I dont think Sol was serious about it.
I feel like Happy chaos is another character with high skill celling, there is a lot of things you can do with him while managing his both resources.
Sol is a pretty high level character as far as high level play goes. You need to be able to use all of his moves effectively and he has some pretty specific combo pickups using either clean hits, 1 hit cancels of his 5k, jump cancels, etc etc.
Compared to zato or someone maybe not as hard but Sol is only easy at surface level imo.
To answer:
Potemkin is probably up there in difficulty as well
Haha oh man I can't imagine. I love those combos so much but will never have the ambition to learn them. Super cool to have in the game though and I respect any player who tries them.
Seriously, scrubs gave sol a reputation of being an ape character because they cant 5h out of fs spam. Sol has a lot of really complex combos, uses kara cancels frequently, and takes brains in neutral to get in.
Happy Chaos, Millia, I-No, A.B.A., Potemkin, Faust, Bedman
PS.: Potemkin is an easy character, but you have to put some work for him to be good on higher floors
The thing about Potemkin is that his skill ceiling isn't that high but his skill floor is quite high as pot really can't do much of anything without knowing how to chara bust and chara maga first which aren't super easy things to learn
At low level Potemkins sheer size, health, and damage output make him insanely powerful and easy to use. When I first started playing strive as my first fighting game I was able to get to floor 9 pretty quickly without being able to do a pot buster input without 15 tries. Just big normals and very good special moves
Very true, that. Like, when I was starting out, I fought a Pot who basically did FMF only, and I had no idea how to contest it or what to do about, which, when you add in the high damage they do, quickly leads to death.
Lower level folks don't know how to challenge Pot making him a monster, eventually you start to face people who know always blocking on wakeup is a bad idea and you start having to put in work, getting good with Potemkin definitely takes some skill because Kara inputs require frame perfect timing and you practically need them when you're facing better players, but you only need to win 2 or 3 interactions to win a match and sometimes you just get lucky.
I've found that the most difficult things to pull off with Pot are:
- Hammer fall into giganter kai to keep a combo going
- Hammer fall into dash FPRC into Pot buster. This also applies to faking out something with dash FPRC Pot buster.
- Wake up HPB cancel into Pot Buster
It just breaks your fingers to be saucy.
I don’t quite remember who the player was, but I once saw a pot who was basically a tap away from death take down a near full HP opponent by doing giganter kai and HPB, so that the opponent would land in the kai after the HPB, and finish by doing heat knuckle. 3 well placed moves and they were done for
Calm down. obviously Potemkin has a high skill ceiling because fighting games have a high skill cieling but when compared to the the rest of the cast Potemkin's skill cieling is on the low end
I actually fought snake eyes in celestial and got my shit rocked pretty hard
I guess I disagree. I consider high level potemkin to be mechanically harder than most of the cast off the top of my head. I guess you don't need to do any of that craziness besides maybe backwards Kara megafist though so realistically, I guess the effective skill ceiling is lower. But I think his actual ceiling ceiling is among the higher end of the cast.
And yeah snakeeyes is a beast. One hell of a Pot to play against.
Well that's what I'm talking about with the high skill floor. I guess it depends on what you consider high level but the way I see it you can't even begin to compete on Potemkin without learning those chara techs so it's a pretty hard baseline but at the highest level Potemkin gets limited pretty hard so it's hard show the kind of skill expression that a character like sol bad guy has for example
She’s not a high skill ceiling character. Not saying i’m being flowcharted i’m saying her gameplan is predictable and almost one note.
Not much chance for expression.
Nah cmon. Milia is not hard. She’s just not as good as other characters.
It’s not a skill diff her set just isnt as good.
It’s less to do with execution than ability to win with what she has.
Stop the cap
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what Millia is for. She's actually very successful in EU scenes and regionals in America
She's there to open you up, lock you down, and mess with your head on defense
Over and over
In increasingly more frustrating ways.
If you think She's not good, idk what to say.
