Yeah i’m still learning how to stop the momentum from pulling your self in with chains by whiffing j.A’s since you cant just mindlessly chain in on him because of lol6a.
Eh. You can chain in on him just fine. Just either do an early j.B or use a non-D chain followup to alter your trajectory.
Yeah, you can’t just heedlessly do 5D > D and fly in with whatever you want, but 6A really isn’t that mighty.
Pretty much agreeing with that was said. Hazama should be zooming around on chains as opposed to walking and hopping. It’s only really an issue with characters like Tao that are just more mobile than he is, which totally takes away his edge.
Speaking of Tao, I finally fought my first good one today. It really took me by surprise, she really makes Valky look like a low mobility character (even though Valky, Tao, and Bang are the most mobile characters in the game).
As for Hazama, abuse that 3C. Even though it has slow-ish start-up the range is deceptively long and can low profile a lot of moves (such as Valky’s 5C >.>); it’s a good start of the round option as well. For people who love to mindlessly jump in, abuse rising fang. And don’t be afraid to zone with chains either.
And man, Noel is annoying. 4D is the bane of my existence. I really need to learn more about this character since everyone uses her. And seriously, 4.3 meterless off of a throw in the corner? Noel is upstaging my damage.
And of course, Ragna is still as annoying as ever. Really dislike those giant hitboxes on everything. This little “hells fang guessing game” is also getting a tad annoying. Baiting ID with 4C and 7C is hilarious though. Luckily most players online respect Nacht Jager wayy too much and don’t realize that it’s not safe, you can IB or poke/DP Valky out of any followup from it.
As of right now, the three characters that really “grind my gears” are Tager, Ragna, and Noel.
As funny as it sounds, Drive spamming Noels are actually the bane of my existence too. Not because I find them hard to beat, since I don’t by any means find them difficult to play against, but because they make the rest of us Noels that actually AREN’T bandwagoners and spammy newbies look bad when we’ve stuck it out the entire series and actually know what we’re doing and what we’re talking about.
Oh, forgot to mention Hakumen, all it takes is one yukikaze to equalize the health bars. He’s scrub accessible but not to the extent that Noel and Ragna are. I’ve noticed that quite a few Noel players seem to use their drive when I’m not even near them (like quite literally at the other side of the stage). Makes me wonder if they are actually using their brains or just mashing buttons.
I’m curious though. Who do you guys think are the best S tiers in accordance to the general consensus (Ragna, Valky, Hakumen). As in, who’s the best, second best, and third best? I have a general idea, but I’m curious as to what you all think.
Noel players can mash drive buttons at full screen because A) if you decide to rush at them all of a sudden, most of their drive starters (especially 2D and 4D) have a pretty good number of active frames, so there’s a decent chance that you might just fly right into it and B) It’s hard for most characters to punish at full screen anyway.
4D is, honestly, an incredibly stupid move. I mean, really. 100/92, fatal counter, immune to nearly every move that is likely to reach her after her funny little backstep thing, extremely viable as an anti-air, autocorrecting followups that lead into almost as much damage as it does, and leads into a mostly-safe blockstring (with mixup!) on block. Seriously? Why would you NOT mash this anytime you think your opponent is near the edge of their effective range (Which, normally, is where everyone WANTS to play). Oh, and there’s an almost equally strong starter that beats every move that 4D loses to. Seriously? Oh, and did I mention that both 2D and 4D get their invulnerability on frame 1, so they’re viable wakeup options, AND they both have a side-switch followup (Assault through) allowing Noel to do a corner combo even when her back was to it.
Noel is a dumb character. 4D and 2D mean that she essentially doesn’t have to play neutral, she just has to guess right about 40% of the time on whether to pick 2D or 4D when her opponent attacks. She’s essentially rewarded for only using those two moves until her opponent gets fed up and stops attacking.
Edit: As for the “within S tier” rankings, I’d argue that it looks like this at top skill level:
Valk > Hakumen > Ragna
and this at a ‘closer to normal’ skill level:
Ragna > Hakumen > Valk
Not gonna lie, but it sounds to me that you don’t fully understand that much about Noel. Most of her Drive moves are insanely easy to see coming and are ridiculously punishable on block and will leave you wide open to eat like, 4k as a result of your spammy carelessness. When spammy Noels win, it’s because people can’t/don’t block, are intimidates and don’t really know how to go about punishing things. Like really, calling a character as a whole stupid when you’re unable to deal with something as predictable and easy to punish as Drive Spam (which everyone’s known about for 4 GAMES BEFORE CP NOW), and judging the entire character off of it makes no sense. It’s like comparing that Shadow Phantom guy from EVO last year to say, GUCCI in terms of players, or judging Akuma and Infiltration by calling him a stupid character because of some spammy Akuma you met online.
