Calling it now, bottom 5:
- Dhalsim
- El Fuerte
- Elena
- Dan
- Deejay
Why is Elena bad?
She’s amazingly dominant at neutral, and her slide goes like 3/4 screen and under fireballs
And even if she can’t slide her focus is going to absorb and crumple from like close to half screen
El Fuerte’s neutral game buffs still being slept on hard I see. He has legit hit confirm damage now, better footsies, great wakeup options, high damage meter usage combos, amazing tools to beat zoning, a great overhead, and a solid mixup game.
Honestly the only things Elf is lacking now are good reaching whiff punish normals and a 3F normal.
A. Way too early to say.
B. Sim still has a stupidly good time against Grapplers so I doubt he’ll be that low.
C. Lack of Hugo (lol poor Hugo) :V
I don’t get why people are calling Elena bad. The high level matches I’ve seen with her she’s seemed really solid, slippery and tricky to deal with. She has a nice high/low mix-up game and her punishes do huge damage as well.
She seems okay if inconsistent. Stuff like cr.lk cr.lp cr.mp will just drop on crouchers I’ve heard which kinda hurts her. Maybe there’s something I don’t know. I imagine it’s because she’s different so scrubs try her for 3 minutes and think she’s bad.
imo elena is awful. i hope someone proves me wrong.
the good:
-good walkspeed
-great dash
-amazing backdash
-amazing focus
-c.mp is a really buff poke (beats shoto c.mk free)
-c.lp reaches far and has good priority
-s.hp has a good hitbox, is airborne
-has a really difficult hitbox to combo (esp. crouching)
-is really annoying due to low profile moves and ranged slide being safe + difficult to react to
-ex mallet is very fast and goes far (but unsafe)
-super is really fast (1+3) and goes quite far (reaches all ranges of fei lp rekka on block)
-command overheads reach far
-j.hp reaches far, is a strong a2a option
the bad:
low vitality:
-950 health
-900 stun (in a game with RFC into 800+ stun combos)
the worst jump in the game:
-by far the worst jump in the game, no way to alter her jump arc, no boss jumpins ala vega j.hp
can’t chip:
-ken (for example) can punish all specials (except one) on block, and some on hit. when spaced ‘safely’ the last hits of lynx tail and spin scythe whiff, leaving her open.
-her only safe special is hp mallet smash, which is -1 on block; except it’s extremely slow and loses to everything (including, somehow, shoto c.mk)
shitty low options:
-c.lk is her only low combo starter and can’t chain, and is a 1f unplinkable link into c.lp (which is another 1f into c.mp)
-makes abare crouch tech basically impossible (c.lk is 0f on block and starts in 4f)
-this wouldn’t be so bad if she had rekka or galactic tornado, but everything is unsafe so you can’t afford to miss a link
-sweep/slide are v. unsafe (sweep is -16)
-c.mk is another low, but you can’t link into or out of it so you have to cancel immediately into an unsafe special
no reversal:
-only ex scratch has any invincibility, all other dps have 0 and get stuffed/thrown free
-ex scratch wheel is an ass-tier reversal; many times you’ll make the correct read, land 1-2 of the hits and whiff the rest leaving her open for a huge punish; far more often than characters like ken/akuma fierce dp might in similar situations
no real AA:
-ex scratch is the only AA i found that doesn’t trade or lose to good jumpins
-s.mk /s.mp sometimes works but have few active frames and do no damage
-early lk dp sometimes works, but because of the damage distribution and poor health you almost always lose in the trade
ultras are …:
-u1 (brave dance) is actually not bad, fast + goes far. but invincibility only extends to 1st active frame, many times i’ve done AA ultra and traded (and lost the exchange). i did ultra vs. lv3 hugo focus and traded. c’mon.
