Ok then, so basically the characters who have to worry about unblockables will just be different and most characters will still have poor options against vortex. I figured Akumas would find new setups and timings. So his only changes are that st hk is now less useful on characters Akuma still beats, demon flip palm is not an overhead, and he can do fireballs out of ex demon flip? Cool man, no big problem with the nerfs and no big plus with the buffs, I like it.
Please take a trip to the Akuma forums. These kids are thinking of suicide over there
I found an image that shows the arc of Akuma’s air hadou out of the EX demon flip. Check it out:
Meh its cool, I don’t need to cause trouble. Slight nerfs, one of which addresses real matchup concerns, and a slight buff. Meanwhile slight nerfs to Fei, real nerfs to Yun and Yang, slight nerfs plus slight buffs to Viper, buffs to some characters below Akuma but not even hardly close enough to make him irrelevant. No big deal, man. Sweet, go 2012.
They are really putting the time into it even though it is free. 2012 is gonna be great.
Does the threat of standing roundhouse prevent Zangief from doing something?
Akuma doesn’t need that move to beat Zangief. Maybe I am missing something.
It helps T-hawk more than Gief. Gief had less trouble getting around it than other grapplers. Though it sucks for the Makoto match up since she is freaking hard to pin down even with s.HK
So it seems Akuma players only don’t complain about broken stuff. From this logic, Yun shouldn’t be nerfed. It’s not one or two broken tools that made him top tier, it’s the combination of good tools.
Some characters don’t have a completely BS abusive tool, but they have a combination of good ones, making them versatile and good against every opponent.
Remember: characters with only 6x4, some 5x5 and no/few 4x6 are not balanced.
It’s a shame 95% of the players think they win because they’re good, completely ignoring their characters’ merits.
As for Akuma, if you’re not winning, or it’s difficult to win, it’s not your character’s problem, it’s your. ALWAYS take the top player as base when you want to talk about a character’s strength. In this case, Tokido.
If this is not the case for the player, well, this topic has some wise words.
"Just because a character is hard to learn, doesn’t mean they should be guaranteed a higher tier standing. The pro-level is the best we have to measure the potential of a character and Viper has proven she can do very well"
i was with you before this. more often than not, it is the player that wins matches. the player still has to know what to, when to do it, and when to make those decisions that decide the outcome
for all the S tiered goodness of the trinity, none of them win anything from the character select screen
It wasn’t supposed to sound so extremal.
But I’ll give examples.
-Somewhere, sometime, a Sagat player from vanilla said he needed no nerfs because his characters had problems that could be exploited.
-Another space and time: a friend of mine was beating their opponents. He had a bit of trouble, but he was beating everyone. In the end, when he found out his character was going to be nerfed, he moderately freaked out. He believes every victory was because he was actually better than his friends. The 6x4 matchup wasn’t being taken in consideration. His ego was.
I’m not saying players can’t outplay others. I’m simply saying that, while people forget that tiers and matchups doesn’t mean everything, player skill is not the ultimate stat. That is often forgotten by players who use top tier characters (not everyone, of course).
edit: Not a rule, but is commom sight: Bottom/Low tier players want their characters to win for them. High/Top players think their characters are perfectly fine and their victories are skill alone.
The threat of st hk prevents both Gief and Hawk from walking forward within like 1/3 screen, so both of them have to be extremely patient and cautious against a character with a very fast walk speed who can quickly walk into range for safe-on-block combo-if-hit move even if he’s up to like 1/2 screen distance. They can’t really beat it on reaction except if they’re really ready to spaz out with ex hand or ex dp, they mostly have to hope that Akuma misses his location so they can punish on whiff. They can’t realistically expect to get out of the way, their walk speed is too slow and they need to be close to deal damage anyway so it’s not like they can play from outside st hk range very ewll. They can both do things against it preemptively if they bet on the right timing, but that doesn’t work terribly often. Check out Tokido v FlashMetroid in Evo top 8, Tokido used it a number of times to do exactly that stuff and then backdashed immediately after Flash blocked the hk. Flash figured Tokido would respect him enough to think that Flash knew st hk was unpunishable but would then think that there’d be no way Flash would try spd there, so Flash tried it, but Tokido either didn’t respect him or was on that next level of mixups. I’m looking forward to that being gone.