Really, what’s with all the Noel hate? I think she is fun
But then again I’m another one of those MASH D Noel players you guys must be talking about. I have been trying to step up my game though >_>
It’s okay man, I feel your pain. I’ve been a Noel player since CT and I kind of get tired of having to seemingly constantly defend her against stuff like this. I mean…2D hasn’t been an overhead since Calamity Trigger, and her Drive doesn’t do chip damage, so if she ground mashes all you have to do is block/barrier block low and punish it. I guess hating Noel’s just “the cool thing to do”, but I really think there are more “cheap” characters within the game and that nothing constructive comes from it as the same “problem” has existed for over 3 and a half years now so if the exact same thing happens and people continue to fall for the same thing then it stops being the characters fault. If you do jump in roundhouse kick in Ryu and get a Shoryuken for your troubles every single time, then at a certain point it stops becoming “Ryu’s cheap because of his Dragon Punch!” and starts becoming “why don’t you adapt and not jump in predictably?”.
Besides, mashing D by itself won’t get you that good damage.
I really need to not mash down-forward C so much at the end of a blockstring >_> Got punished HARD for it in a few matches I had last night.
Yeah, her slide attack is really punishable, though it’s tempting to go 6B>6C>3C.
What pisses me off about Blazblue, and pretty much almost any Arc Systems fighter is that there are deliberately favored characters or mechanics for that character put into the game. Certain characters are allowed to get easy high damage combos off of mixups while everyone else has to work hard for their damage. I see arakune’s netting up to 90% damage in a single combo simply because he breathed correctly, and ABA, besides one life drain flaw, seems to be pretty much safe doing whatever the hell she wants between transitioning to her alternate modes. Allowing such philosophy to show up in their games makes me wonder how they ever wind up with any semblance of balance at all.
And then there’s imposed drawbacks to character gimmicks that they give that’s also doesn’t sit well on the balancing scale. Only in certain variations of the game did Ragna ever do high enough damage to not warrant being allowed to gain much life back from his life draining abilities - as if getting a 15% of his life back from a combo doing 30% damage (which seems to be the norm for him) would be cheap or something, GRANTED he has the lowest defense rating in the game. In that case, what’s the point of even giving him life back in the first place? Am I supposed to give two flying craps about the tick damage amount of life gain I get back from my combos? The match won’t even last long enough for me to get a sizable amount of life gain from my attacks. Why not just let it be a feature of Blood Kain, and get rid of that stupid life drain drawback he has from using it?
His predecessor suffered similar unnecessary unfair treatment at the hands of the developers in the name of “balance”. Here you have Sol, once a character whose only gimmick was a high damage loop combo in the corner being complained about because it was annoying to get caught in - outside of using that combo, he was a garbage character with garbage options and a ridiculous amount of recovery on his normals and specials that wouldn’t last a second against higher tiered characters in that game, yet he was the most complained about. The developers then caved into the fans demands every single time someone complained about him in the game and he’s seen more revisions and undeserving nerfs than the entire cast. No, don’t complain about Slayer, Eddie, Jam, and Millia at all, they deserve all that high damage, fast backdashes, parries, easy dizzies, unblockables, high priority attacks, awesome frame data and damn near free mixup for everything they (don’t) work for. Now according to a few tier lists for AC+R, he’s pretty low tier. And people will still complain. OMG, too much damage. Yeah, whatever.
You’re free to say that, but I’m free to disagree. The problem isn’t drive “spam” - but at high levels, drives are still huge rewards, which makes your whole “Oh, it’s just like Ryu’s dragon punch!” argument obsolete, AND, as mentioned, even just making you BLOCK it gives Noel free mixup for several hits (21 frame overhead), ending in moves that are questionably punishable for a lot of characters. (Sorry, but if you say Noel’s drive strings are ‘easy’ to punish, then you need to try to actually do it, rather than just say “Oh, oh, it’s -13!” That’s great and all, but it also pushes you way the hell back.) Also, why is drive spam “predictable” when it’s one of the most freeform chains in the entire game? Normally, a character is restricted to a few possible gatling options, whereas Noel can do any of her drive followups after any of the others. And can’t you just end a drive string with A Optic Barrel and be like, -3?