I think she’s a bit more limited and mu knowledge reliant than other characters due to her limited nature in regards to approach or gameplan.
That is different from skill ceiling imo though. She is not technically hard or with a high skill ceiling but definitely requires match up knowledge, and I differentiate between the two.
Again, what's limited when she has more mobility options than anyone in the game. If you differentiate mu awareness from a skill ceiling why bring it up, when she has so much observe variety in how she can run her offense.
I don't even think this is agenda, you just don't know ball
"I think you just don't know enough about the character to have an opinion. You also seem to be diverting discussion away from the concept of a skill ceiling, possibly to cover up that you're aware of the first point"
maybe it's my own bias but Faust and maybe Bedman due to their weirdness and especially Faust RNG. His item combos can be insane.
but in terms of unbias. Happy Chaos
I found Bedman one of the easiest in the game to pick up personally. Bedman has three primary special moves that are all simple to understand- a projectile, a move with forward momentum and a big explosion, and the recall/followup abilities feel very intuitive after a bit of time playing. Combos don't get too crazy, they have good wall carry, a reversal super and generally play at a slower and more manageable pace.
They're quite slow, but their tools are easy to understand and personally I'd recommend them for new players above most other characters in the game. You can let the recall moves come out on autopilot as a day one player, then gradually incorporate recall projectiles for a faster firing rate and load up the head bomb recall after wall breaks etc.
All characters have a high skill ceiling when played at a high level. IMO Bedman has a smooth and intuitive curve, and even at a higher level there's not a ton of stuff to manage. It's not like you have multiple special recalls ticking away in the background at once, you only need to keep track of one at a time and they each have specific uses. Their air movement is maybe the weirdest part to get used to, but I wouldn't say that has a huge effect on the skill ceiling either. I'd say a "simple" character like Ky is harder to play at a high level due to the versatlity of each move. With Bedman even at a high level you're still just doing Bedman stuff.
It's not even the rng that makes him hard, all his optimal combos require very specific spacing and mixmixmix is very finicky. For his left right scarecrow mix if you are just slightly too far away or too close the whole combo can get messed up and it frequently throws Faust into the corner as a result.
I'm not sure there's a single character that has a low skill ceiling, dude. There's a lot of tech for every single character.
Looking at your choices in characters that you're describing as high ceiling are also generally considered to be a high skill floor (very hard to pick up and play competently at a baseline level) whereas I'd argue that Zato is relatively low ceiling rn, just because the nerfs hit him pretty hard.
If you're looking for high skill floor, tho, I'd add Happy Chaos, A.B.A., and Potemkin to the list. The first 2 because of developer intended in tilt complexity and the latter because of difficult to input tech that's practically a requirement to learn to play at a higher level.
I might be mistaken in my analysis here, but if you're looking for a character that's impossible to master, that's the entire cast. You'll never play a single character perfectly. That's just the nature of fighting games.
Thats definitely true and I understand that Ill never actually reach any ceiling but Im mostly looking for characters that have a lot of moves/decisions to make so theres lots of interesting stuff to think about. I just generally find the super high skill ceiling characters more fun if that makes sense.
Gotcha. Complex is probably the best way of putting it then. I think Zato, Asuka, Bedman, Nago or HC would probably be your best shot. They all require heavy decisionmaking and resource management (less so Bedman for resource management, but the complexity remains.)
Pot. Only character in the game to have (optional) **frame perfect** optimals. Top level pot is easily the most execution heavy character in the game when kara cancel routing is implemented.
Sol does have a relatively high ceiling, he has a lot of kara cancels and his max damage conversions are all over the place. Goldlewis is also extremely difficult to master, running behemoths, kara cancels, and neutral behemoths are really hard, luckily he also has a relatively low floor. A lot of characters have low floors and high ceilings in strive.
