I also find it amazing that everyone is listing their favorites. -_-
Recovery, no doubt. And Oro’s EX fireball has tracking, and is fine in tourneys. 
Denjin OWNS all
I voted for recovery as well, and I guess if you can call Venom’s(from GGXX) ground super a projectile then that is a pretty useful one imo.
recovery is good, covers good space and chip or damage.
That’s a beam… beams and fireballs aren’t the same thing…
I think recovery and relative size are the most important aspects. On the other hand, a fast projectile (such as Cables fierce) can’t be used cheaply as well.
I suppose it’s a question of the style of character… a character could have a very very slow yet large projectile, but because of the quick recovery, that character can use very slow fireballs for diffrent tricks with lock downs and mix ups. (jumping ahead of it or walking behind it and so on)
On the other hand, you can spam the joint up with lots of little pellets and keep pressure on at all times forcing mistakes.
I don’t think tracking and stun are so important… ultimately fireballs represent a way to make your opponent block at a distance. You have to be careful when building projectile characters, it’s very easy to create something broken with projectiles.
No, I didn’t miss the point. The BEST fb is gonna have several of these features that are listed at once. There are lots of fireballs that come out fast, move fast, keeps the character safe after shooting and cover big spaces. Sometimes the only way to counter some of these fireballs, is to hit them while and only while they’re doing a fireball with hop special/slide special.
I <3 SNK
cvs2 haohmaru- the best fireball ever, its a shining example for us all
I voted has the least start up frames and travels the fastest. I mean, recovery is good, but if it comes out almost instantly, well, good job for the computer, but to any human eye not fast enough, well block or hit. Least start up frames would kind of be like Akumas air fireball, so yeah.
Most good fireballs have good recovery. Even in KOF I believe mature has a kaiser wave type fireball and it’s useful despite it’s start up because it allows you to rush after it and is more difficult to jump over because of it’s size.
Recovery tends to be key just look at sean’s basketball for instance or dudley’s rose…they do like 1 point of damage but they allow follow ups, it’s a obstacle and although it may not have some huge hit box it’s still useful.
That’s not to say that fireballs aren’t useful with other aspects aswell, if anyone has played svc you should see the hilarity that is SVC sagat and his ridiculous fireballs which can hit meaty as hell. Low tiger cannon is pretty funny and hits people with the very tail end making it a pretty good anti air super when you think they’ll jump in from afar.
Most of the best fireballs you’ll notice tend to have more than one of the attributes you mentioned and tend to always have some kind of follow up opportunity usually due to low recovery time. About the only thing that would justify a fireball being useful and having crappy recovery would be one that instantly covers the screen and can be used to punish things normally unpunishable and even then it would probably need to do good damage or combo into a super to reach sonic boom popularity. The only other thing that can compete with a fireball with good recovery would be one that chips well and doesn’t leave you ridiculously open.
Tracking opponents with a fireball would probably be reserved for 3d games but also Sektor of MK fame has a heat seeking missle iirc but it can be fizzled out so it limits it’s use. It depends on the measures used but if it is going to hit you no matter what then it would probably be broken even if it does only 1 damage on hit or block.
Overall:
Recovery > Good chip damage > Everything else
As I said it’s usually not just any one thing when it comes to things other than recovery and good chip. Usually a good fireball has more than one of the attributes you described including the 2 I think are most important which is recovery and good chip. But I will go ahead and say that the 3rd best fireball attribute would be AAA capability (high/low variation option). Good examples are whether Urien’s hp fireball (but his has juggle potential so that’s something extra other than just AAA ability) or Sagat’s high tiger shot.
Well that’s just the thing there is usually a way to avoid it and from just about every example of a “big fireball” (kaiser wave, haou shokoken) they usually can be avoided at the peak of your jump (rolls aswell in most of the games that these big fireballs are present) and tend to be very punishable due to high recovery. However there are exceptions such as Mature’s Kaiser Blade (don’t know the exact name) but it makes up for it in it’s start up time and the fact that in KOF you can roll through it.
i really still don’t understand how anyone can hope to answer this question.
Least startup/recovery + coverage. Send it out and rush forward. They do anything to avoid it and you can catch them coming out of it (rolls/jumps) Sol’s should go full screen and be a little taller if you wanted to create the perfect projectile. Speed I used to think was paramount until I started playing 2003 and comboed just about anything off of Ash’s DM.
Question answered AND opinion given. Wasn’t that hard.
FRC Gunflame (GGX2 [not reload])
basically the best fireball is the one that, given a game’s engine and cast, is almost, but not quite, broken.
This isn’t one of the poll options, but I think the best fireball is the one that’s hardest to avoid. For example, AHVB, Mega Optic Blast, and Ice Beam all have amazing speed and screen coverage in MvC2 while Denjin Hadouken and Oro’s EX fireball are both hard to avoid because you can mix up Denjin’s timingand Oro’s thing is a super-slow, tracking fireball that hits twice.