such fear with Sagat, whose history In SF has been almost as decorated as Akuma’s, despite being a high-health character. He is a “safe” character who “should” be popular in tournaments from a designer’s view. Rufus was never far from strong in any version of SF4. In Vanilla SFxT, the strongest characters were mostly average or above-average health. If you’re willing to go further out into designers who might not be so scared of grapplers, you’ll probably find a wider array of health values. For example, the UNIEL top tiers are mostly above-average health.
Akuma is always strong because he is tuned with velvet gloves, not because his tools ensure that he can’t be bad. I assure you, it would be easy enough to turn Akuma into Dan with just some tweaks on hitboxes, startup and recovery times. But in reality, the designers make sure he is good. When Akuma’s teleport wasn’t working to protect him from setplay, they gave him U2. When U2 wasn’t good enough, they made it better. Then look at all the other characters who waited for years before getting anything to fix their weaknesses, if they got it at all.
So I don’t recommend taking any lessons about the effectiveness of any balance procedure from Akuma’s performance. That’s entirely the human touch at work. I’d speak similarly to the people who argue that Ono was lying when he said AE was intentionally unbalanced for the arcades - I’d wonder if you’d seen AE’s patchnotes, and then point at Phoenix Wright again for good measure.
About why variable health exists:
[details=Spoiler]For a counter-example that might be worth looking at, I’d suggest researching Chipp’s performance in GG. That’s a character who would need to change completely if he didn’t have paper-tier health, but against people who are familiar with the character, he isn’t inherently dominant, despite having lots of “tools” to help him avoid getting hit.
Compare him with Seth in SF4. They have similar traits: neither of them want to be trading hits with you at mid-range. They would prefer to never block if they could help it. They have tracking teleports and multiple mixup tools and a shoryuken for desperate measures.
So what’s the difference in the way these characters are tuned? Well, Seth is a boss character, and Chipp is not. He is supposed to be strong. Yes, there are other differences. The weakness in Seth’s offense is that his damage is low, while Chipp’s weakness is positioning - he doesn’t really get going until he has you in the corner. In a game like SF4, you could say that low damage is not much of a weakness. But it would be extremely easy to make either of those characters terrible.
I’d say that, on the whole, low health can be something that keeps a character out of top tier almost as often as high health. How many characters have you seen where people say they’re good if you play perfect, but no one actually does? I would have a suspicion that boosting Juri to average health would be a tremendously effective balance change.
Which brings me to the ultimate point: variable health is primarily a design tool that molds a character’s playstyle. Yes, there are times where you will see a character’s health adjusted, and then it becomes a balancing tool. It can even be an effective one, if you let it. But that’s not why it exists.
The whole idea of “better tools” is lazy thinking. Does Rufus have higher health because his “tools” are worse than other characters? Far from it. Early on, EX messiah was described as the best reversal in the game. He has the best divekick in the game especially from AE onward, and he has a safe special move for pressure purposes. Cammy has less health than Rufus, and she has “a lot of tools,” but are they better? I would not say so. She has no safe specials, no overhead, weak range on throw and focus, her crossup is relatively awful, her ultra is hard to combo into, and even her divekick is not very good anymore without meter. The only truly great move she has left is her DP. The reason she’s always been strong is because of the way her moves work together, the way she fits into the metagame of SF4, and because she doesn’t have any glaring weaknesses in her character for an opponent to abuse.
Rufus has high health because it allows the designers to change the way he plays and the way opponents play against him. He is weak on defense without meter, so he has moments of vulnerability, especially in the first round. If he manages to take the advantage here, he can afford to take risks without great fear of punishment, but if the opponent properly capitalizes, he doesn’t instantly lose. In a game that had universal health, a meter dependency like that would be a major handicap for the character and probably have to be removed or overhauled.
None of that falls in with your statement about tools vs. health, or getting hit vs. not getting hit. It’s about creating variety in the types of characters available in the game.
Similarly, characters are given low health because the designers want to create incentives for certain types of play. They don’t want Akuma to make a habit of doing close-range frametraps with low jabs and strongs like Ryu does, even though technically he is capable of it, because Akuma will suffer more from guessing wrong and/or eating a reversal from the defender. In order to include a character with strong keepaway, like you might get from a teleport and air fireballs, it’s important to ensure that a clean combo on that character will put you at a life lead, even if you’ve both landed one, forcing them to close the gap.
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In a game with universal health, unless you’re willing to accept homogenization of the characters thanks to equalized risk/reward, you’d have to manually cripple the options you don’t want the character to use very often. Like any nerf-heavy approach to design, this doesn’t feel very good, and will probably slow down the pace of the game. Rather than saying health is an ineffective means of balance, I’d say it’s a non-intrusive one: the character still feels like the character, only your priorities change when health changes.
If you look at history, are there more top tiers with low health than high? Undoubtedly, but as I’ve been saying, I believe this is for human reasons and not systemic ones. The best examples are found in more obscure fighting games, as well as old fighters made before designer biases set in. I doubt you will find much correlation between health and tiers in those games, aside from cases where huge big-body hitboxes were abused, which is a separate and real problem.
What does this huge post have to do with SF5? Probably not a lot in the scheme of things, because variable health is there to stay, but I did my best to keep it small with spoilers. As far as Akuma is concerned, I’d have to be blind not to expect him in the game, and I’d also not expect him to be the same as he was in past games.
If I had to take a shot in the dark for how SF5 Akuma could be made unique:
[details=Spoiler]Actually do the thing the other guy said about making supers into regular moves, to some extent. He could have a fierce that’s the initial punch of KKZ. Unsafe, but pops up on hit, more on counterhit. Similarly, play with his tatsus like they did for Ken. Make EX tatsus work like 3S SA3/Gouken’s tatsus, maybe. VT can be Misogi, with some horizontal control but closer to Oni’s version than a full screen super, and no invincibility.
Akuma had a roll in the alpha series. Since Ken didn’t get his, you could bring it back for Akuma, possibly as a quick teleport without the full invincibility - same effect, more Akuma flavor. Regular teleports would be only accessible as V-Reversals. Keep the air fireballs and demon flip (v-skill), since they will be less oppressive in a game with SF5’s wakeup options. Only demon palm and slide build v-gauge. Make sure that the air fireball doesn’t trade if you hit him as he’s firing it.
s.HK could be SF4 HK, b+HK could be like E.Ryu’s axe kick, s.MK would angle downward (more alpha Akuma). Since you mentioned you don’t like his overhead chop, despite it being a little different, there’s also a f+MK there if you want it, or you could just give him UOH.
Give him cancelable medium normals that aren’t as good for linking as the other shotos. His offense would be primarily 2-in-1s with different specials, so his best confirms would be from b+HK, punishes, demon flip, and air fireballs.
In total, I think all that would make him play considerably different from Ryu, while distinctly himself. And that’s off the top of my head, so it’s not really a serious suggestion, just saying I don’t think it’s hard to have a version of Akuma that’s clearly not “Ryu + new moves,” and he’s going to be there whether we want it or not.[/details]