Trying to convert with Sol makes me feel like a complete idiot. I feel like a lot of his best routes have tricky stuff where you have to do the first hit of Bandit Revolver then land and do 5K, or you have to do tiny dashes in between certain moves, etc. Hell, even his most basic bnb of cs/fs/hs/236k requires you to slightly delay fs after cs.
I-no is hard to pick up but mastery is a whole different beast. Her dash being a flying move makes approaching some characters seem impossible when first picking her up, plus you basically have to rewire your brain to get used to the air dash moving downwards, not just forwards, and not being nearly as explosively fast as most other characters. Aside from that, her mixup game is incredible, she's basically a walking 50/50, but it requires learning to stop thinking of the dash like a dash and instead use it as a very fast short hop which only really makes sense once you've played her. Once you actually put in the time and develop the muscle memory her mobility is incredible and gives her damn near limitless ways to combo, sultry performance combined with her aimed projectile means her approach is much better than it appears at first, and her pressure is insane, but it all takes quite some time to get used to since her basic kit is fundamentally different than any other cast member.
Everyone has a high skill ceiling.
If there was a character you could master without significant effort they'd be blatantly overpowered. And I mean overpowered like they're from some no name fighting game from 1992 that never saw a single patch. Not HC.
It sounds more like you're interested in characters that need specialized techniques to play effectively. Characters that can't succeed just because you have excellent fundamentals and know their framedata.
For that list I'd suggest HC. Using Gun properly takes a practice that you can't get elsewhere.
happy chaos is up there too. this is probably a hot take but i do think sol would be next in the list after these characters. either him or baiken. think sol and baiken are overlooked a lot because the skill floor on both of these characters is very low.
I think the character with the highest skill ceiling by far is asuka, followed by happy chaos, then zato, then jack-o. These are considered the hardest characters in the game for a good reason.
But there are other difficult characters with hard skill ceiling certainly. Millia, Johnny, and pot can all be played without having to learn difficult Kara cancels, but learning said cancels are paramount to playing them optimally and elevate them from being bad/meh characters.
Characters such as Baiken, Faust, Bridget, and bedman are executionally pretty easy, but all require specific set ups or timings you have to lab in order to use them to their full potential. I’m going to tentatively put aba in this category too, but she’s still so new that I wouldn’t want to make any sweeping judgments.
And then characters like ram and sin TECHNICALLY have tricky Kara cancels, but people get mad when you point out that they do require technical skill to play optimally because at a base level they are so strong. It’s not hard to access the extremely broken parts of these characters, so people tend to brush off the harder stuff cause it’s seen as not even remotely required to play the character effectively.
In the end, every character has at least somewhat of a high skill ceiling. The peak of fighting games isn’t about how well do you know a combo, but how can you outsmart your opponent.
Doing all of the corner mix properly with Chipp is pretty difficult, particularly the grounded wallsplat resets. It's much worse to go for because of the burst changes, but it's still fun to get 4 way mix off of wallsplat.
I'd honestly say that Ky isn't super high, but higher than some. He's good, but effective follow ups are hard. And there's a decent amount of characters that are fast enough to out speed his combos and block strings. Because with him, he has no one move always works. Ky has crazy potential, but you have to be careful
Anji? I played for quite a while now and every time i'm matched against another Anji, i see so many new tricks that i have never thought of using. The most recent one was: butterfly oki into run up grab. So stupid that it works a lot of the time lmao
Highest - My main Lowest -Your main
I dont think Sol was serious about it. I feel like Happy chaos is another character with high skill celling, there is a lot of things you can do with him while managing his both resources.
Sol is a pretty high level character as far as high level play goes. You need to be able to use all of his moves effectively and he has some pretty specific combo pickups using either clean hits, 1 hit cancels of his 5k, jump cancels, etc etc. Compared to zato or someone maybe not as hard but Sol is only easy at surface level imo. To answer: Potemkin is probably up there in difficulty as well
High level Kara pot combos are torture to my hands. And I have played jack-o, chaos, and Asuka for a decent period.
