Whats more balanced? 3rd Strike or MOTW?

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Whats more balanced? 3rd Strike or MOTW?

Post by Guest » Tue Sep 13, 2005 23:23

Which one of these games do you find personally to be more balanced and tell us exaclty why you believe that.

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Post by Blake B » Fri Sep 16, 2005 01:00

Tough choice.......i'll say MOTW, though.
Why? Because everyone never really had much of an big advantage over anyone else. Kain was just like a regular character, he never was a "OMG, the power!!" type of character like SF3's Gill and Akuma/Gouki. In MOTW, the attacks were also well balanced (Not including the specials), Grant or Tizoc were powerful, but not the "One damn move did all that? the match just started!!" powerful, like Q or Hugo. And that's all i can think of for now...

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Post by Monpochi » Fri Sep 16, 2005 05:15

I can't say much... but minus the par whoring... I like Third Strikes feel... but i also love playing MOTW (minus the level 8 difficulty because almost all of the opponents become as hard as hell)... so.. i'm torn. :P

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Post by Mole » Wed Sep 21, 2005 05:50

Alright, I've been lurking here for a while, but when I saw this thread, I felt compelled to join-up and give my 2 cents.

Disclaimer: My tiering is based on tiers assembled by other people, and a bit of my own opinion.

3rd Strike has a cast of 19 tournament legal characters
Garou has a cast of 14 tournament legal characters



First, I'll analyze the extremes in the tiering, and then after that, analyze the middle.

Both games have their godly characters. 3rd Strike has Chun-Li and Ken (and maybe Yun too), Garou has Kevin (and maybe Jae Hoon too). Both Chun-Li and Ken are considered easily the best two in 3rd Strike. Chun-Li has amazing priority on certain normals, and SAII is amazingly fast on start-up, with an easy confirmable cancel from crouching MK. Ken also is very strong, with SAIII being easily cancelled from crouching MK or crouching MP, and his own array of high priority normals, specials, and EX's. Garou has only Kevin in the God Tier with his Feint cancels creating a string of C's followed by either a special or that ludicrous S-Power super that stuns, plus good mix-up potential with his move that sends him forward quickly (allowing cross-ups) and his crawl which has a high-low-cancel branching. Still Garou's God Tier is smaller than SFIII's, even by percentage.

When you look at the bottom of the list, you'll see Twelve for 3rd Strike, and for Garou, eh, I'll agree with Freeman being lowest. There's already a discrepency here. Although Freeman isn't as useful as the rest of the cast, he's not nearly as disadvantaged to the degree that Twelve is. Twelve has extreme lag on most of his attacks, and has a very difficult time dealing damage. Most of his damge comes entirely from a mix-up game that involves constant air-dashes. Twelve even has a normal that's punishable even if it hits (Chun-Li can let Twelve's standing HK hit her, and she can still hit him with SAII before he can recover). Freeman, doesn't have the same problems, and is a bit closer to the rest of the pack.

Now to analyze the middle.

Within the middle there's the stronger, the dead middle, and the weaker.

3rd strike has definite groupings in this middle group. You have Yang and Makoto taking a high spot in the middle, characters like Dudley and Elena in the middle, and lower tiered characters like Remy and Necro (I know it's not complete, that's not the point).

Garou also has its groupings. Gato and Terry are examples of stronger characters, B.Jenet and Marco are examples of middle characters, and Griffon and Hokutomaru are examples of lower characters.

In the end, there doesn't seem like that much of a difference between the middle sections. 3rd Strike ranges about as much as Garou does.

In the end, it's very difficult to tell which game is better balanced. 3rd Strike has bigger outliers on the extremes, but the middle section is just as balanced as Garou's middle section (and with more characters, which is harder to do). I think in the end I'd have to give the nudge to Garou, but that might be a little bit of bias more than anything else.

EDIT: Completeing sentences and ideas.
Last edited by Mole on Fri Sep 23, 2005 00:35, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by AcidicEnema » Thu Sep 22, 2005 05:07

Very sound analysis.

I always thought that Marco was also considered top tier in Garou because of the breakable A uppercut? Down right abuse if the player can do it consistently.

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Post by Mole » Fri Sep 23, 2005 00:30

Not as sound as it could be, I just noticed I didn't even finish a sentence before submitting it. Thanks, though.

My tier knowledge for Garou comes mainly from that "Official Japanese Player Tier List" that's been floating around for a while (coupled by videos and my own experience that seem to confirm the tier list). If I remember correctly, it put Marco just below Jenet at 7th in the roster, making him almost exactly middle of the pack. However, my actual experience with Marco has been not as great as I would like. I could be entirely wrong on my understanding of character balance in Garou, I'm not quite sure.

