How do you feel about characters like Crimson Viper who are purposely powerful but have a high execution barrier? I hear people who hate her say that execution doesn’t matter in high level play and that she isnt balanced just cause she’s hard to play.
I’ve been dealing with Fox my whole life.
I think that just because a character is hard to execute with isn’t an excuse for making them better than the rest of the cast. There’s certainly something to be said for having a reward for execution, but eventually in a game’s life, someone will overcome that execution hurdle and the tables will turn, and that character will dominate.
Having a character like that be the best character in the game is tolerable. If you’re going to have a top tier, it might as well be the hardest characters in the game to play. However ideally you want to prevent any one character from dominating over others.
So basically, it makes sense to give characters a bit more for doing something tricky, like 360s on grapplers, however this shouldn’t be used as a license to make all the high execution characters top tier and super strong.
I once asked my friend ClarenceMage about what the point of playing a ridiculously hard character like Gen was if they weren’t any better than the other characters, his response was that it means the character has a more uncommon matchup, and so is responded to worse by other players who cannot get familiar with Gen as easily. I think on top of that having them be very slightly more powerful than other characters as a reward for their efforts isn’t a bad thing as long as it’s kept in check. Higher effort characters also appeal to a specific type of player, and giving them that to work on and play with in matches is nice.
Of course a bad scenario is if you have a top tier full of low execution characters, like many of the Xrd Sign DLC characters, such as Elphelt and Sin. Or of course Ibuki and Juri, two execution heavy characters, being low tier. Zato being broken/really good isn’t a good thing, but it’s tolerable.
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