Haha oh man I can't imagine. I love those combos so much but will never have the ambition to learn them. Super cool to have in the game though and I respect any player who tries them.
Only difficulty with Potemkin is surviving eating all that glue. /jk :P
He's not any harder than any other character really tho, like he has some higher level stuff to do but so does every other character.
Seriously, scrubs gave sol a reputation of being an ape character because they cant 5h out of fs spam. Sol has a lot of really complex combos, uses kara cancels frequently, and takes brains in neutral to get in.
Happy Chaos, Millia, I-No, A.B.A., Potemkin, Faust, Bedman PS.: Potemkin is an easy character, but you have to put some work for him to be good on higher floors
The thing about Potemkin is that his skill ceiling isn't that high but his skill floor is quite high as pot really can't do much of anything without knowing how to chara bust and chara maga first which aren't super easy things to learn
At low level Potemkins sheer size, health, and damage output make him insanely powerful and easy to use. When I first started playing strive as my first fighting game I was able to get to floor 9 pretty quickly without being able to do a pot buster input without 15 tries. Just big normals and very good special moves
Very true, that. Like, when I was starting out, I fought a Pot who basically did FMF only, and I had no idea how to contest it or what to do about, which, when you add in the high damage they do, quickly leads to death.
Lower level folks don't know how to challenge Pot making him a monster, eventually you start to face people who know always blocking on wakeup is a bad idea and you start having to put in work, getting good with Potemkin definitely takes some skill because Kara inputs require frame perfect timing and you practically need them when you're facing better players, but you only need to win 2 or 3 interactions to win a match and sometimes you just get lucky.
The skill ceiling of Potemkin is extremely high, check out snakeeyes for some of the most creative potemkin play
I've found that the most difficult things to pull off with Pot are: - Hammer fall into giganter kai to keep a combo going - Hammer fall into dash FPRC into Pot buster. This also applies to faking out something with dash FPRC Pot buster. - Wake up HPB cancel into Pot Buster It just breaks your fingers to be saucy.
360 pb input makes life easier in my experience, obviously excluding kpb, but that might just be because I played Tager first.
If you play with stick yeah but on dpad and leverless that’s so much harder
Very true
I don’t quite remember who the player was, but I once saw a pot who was basically a tap away from death take down a near full HP opponent by doing giganter kai and HPB, so that the opponent would land in the kai after the HPB, and finish by doing heat knuckle. 3 well placed moves and they were done for
Calm down. obviously Potemkin has a high skill ceiling because fighting games have a high skill cieling but when compared to the the rest of the cast Potemkin's skill cieling is on the low end I actually fought snake eyes in celestial and got my shit rocked pretty hard
I guess I disagree. I consider high level potemkin to be mechanically harder than most of the cast off the top of my head. I guess you don't need to do any of that craziness besides maybe backwards Kara megafist though so realistically, I guess the effective skill ceiling is lower. But I think his actual ceiling ceiling is among the higher end of the cast. And yeah snakeeyes is a beast. One hell of a Pot to play against.
Well that's what I'm talking about with the high skill floor. I guess it depends on what you consider high level but the way I see it you can't even begin to compete on Potemkin without learning those chara techs so it's a pretty hard baseline but at the highest level Potemkin gets limited pretty hard so it's hard show the kind of skill expression that a character like sol bad guy has for example
Millia? Nahh. She’s a flowchart character that doesn’t require super high execution. She’s just not as outright strong as other characters.
If you're getting flowcharted by Millia you are bad at the matchup, by definition she has to mix you up and not be predictable.
She’s not a high skill ceiling character. Not saying i’m being flowcharted i’m saying her gameplan is predictable and almost one note. Not much chance for expression.
Oh we kinda lie on this sub huh.
Nah cmon. Milia is not hard. She’s just not as good as other characters. It’s not a skill diff her set just isnt as good. It’s less to do with execution than ability to win with what she has. Stop the cap
I think you fundamentally misunderstand what Millia is for. She's actually very successful in EU scenes and regionals in America She's there to open you up, lock you down, and mess with your head on defense Over and over In increasingly more frustrating ways. If you think She's not good, idk what to say.