Imo Akuma will still win both matchups, just not as much. That’s fine with me even as the grappler player, should be fine with Akuma players too.
As a Makoto player, Akuma’s st.hk nerf is my favorite change out of everything. Fuck that move.
there is a mix, but its heavily skewed towards the player. and just so you know, its the same way whether i play high tier fei, or low tier gen
fei just makes the match ups easier with better tools. but all the little things that go on in the match like spacing, AA, defense, fundamentals, knowing punishes, knowing when to mix up or back off, frame data etc., it doesent change because i pick a worse character
Okay, so, Gief and Hawk’s Akuma matchup just became better.
So what about Hawk’s Blanka matchup? Isn’t that considered to be the only 9/1 in the game? What’s being done about that?
The majority of those back dashes were not after standing roundhouse (one clearly was in the first round). The damage nerf might have helped Flash more in that match than the frame data nerf. Standing roundhouse was mostly used to punish whiffed SPDs. But yeah, it’s impossible for me to tell what buttons the move is preventing Zangief from using.
Nah it’s not 9-1 at all, Hawk’s footsie normals are too good for that. But it’s a big loss, no doubt, and I don’t really know what you can do about it other than make something of Hawk’s better than it needs to be in other matchups (ex spire faster and farther? sweep faster and farther? dash faster and farther? etc. any of those would cause so much havoc in other matchups) or make something of Blanka’s almost not usable in other matchups (horizontal ball pushback even worse? up ball pushback ever worse? ex rainbow ball escape from the corner worse? etc). One nice change will be that Blanka’s up ball will knock down on hit BUT actually be punishable by Hawk on block because it doesn’t push the opponent back as far on block, so while this change is good for Blanka in most of his matchups, against Hawk it might even things out a bit. Maybe Hawk’s easier u2 motion will make it a tiny bit more useful here? Who knows. Anyway they’re both weirdly designed and kinda polarizing characters, I don’t think you could make this matchup easier without some pretty significant changes to each of them.
Any buttons. What, am I gonna be whiffing buttons from 1/3 screen in expectation of a st hk against one of the best whiff-punishing characters in the game with st hk and walk sweep who has other good options like fireball and runaway to convince me not to push buttons there very often? That’s not gonna get me very far.
the joystick
that move+akumas walk+giefs walk=gief cant move
seems like akuma players think he’s headed for low mid tier and worst shoto if the beta changes stick
I follow what you guys are saying but as long as Akuma has space to move backwards Zangief still isn’t getting in with any consistency. It will be interesting to see if the nerf actually makes any significant difference.
An unrelated thing that I noticed when watching that match (I am not directing this comment towards anyone, I am just writing it):
(1) First blocked standing roundhouse, Tokido did jump back air hadou, Flash Metroid did a standing strong.
(2) Second blocked standing roundhouse, Tokido did cr.mk, it looked like Flash Metroid tried to stand and walk forward, he got hit by the cr.mk. This could be a bait by Tokido setup by (1).
(3) Third blocked standing roundhouse, Tokido back dashed, Flash Metroid did an SPD and got punished. This could be a bait by Tokido setup by (2).
That is the difference between spam and legitimate Street Fighter. Average Akuma players spam the move and pay the price for it. Legitimate Akuma does the above (maybe 
).
Did …did you just say your char got nerfed hard?
See here now sir…
Only ONE char got nerfed “hard” from Vanilla to Super and his favorite word is Tiger.
Did I say Akuma received the hardest nerfs?
You won’t hear and argument from me, Capcom overnerfed Sagat. Still Akuma got some rather big nerfs.