I’d definitely agree that Yvel is low tier. On the ground he dies and on his feet, like you said, there are guys who do everything he does better than him. And yeah, Vovchanchyn, on his feet, is always threatening because of his mad power. He can practically jab his way to a KO within two rounds.
I dunno about Newton. To be honest I never really used him all that much, but from what I could tell he seemed unremarkable but solid. There are characters which do everything he does in any given situation better than him, but he’s never horribly overmatched in any position I don’t think. I thought his biggest assets were his flying submissions from standing, because aside from being able to catch people by surprise for a win in various ways (baiting, rushing out at the start of a round, etc) they’re reasonably safe ways to put guys on the mat when you don’t want any of their striking, or don’t want to risk a takedown. It makes dealing with guys like Schilt and Wand so much easier.
His other best tool I think was his sweep counter. I can’t remember how it was done, but basically half the time you had top position and somebody would try to sweep you, you could just roll through and end up back in top guard. Which I thought was super nifty. The combination of the sweep reversal and the flying submissions made him kind of annoying to deal with I thought, because basically it meant he could safely and easily put you on the mat from a distance and keep you there if he really wanted to, unless you were a seriously good grappler. If I had to guess - because of that stuff, and generally having reasonably decent striking tools - I probably would place him about upper mid or something.
Gary Goodrige, holy shit, he is made of lol and win. He’s mad fun if you can figure out how to not get killed with him. Like, I have no idea where he’d be tiered either because he’s such a wacky fucking character, but it seemed to me that at least half his game consists of indiscriminately throwing bombs, and if they whiff, he gets punished like hell, but if they connect, it can be laughably brutal. Basically, on CH stun you can either throw out 1,2,1,2,1,2 or 2,1,2,1,2 (or something like that, you get the idea). They’re these two combos only available on stun; one is just a flurry of punches which is nasty if they all connect, and the other is a smaller flurry of punches ending in an (escapable) auto throw of punches to the mid section, which is even nastier. So basically if you throw one of his huge bombs and it connects on CH, as if that didn’t do enough damage, you basically get a whole shitload of free damage on top of that.
Plus, if I’m not mistaken he has a corner specific combo like Herring (1,2,1,2,1,2 or something) which is great damage if it connects, and nice chip damage if it doesn’t. Basically, given these tools - it’s hard to do because everything he does has such retarded startup - but if you can pressure people into a corner with Goodridge you can potentially unleash hell, and decimate anyone for like 80% of their vitality in about ten seconds while you rofl and your opponent just sits there like “wtf O.O”. Plus, he has some really nice ground and pound from top mount if you wind up there, but I found that deliberately going to ground with him was generally a bad idea because his grappling kind of sucks and you really don’t want to risk winding up mounted.
So yeah. Granted I didn’t use Goodridge a whole lot, but he’s a weird character I think. Serious risk vs serious reward, basically. Either really high tier or really low tier, not sure which. 