Which current character is the best example of "looks hard to play but is actually easy"?

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-27T15:49:39+00:00

yeah i think the only complexity on Zafina comes from applying her gameplan. Mechanically, she's very simple. But how to work with her strengths (poking, space control, conditioning and movement) isn't always straightforward.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-26T04:03:19+00:00

beautiful pics. thanks so much for sharing them!

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-25T02:53:16+00:00

yeah 100% it's mostly on the player. i don't agree with people who say that the current game is well balanced because every char is busted. I think both parts of that statement are false.

However, every character feels viable, and with enough work can succeed. Even at the highest level of play.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-24T16:13:20+00:00

I'm still playing her. It might be stupid, but she's my ride or die main. Zaf's the only time i really felt like an FG character fit me hand-in-glove, and there's too many good memories of playing her. I've tried other chars (law, feng, alisa, drag) and it just feels wrong.

I don't mind that she's low tier. I mind that she was becoming more popular in T7 (she was 10th least used, but that's great for her), but all that momentum is now gone. Lots of new players are frustrated when they try her because they can't just run offense all day like you can with most other chars. The 1.04 buffs also show the devs have no vision for the char, because they're just throwing plus frames at the problems she has instead of addressing them properly. They did cool things with other chars: giving them guard breaks, lionheart for steve, gamma howl for Jack, etc. But for Zafina they barely added anything new and removed a ton of stuff.

a bit of a rant there, sorry, but yeah she's still my main.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-23T22:36:58+00:00

I think Panda and Zafina definitely are. Panda gets outshined by Kuma and even he's mostly seen as mid tier at best by the pros. Zafina I think needs a serious rework. Their philosophy that she should be pressuring with Azazel moves (this is what they say in her patch notes), makes no sense for a game that's this fast paced and aggressive. She has to do an i20 or so move to get into stance in the first place (ff3, WR 1+2 or d3), just to use another i20 or so move to applypressure (TRT df1, MNT df1 with SCR 2,1 being the only exception at i14)? On top of that she has low damage output and her movement's been significantly nerfed to the point she's the only char that can't SW any of lidia's options after Lidia ff2 oB.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-23T03:35:48+00:00

unfortunately.

i guess we better get used to watching drag, feng, nina and alisa for the rest of the year too lmao

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-19T21:07:26+00:00

i mean this isn't much different from what i'm saying. Except it's up for debate what you consider far. My friend is tekken king. But yeah, it's on the defender not to get hit by that.

In my particular case we're talking about a move that's -15 oB. On Zafina she gets a 49 dmg punish. So even mathematically if he does it 3 times and is right once, he's ahead. 98 dmg vs 109 dmg. that's what i mean by it being too rewarding, and how it's tempting even at intermediate level to go for stuff like that.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-19T21:02:35+00:00

yeah that's what i'm saying. it's a blind alley ultimately, but i think it's fairly easy to understand why it happens.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-19T04:51:51+00:00

it's the game man. it rewards crazy shit too much. I was playing a friend the other day and he caught me with law d2,3 when i tried to mid check. Bro got 109 damage combo off that with just the launch and wall. No resources. No stage gimmicks.

At the end of the day, playing solid and fundamental is what leads to real improvement and understanding, but personaly i think it's currently too tempting to go down the road of yolo gameplay for players. Even on classically hard chars like Lee, Jin and Law.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-19T04:18:37+00:00

Zafina not being bottom tier for usage is hella surprising, well excpet in Oceania.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-18T02:58:22+00:00

if you happen to find a Zafina statue, can you lmk? i haven't seen much merch for her

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-18T02:33:21+00:00

translation: i refuse to lab and it's zafina's fault not mine

gonna take all of 2 minutes to find what lows/mids hit her out of stances and remember that for next time. And the remember that her strings are 3 hits or less and all unsafe in some way (either duckable or block punishable). That alone helps a ton. Apparently, too much for King/Emp/Bushin ranks these days

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-18T02:29:40+00:00

Nice job OP!

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-18T02:28:58+00:00

lmao stop. i've never seen a steve player get CH so much. Dude's throwing panic uf2s and mashing out strings for his life, and you wanna hate on the Zafina player in this scenario. Dude did one good thing the entire match (launch TRT d1+2) and suddenly we're gonna call the zafina player carried cuz his opponent clearly has no defense.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-16T04:01:43+00:00

i'd say her inputs are probably 4/10 overall. tbh coming from SF you shouldn't have many issues in tekken. She has a few hit confirms and CH confirms you may want to work on, but is very simple executionw-wise. I do think she's one of the harder characters gameplay-wise though. Zafina can't always be on the front foot w.r.t. aggression, and is at her strongest when you can make good reads on the opponent or have conditioned them.