-u2 (healing) has almost no setups; even if you RFC something to get a full crumple + backdash and ultra 2 most characters can punish. full super into u2 has the same problem. you have to cancel early just to not die, which nets you very little health.
nothing works:
-i have never seen any character in any game drop opponents out of multihitting specials more than elena in this game; hk lynx tail and all versions of spin scythe from range are extra guilty of this
-s.hp is supposed to be her cancellable heavy (gateway into heavy versions of specials) but it starts in 13f, doesn’t hit most crouchers, and you often can’t even get it on a crumple
-she can’t reliably combo many crouching characters (gen, chun, herself) because spin scythe 2nd hit whiffs, and cancelling into dp doesn’t reach.
-she has 4 input mapped to kicks (dp, reverse dp, hcf, qcb + K) and in an attempt to make this manageable capcom decided to make lynx tail (rev. dp) have no shortcut, but also have priority over dp when the inputs overlap, so you sometimes get hit in the face when you try to AA dp from walking back. i played elena in sfxt and she definitely did not have this many problems getting the correct specials out.
-has no chains (like honda) therefore can’t do chain OS slide or ultra or whatever
-ALL her normals are minus on block except c.lp (+2) and c.lk (0) so it’s difficult to make people stop pressing buttons
-no consistency on her backthrow (try it midscreen, then try it w/ opponent in the corner, completely different distances) making oki/safejump pressure difficult
-c.mp is great! cool. it beats a lot of pokes. but from the range you’re doing that, that’s it. you don’t have rekka or fireball to combo into. scythe and dp whiff. lynx tail will drop the opponent midway or just not reach. rhino horn only hits standing opponents. so you can’t convert these stray hits into actual damage, which is what good characters do (think sakura c.mk into sho FADC damage, or eryu c.mk into whatever, or cammy c.mk into drill into oki). sure, chun doesn’t need to do that, but chun also has way better buttons / movement to land those hits more often. rose has a similar gameplan (annoy, poke, maintain max poke distance, convert here and there) but again, has normals that are much better suited for this; faster and more range.
Elena is a hot mess to both at as and against. Not a fan at all.
I really really really really wish Elena was bottom 5, but alas that’s not the case.
Welp we’ll see what Justin does with her. Is it a good character or is it iron fist part 2?
I get the idea that she is supposed to be all neutral w/overheads and lows and focus. She should basically never jump at all, and her damage combos and specials outside of ex mallet and combo ender dps are all a bonus
justin can make anyone look good. he could place in majors with deejay if he wanted to. being above average at neutral is great, but why bother if there are characters that are either better at it (chun, rose) or simply invalidate that approach (yun, viper)?
i’m really interested to see how he does at evo vs. people who are used to her spacing and know how to punish her normals/specials properly. you can’t win a major with 50 damage overheads and no scary low option.
I dunno. Maybe you’re right. That’s why I’m saying wait and see.
Kazunoko makes her look really good too for what its worth
wasn’t that all pre-console? she got quite a few nerfs since arcade release.
Im just surprised I haven’t ran into an army of Decapres, E. Ryu’s, Yuns yet. Still same old Ryu picks lol
ive seen alot of yuns and evil ryus although most of the evil ryus i fought were being played like ryu
It was. I’m pretty sure almost all of the jpn players that mained her pre console are dropping her.
So Elena has a 4f CR LK, which is +3 on hit? lol. And it is not chainable, wow. Her CR LP is a 3f move.
Also her frame data tells me that she looks quite unsafe tbh.
I should have looked into the frame data first and also some training mode practice, before playing against her.
Is Rufus/Blanka still horrible for rufus?
Yup her most basic BnB consists of two 1 frame links, one of which is an unplinkable jab link. Elena’s adv right now is that many don’t know what’s safe and what’s not against her, and when to look out for EX mallet. when they realize that literally everything she does is unsafe and punishable, including most of her normals and that her EX mallet is pretty easily telegraphed due to her terrible low game,(you honestly dont really have to watch for lows against her at all) she’ll be blown up pretty free.
Hugo is numbah wun