I just watched the entirety of the Evo 2k11 matchup between Tokido and LK, and you want to know how many times Tokido was punished for his drive strings? Once, when he was clearly trying to bait something by doing something goofy, and a couple of times when he got DP’d out of it. And honestly, he got pretty good results most of the time when he just “randomly” hit drive in Neutral, and that’s against a character with massive disconnected hitboxes. If anything, Tokido lost because he respected LK’s staffless pressure way too much instead of just hitting drive. (That and too many random muzzle flitters. :P)
Sadly, Jourdal’s channel is dead, or I’d show you exactly what I’m talking about - at high levels of play. Noel is an absurd “footsies” character because anytime you might want to, for example, poke her and try to initiate pressure, you have to deal with the fact that you could get fatal countered for 4k. This is the other reason your “dragon punch” analogy is wrong - jumping in is stupid behavior. Trying to play footsies with Noel is also stupid behavior, but it shouldn’t be, because you don’t really have other options except to sit there and let her pressure you. She has, essentially, a move that beats 2/3rds of the moves in the game and fatal counters for 4k, and another move that beats about 50% of what’s left and leads to 3k. And you just have to guess.
Also, Sol Badguy Z, did you seriously just suggest that Ragna should get 15% HP back on every combo? Do you realize that if they did that, landing a SINGLE combo would mean that only Tager and Hakumen would have more health than him, and landing two would mean he would have, effectively, more HP than anyone else in the game? So in a close match, you would suggest that it would be “fair” for Ragna to have more HP than Tager? (Note: You are also wrong when you say Ragna has the “lowest defense rating” in the game - if by that you mean “HP”. If you mean “guard primers” then yes, but that has little to do with his life drain ability.)
I guess I’ll post my thoughts about this. Note: I’ve only been playing for about a month so I’m terrible and don’t have much (matchup)experience besides a few characters.
The thing about Noel that pisses me off is her high damage off EVERYTHING. She can force you to play a guessing game during her drive. After blockstrings she can either 6B or 3C(even though it’s punishable on block) and she gets lots of damage of that too. And her corner damage…fuck that.
That being said, I feel she’s kinda like Blanka. A character that just destroys scrubs (like me) if you don’t know the matchup.
I can’t say I really hate her since I don’t know the matchup and I’d feel dumb judging her without having knowledge of the character.
Characters I genuinely hate.
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Arakune.Curse. FUCK curse.
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Litchi.I find her pressure so fucking hard to deal with. And when you get hit it takes 20 secs before she finishes her damn combo.
And when that combo is finally over, you have to deal with corner oki. Aka you’re done. -
Ragna (playing as Makoto). Now I don’t mind Ragna that much although I do think he’s too good atm.
But fighting Ragna with Makoto is just a fucking nightmare. He does everything Makoto does, but better. EVERYTHING. Better pressure, better pokes, better damage, better air normals.
Want to play footsies? Ragna: “Lol…no. 5b”.
Want to jump in (with shitty air to grounds)? Ragna: “Lol…no. 6a”.
Want to AA him? Ragna: "Lol… no. j.C.
It doesn’t help that everyone online is a beast. I often find myself just getting completely destroyed and not learning anything in the process. I never had this much trouble getting into Marvel/SF4 and that was without any knowledge of fighting games. But so far pretty much everyone online is willing to help so it’s not all that bad.
Re: Airk
Arakune’s Curse and Litchi are kinda a good bit more dumb than Noel’s ever been but getting into that discussion proves nothing. It’s also worth noting that EVO 2011 used an entirely different version of Blazblue than the ones today and that you can’t do 236A in the middle of a Drive string or cancel throw into Muzzle Flitter anymore, so listing those as problems is kinda silly. You said it best yourself, when you said that her overhead (6B) is 21 frames, because that just shows you can see it coming easily and hit her out of it. Being pushed back from a Noel isn’t really that much of an issue because Noel herself isn’t a long range character by any stretch of the imagination so having you get pushed away from her just gives her a break from being pressured herself, and that’s about it. Believe me when I say I wish it was a lot more than that, and that it gave us a giant advantage aside from corner carry, but I can’t because that’s not the case.
Extend and BBCP Noel are different from the CS2 Noel you were watching in EVO 2011 and all that, and even then I never thought she was nearly as “dumb” as people claimed. Also, Jourdal’s channel IS back up, and can be found under the name Jourdal2012 on Youtube. Feel free to pull up Noel matches from players like Shirushino (R-1), R-2, GUCCI, Shi-No or Takeyama if you want, and if you can’t find some, I’d be glad to link you to some in order to further explain my points.
I’ll take your word for some of this stuff, I only heard from other BB fans that Ragna had the lowest HP (I say defense rating, because it’s easier to look at the life bar and say, oh, that was 25% damage, rather than know how many Hitpoints a character has and how much damage was taken).