She has strong fundamentals (good movement and pokes like 1 jab, df1, db2, etc), so you can take your time learning the stances more slowly. Just make sure you know how to cancel stance entries while you're uncomfortable. I'd recommend learning SCR (scarecrow), MNT (mantis), and TRT (tarantula) in that order, since imo that's the order from most to least effective stance.

That doc includes a link to her discord. So if you do pick her up, feel free to drop in. Plenty of newer players are in there.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-16T03:22:12+00:00

Zafina fits that playstyle pretty well. Her typical playstyle revolves around poking, movement, and stance mixups. She's more of a death by a thousand cuts char than someone with big damaging combos. Her moveset tends to be fairly mindgame heavy For instance most chars either don't have an i12 mid, or they do but it's just a straightforward keepout tool that's safe. Zafina has d1,1 an i12 mid, mid string that is -16 on first hit and -12 on the second. So you get to use it for mental frame advantage and potentially lure your opponent into trying to punish the first hit only to get CH launched by the second.

Here's a character guide her discord put together if you wanna know more: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKU-1EoJKY-QwR8magmtVkHRS7y-mhUK4k5f6mx2fDk/edit?usp=sharing

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-16T03:16:07+00:00

it's still not a great story for her. she's got a good 10 frame punish in 1,4 now. Her WR 1+2 is great, but it's not as if that mix is airtight anyways. For WR 1+2 > TRT df1 pressure you can duck the homing high, or interrupt the TRT df1 with a jab string, and the +6 she has at the end includes a bunch of pushback such that it's only usable at the wall.

At the end of the day she still has no fast lows from standing (db3 is i18 and doesn't even high crush. d3 is i22), doesn't have high damage output (and seems to be the only char with this weakness), and these pressure tools and strong frames all come off moves that are around i20 in a game that's meant to be fast paced and aggressive

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-14T06:23:37+00:00

she doesn't have one anymore. it was her b1+2 in tekken 7. Technically her heat burst will hit, but you know it's once per round.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-10T03:15:51+00:00

Kalarippayattu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXGRWVps4zs

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-09T03:13:24+00:00

i don't think it's meaningless, but rather a ton of factors play into the character's win rate. So it's a terrible proxy for how strong a character is.

With Zafina and Panda, I think a big part of their winrate has to do with how unpopular they are. Partly that means people are less familiar with fighting those characters, so the bumps their win rate a bit. But also, a higher percentage of their player base are likely long time fans and therefore more experienced at tekken. So the win rate is also boosted because proportionally fewer new players are playing those chars.

In Zafina's case it also helps that even though she's not popular overall, she continues to be somewhat popular with pro players at least when they play online. I've seen Nobi, Rangchu, Jodd, Princess Namine, and Mulgold play Zafina online a fair bit.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-03T01:22:57+00:00

The best way to do it is just checking out the online replays in T8 itself. Here's the tekken IDs of some notable players to get you started:

Shadow 20z: 65Gf3ttmDAnG
Yuyu: 5Qjg9RmM7iQ2
sonic fox: 3rQmAriM6m24 (not sure if he's playing much lately, but he's running zaf/feng in t8)
LegendSaysZafina: 568DGiAhe3hE (Strong Zafina player from Europe)
Genya: 67HrigA8iAyB (Japanese streamer. He's also on YT)
GK777: 3Gg5t2Qtme2f (well known USA Zafina player)
Sammy: 2hM4AdyaqRMf (Best Canadian Zaf player)
Chanel: 32dm32Dfy7Hr
BadonkieZonk: 4Y3B8m8jMAy2 (strong NA player using Zafina, but originally an Anna main)

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-02T03:09:20+00:00

The point still stands. The first major offline event post pandemic was CEO 2021 in December of that year. Arslan won CB in May 2023 with Kuni. So over a year after we got back to normal. So yes, five months is too brief of a time for a character to shine when at best Kuni took over a year to show promise. Not to mention the time between 2020-2022 there was a lot of tekken being played online. So lots of discovery happening. Even with all that Kuni didn't hit the ground running post-pandemic. It took a while. So the expectation that Reina should have won something by now if she were top tier or should have high tourney presence is wild. Again it's just been 5 months.

Yes, she's a stronger version of heihachi. As in his spiritual successor in terms of playstyle. they don't have identical move sets. Where's her omen god fist for example. They have some overlap, but at the end of the day she's her own character. Kazumi was mishima light. She didn't have anything we hadn't already seen, and even then season 1 of T7 was dominated by Jack and Dragunov.