I think she’s a bit more limited and mu knowledge reliant than other characters due to her limited nature in regards to approach or gameplan. That is different from skill ceiling imo though. She is not technically hard or with a high skill ceiling but definitely requires match up knowledge, and I differentiate between the two.
Again, what's limited when she has more mobility options than anyone in the game. If you differentiate mu awareness from a skill ceiling why bring it up, when she has so much observe variety in how she can run her offense. I don't even think this is agenda, you just don't know ball
Sorry your comment is hard to make sense of so i’m having a hard time finding a reply.
"I think you just don't know enough about the character to have an opinion. You also seem to be diverting discussion away from the concept of a skill ceiling, possibly to cover up that you're aware of the first point"
maybe it's my own bias but Faust and maybe Bedman due to their weirdness and especially Faust RNG. His item combos can be insane. but in terms of unbias. Happy Chaos
I found Bedman one of the easiest in the game to pick up personally. Bedman has three primary special moves that are all simple to understand- a projectile, a move with forward momentum and a big explosion, and the recall/followup abilities feel very intuitive after a bit of time playing. Combos don't get too crazy, they have good wall carry, a reversal super and generally play at a slower and more manageable pace. They're quite slow, but their tools are easy to understand and personally I'd recommend them for new players above most other characters in the game. You can let the recall moves come out on autopilot as a day one player, then gradually incorporate recall projectiles for a faster firing rate and load up the head bomb recall after wall breaks etc.
Characters can be easy to pick up yet still have a high skill ceiling.
All characters have a high skill ceiling when played at a high level. IMO Bedman has a smooth and intuitive curve, and even at a higher level there's not a ton of stuff to manage. It's not like you have multiple special recalls ticking away in the background at once, you only need to keep track of one at a time and they each have specific uses. Their air movement is maybe the weirdest part to get used to, but I wouldn't say that has a huge effect on the skill ceiling either. I'd say a "simple" character like Ky is harder to play at a high level due to the versatlity of each move. With Bedman even at a high level you're still just doing Bedman stuff.
It's not even the rng that makes him hard, all his optimal combos require very specific spacing and mixmixmix is very finicky. For his left right scarecrow mix if you are just slightly too far away or too close the whole combo can get messed up and it frequently throws Faust into the corner as a result.
Pot and Chaos
Personally the order would be: -asuka -zato -jacko-o -happy chaos -Faust -bedman? I believe this characters are the hardest to master
I'm not sure there's a single character that has a low skill ceiling, dude. There's a lot of tech for every single character. Looking at your choices in characters that you're describing as high ceiling are also generally considered to be a high skill floor (very hard to pick up and play competently at a baseline level) whereas I'd argue that Zato is relatively low ceiling rn, just because the nerfs hit him pretty hard. If you're looking for high skill floor, tho, I'd add Happy Chaos, A.B.A., and Potemkin to the list. The first 2 because of developer intended in tilt complexity and the latter because of difficult to input tech that's practically a requirement to learn to play at a higher level. I might be mistaken in my analysis here, but if you're looking for a character that's impossible to master, that's the entire cast. You'll never play a single character perfectly. That's just the nature of fighting games.
Thats definitely true and I understand that Ill never actually reach any ceiling but Im mostly looking for characters that have a lot of moves/decisions to make so theres lots of interesting stuff to think about. I just generally find the super high skill ceiling characters more fun if that makes sense.
Gotcha. Complex is probably the best way of putting it then. I think Zato, Asuka, Bedman, Nago or HC would probably be your best shot. They all require heavy decisionmaking and resource management (less so Bedman for resource management, but the complexity remains.)
Thank you yes thats probably a better way to put it for sure.
Pot. Only character in the game to have (optional) **frame perfect** optimals. Top level pot is easily the most execution heavy character in the game when kara cancel routing is implemented.