And no, I didn’t say he should get 15% back from every combo, just 15% back from a combo that did about 30% damage. I may be being too generous, but the amount of lifegain he gets from his combos currently can get destroyed with a single counterhit. That’s pretty useless and makes his gimmick unnecessary. Seeing as his damage output isn’t extremely high - and by high, I mean he’s not doing Guilty Gear Sol damage - getting that much back doesn’t seem like much to me. A full combo from arakune would make even that 15% gain useless anyway.
Ragna does extremely high damage for a BB character - he can get lolstupid levels of damage with Blood Kain. Don’t compare BB damage with GG damage - they’re different games, and the amount of damage that is “normal” in one is not in the other. A 30% damage combo (about 3500 damage) is a LOT for a basic meterless BnB in BB - most of those come in around 2-2.5k. 3.5k is more normal in the corner, and Ragna easily hits 4k meterless there.
As for his life, you don’t have to take my word for it - it’s all right here.If Ragna can steal 1k damage over the course of the match (imminently doable - that’s roughly 8 drive moves hitting or being blocked without barrier) he has eliminated any difference between him and an “average life” character. So I would hardly dismiss it as trivial. Is one combo worth of damage exciting? No. Is the life steal he can inflict over the course of a match relevant? Yes, yes it is.
Re: Noel - I stand corrected on Optic Barrel. That’s good, at least. But the rest of the points you make are still poorly considering. For example saying that her overhead is 21 frames “because that just shows you can see it coming easily and hit her out of it” is hilariously wrong, because A) 21 frames is one of the fastest overheads in the game. For reference, Litchi 6A and 4D[m] are both 22 frames, and Ragna’s overhead is 24. B) Since it’s a chain revolver combo move, it will always be done after a move with an attack level of at least 3, probably 4, which means that it’s actually impossible to jab her out with a 6 frame jab EVER, and a 5 frame jab (which most characters don’t have) will only work if you chain from a level 3 attack. There simply isn’t enough time out of blockstun otherwise. Similarly, saying “Being pushed back from a Noel isn’t really that much of an issue” is missing the point - if she pushes you back sufficiently, she makes it harder for you to punish her so-called “unsafe” moves.
Jourdal’s channel is “back” but as far as I can tell it doesn’t have most of his OLD videos, considering for example, that there is ONE Video for “SHI-NO” and like four for “GUCCI” all of which are CP matches. I found this though, and it pretty much drives my points home. Note how much BETTER the Noel player does once he stops trying to play for real and starts mashing the crap out of 4D.
Edit: Oh, and I’m not saying that Arakune isn’t MORE stupid than Noel (He is) but that doesn’t make her NOT stupid. Litchi, on the other hand, I disagree with. Yes, her Oki is very strong, but she no longer gets hilariawesome damage + 50 meter off it, so it’s entirely possible to live through it, and it DOES require her to push you to the corner. It’s not like Arakune and his 9k wherever stuff. (CP Arakune looks much more sane.)
Wait…I think there’s a bit of confusion here. I’m talking about 6B, which is her overhead that is a NON-DRIVE one. 6B is a sort of spinning overhead pistol-whip like move that she does as a normal outside of combos. The move you’re referencing sounds a lot like d.6B which is a sort of overhead axe kick, which can only be done during drive and if done after a whiffed Drive start up, really makes little sense in terms of doing it.
In other words, I believe the overhead you’re referring to is this one, which is NOT the one that I’ve been discussing.
You’re probably talking about Ragna in CSE. I already know he did a fuckton of damage in that game. Not really specifically what I’m talking about. I’m looking primarily at CP, and what he was capable of for the most part throughout the games. Even with meter in CP, despite the overall damage boost, I haven’t seen him get above 30% while getting one counterhit worth of damage back from it.
I’m assuming 1k is 10% life - seriously dude, you might as well not even bother making a point if you’re going to be mentioning values to me, it doesn’t compute, that’s what I’m trying to say when I mention that I look at a lifebar and judge by percentages - I don’t do that in any fighting game, and percentages are universal (example, he does ___% against ____). So, by that 10% lifegain he gets from an entire match, basically, 1/3 of someone’s 30% combo is going to be made irrelevant. Meh. Yeah, that’s pretty much insignificant.
What would be significant, is they just said “fuck the life steal, convert whatever little amount he gains equally back to actual damage” and then he’ll have something significant. I’ve not seen a match where his life gain ability actually turned the tides. Until such a thing happens, his gimmick…or drive, is a joke.
EDIT: Basically, what I think would be fair with Ragna’s drive is, over the entire course of a match, if it would normally take 3 full combos to kill him, then providing he has hit the opponent enough times to get down to their last sliver of life, he would’ve drained enough life for them to be required to pull a 4th full combo in order to kill him.