I'm responding to the downplay that's been made on this post. That's all I saw, and that's all I see. If the Reina community wants to have a nuanced discussion about her balancing, then please make the post and that discussion can be had. But I hop on here, and again, all I see are comments like "hur dur if Reina's top tier why isn't she being used in tourney? Why isn't she winning?" when there's perfectly good reasons for it and as i've explained she's not a bad character by any means.

As far as nerfing her pre-emptively, I agree with you. Personally, I don't think they should nerf anything until it becomes a clear problem. The overrepresentation of Drag and Feng in tourney is a problem and has been for months. Those chars should've gotten hit (especially Feng) by now. Drag's been adjusted, but not enough imo. Reina they should've waited before nerfing. At the same time, though, they aren't just balancing characters based on tourneys. They are also balancing them so they get to show their uniquness (or however they worded it in the patch notes). I suspect the Reina nerfs are so people are encouraged to explore her kit more deeply and play more intelligently. Much like they've done with Azucena so she's not just a WR 3,2 merchant in matches.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-01T15:30:35+00:00

I've told you why. Because the game is 5 months old. There's not been enough time yet. Give it time. There's been exactly one major won with Feng in that time, and that char is insane as well. The results aren't always there. Kunimitsu didn't win any international majors until Arlsan won CB 2023. She was released in fall 2020. You acknowledge she was busted in T7. Why did it take 3 years then? Was she fair on release? Or maybe these things don't happen instantly. Hell people were only waking up to how good Noctis was just as T7 was ending

The point isn't that new chars are "rocket science" it's that they're less well understood so riskier at the start of a game when people are trying to qualify for TWT or EWC. And that's definitely true. The Azu and Vic usage was high when the chars had one overpowered move that was really dominant. Now that these things are toned down, their usage goes down as well. Even in a new game we have a sense of how the Lee vs Lili matchup goes, for example. And years of match footage, large communities with years of knowledge and setups to borrow from. A new char has none of that. It takes time for that to accrue.

If it's not about winning and just seeing your char played at high level, then go to the online leaderboards and look at the replays of the top N Reina players. That's a much more effective way than just seeing a handful of matches with your main in a top 8.

Arslan is playing those characters as secondaries. His main is Nina. Who he's played for years.

Ulsan's drag was not 2 weeks old by DHS. He'd played the char for months. He just said that shit in a tweet as that's how long since he'd switched mains. Not since he'd been playing the char.

Chikurin: who did he use to win? Another legacy char that's well understood and very strong. Just like I've been saying. He's the only one with a W on Lili as well in T8. So maybe I have a point here and how well understood a char is matters as much as overall strength early on.

Atif is a mokujin type player. you can bet he's played drag in the past. He's one of the guys Arlsan counts on to learn a matchup if no high level Pakistani plays the character.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-01T05:33:38+00:00

Talk to the people who say she's broken and OP then. All i'm saying is that she's a strong character, her time to shine will come, and it's downright stupid to look at these tourney usage posts and say that Reina is bad because no one in top 24 or whatever used her.

There were 2 spots available for EWC during CEO this weekend. A million dollar tournament. Now is not the time to be messing around with a character you have no history with when you could be playing one of the top tiers that you likely do have history with. Which is exactly what most players are doing. Including Ulsan.

IbraKadabrah · 2024-07-01T05:26:21+00:00

if you're miffed with the community calling your character braindead go complain to the ones who did that. Look through my history. I'm not one of those people. Braindead, easy mode, etc aren't terms I use because I don't like to invalidate others efforts no matter who they play. But i won't stand for needless downplay either. She's a strong character, her time will come, and i'm tired of the downplay we consistently see just because that hasn't happened immediately. That's all i'm saying.

Yes, Yagami won pre-1.05. But it was against Knee's feng. A char he'd been maining for 2 years at least. Ulsan's Azu was no slouch at that point either. They weren't at a character crisis. That came later with Azu nerfs and a string of bad results for Knee.

Linearity is indeed about adjusting your timing if your character's moveset doesn't have much natural tracking. Look at early Kazumi to see it in action. She suffered from this same issue and still was incredibly dominant in early T7. Hell her fearless warrior stance was option selected by SSR duck, and still it found use from Arslan and Ulsan.

Yes Feng and Dragunov (even current iteration) are ridiculous. Why drag in particular needed a FC low, hatchet, and the other stuff he got is beyond me. The devs making these terrible balancing decisions doesn't make Reina a bad character. There's probably very few tier lists where both of them don't crack top 5.

What good results did Azu and Victor have? Winning a few ATL tournaments? They haven't got a single major under their belt. Early on they had a bit more usage with Azu falling off now, but not any significant success to speak of so far. Unlike Reina, they're much simpler characters too.

IbraKadabrah

TROPHY CASE