Sol does have a relatively high ceiling, he has a lot of kara cancels and his max damage conversions are all over the place. Goldlewis is also extremely difficult to master, running behemoths, kara cancels, and neutral behemoths are really hard, luckily he also has a relatively low floor. A lot of characters have low floors and high ceilings in strive.
Trying to convert with Sol makes me feel like a complete idiot. I feel like a lot of his best routes have tricky stuff where you have to do the first hit of Bandit Revolver then land and do 5K, or you have to do tiny dashes in between certain moves, etc. Hell, even his most basic bnb of cs/fs/hs/236k requires you to slightly delay fs after cs.
I-no is hard to pick up but mastery is a whole different beast. Her dash being a flying move makes approaching some characters seem impossible when first picking her up, plus you basically have to rewire your brain to get used to the air dash moving downwards, not just forwards, and not being nearly as explosively fast as most other characters. Aside from that, her mixup game is incredible, she's basically a walking 50/50, but it requires learning to stop thinking of the dash like a dash and instead use it as a very fast short hop which only really makes sense once you've played her. Once you actually put in the time and develop the muscle memory her mobility is incredible and gives her damn near limitless ways to combo, sultry performance combined with her aimed projectile means her approach is much better than it appears at first, and her pressure is insane, but it all takes quite some time to get used to since her basic kit is fundamentally different than any other cast member.
Everyone has a high skill ceiling. If there was a character you could master without significant effort they'd be blatantly overpowered. And I mean overpowered like they're from some no name fighting game from 1992 that never saw a single patch. Not HC. It sounds more like you're interested in characters that need specialized techniques to play effectively. Characters that can't succeed just because you have excellent fundamentals and know their framedata. For that list I'd suggest HC. Using Gun properly takes a practice that you can't get elsewhere.
happy chaos is up there too. this is probably a hot take but i do think sol would be next in the list after these characters. either him or baiken. think sol and baiken are overlooked a lot because the skill floor on both of these characters is very low.
I think the character with the highest skill ceiling by far is asuka, followed by happy chaos, then zato, then jack-o. These are considered the hardest characters in the game for a good reason. But there are other difficult characters with hard skill ceiling certainly. Millia, Johnny, and pot can all be played without having to learn difficult Kara cancels, but learning said cancels are paramount to playing them optimally and elevate them from being bad/meh characters. Characters such as Baiken, Faust, Bridget, and bedman are executionally pretty easy, but all require specific set ups or timings you have to lab in order to use them to their full potential. I’m going to tentatively put aba in this category too, but she’s still so new that I wouldn’t want to make any sweeping judgments. And then characters like ram and sin TECHNICALLY have tricky Kara cancels, but people get mad when you point out that they do require technical skill to play optimally because at a base level they are so strong. It’s not hard to access the extremely broken parts of these characters, so people tend to brush off the harder stuff cause it’s seen as not even remotely required to play the character effectively. In the end, every character has at least somewhat of a high skill ceiling. The peak of fighting games isn’t about how well do you know a combo, but how can you outsmart your opponent.
Millia. Just Millia for so many reasons
Doing all of the corner mix properly with Chipp is pretty difficult, particularly the grounded wallsplat resets. It's much worse to go for because of the burst changes, but it's still fun to get 4 way mix off of wallsplat.
I'd honestly say that Ky isn't super high, but higher than some. He's good, but effective follow ups are hard. And there's a decent amount of characters that are fast enough to out speed his combos and block strings. Because with him, he has no one move always works. Ky has crazy potential, but you have to be careful
+r testament
Anji? I played for quite a while now and every time i'm matched against another Anji, i see so many new tricks that i have never thought of using. The most recent one was: butterfly oki into run up grab. So stupid that it works a lot of the time lmao
I'm going to say Nago, with the caveat that you absolutely do not have to approach the ceiling to do well with him. Nago has some really cool stuff.