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Post by AcidicEnema » Fri Sep 23, 2005 02:51

Hmm yeah. According to Persona here's the Neo Geo Freak MOTW tier list:

S rank: Grant
A rank: Kevin, Gato, Jae Hoon
B rank: B. Jenet, Terry, Marco, Kain
C rank: Hotaru, Hokutomaru, Dong Hwan, Rock
D rank: Griffon, Freeman

So yeah, there are quite clear distinctions, even in the middle tiers.

I think the main problem with comparing balance in the two games is that Garou never had the competitive base that 3rd Strike has. 3rd Strike is still played at big tournaments in US and Japan... Garou not so much. So you aren't going to get the depth of being 'played out' in Garou that you get in 3rd Strike.

Not sure that much *would change* if Garou was played more, but I thought it deserved mentioning.

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Post by Mole » Fri Sep 23, 2005 03:09

That's a good point to bring up.

However, that tier list brings up a few questions for me. The only differences from what I thought I knew are S and A (with an extra member in B). My understanding was always Kevin as S rank, and Jae Hoon, Gato, Terry, and Grant as A rank. What about Grant pushes him up past Kevin? I don't believe I've ever seriously played Grant at all, so it's not that I don't believe Grant is top tier, just that I don't know why.

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Post by Persona » Sat Sep 24, 2005 01:31

In my opinion the reason Grant is higher than Kevin is because Grant is really scrubby. Kevin at least had to pull off long combos to be successful. Grant is just "Opponent does this, I press button 1, opponent does that, I press button 2".

Grant has great pokes.
Grant has spammable specials.
Grant has very-easy-to-do combos for lots of damage.

Grant may not have the omgwtf damage like Kevin, but I think everyone would be satisfied enough doing a pretty damaging combo by mashing df C.

But I honestly don't think Grant and Kevin are far apart, there's still stuff Kevin has that are way better than Grant. But if you're new to MOTW and want to own the whole arcade in a matter of mins, Grant's your choice.

And my vote for more balanced game goes to 3rd Strike. :)

One reason why I chose 3rd Strike is that, as long as you're a god at parrying, you can do at least pretty well with any character. But if you're a god at Just Defense, all you get is a bit of extra health and barely no chance to counter. Another reason is you have simple characters like Rock and Terry who have a few specials that get the job done, but you have Kevin or Gato who have 1291293171 more ways to punish people. It's like putting a Dragon Ball Z character into a Yu Yu Hakusho anime, which is why I don't really see MOTW that balanced.

Oh and sorry if my post doesn't make much sense, I posted this after 18 hours of Warcraft 3 and I'm dead tired. :)

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Post by AcidicEnema » Sat Sep 24, 2005 17:45

Persona wrote: One reason why I chose 3rd Strike is that, as long as you're a god at parrying, you can do at least pretty well with any character.
Hmm. But the fact remains that in big tournaments (where presumably all the top players can parry well) certain characters, in particular, Chun Li do much better?

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Post by Ry_Guy » Fri Oct 21, 2005 11:01

Honestly I don't see the point in arguing which of them has better balance. Both games have fairly distinguishable tiers, and though every character can win, that doesn't mean they're likely to. I mean, you could beat Kevin or Ken with Sean or Freeman, but that's not likely to be consistent, as tournament results would show.

Garou's top-tier however is larger than people say, however. Contrary to popular belief, Kevin is not god-tier. Though he is quite argueably the best character overall, there are more characters in his league than people would give credit for. To be a god-tier would mean that other characters have little hope of beating him, and that's not the case.

The top-tier consists of Kevin, Gato, Terry, Jae Hoon, and Grant. The reason for Kevin's place is quite obvious as he's a very solid character overall with a good range of mixups, and when given the meter to do so he can bring alot of damage out with simple and practical combos. His down side (if you could really say he has one) is that he doesn't build that meter as quickly as he would want to, and without it there's nowhere near as much reason to be intimidated by him.

Gato is most likely the runner up in this contest. His more dangerous combos aren't as practical as Kevin's, but some of the stuff he's capable of is scary regardless. He's the probably the king of Garou's rushdown game. It's an utter pain in the ass the get that guy off of you, without a doubt Gato's speciality is laying on pressure. Having the only invincible d+AB and the ability to CD crossover comes in handy for him every once in a while too, not to the point that they're decisive to his game, but good things to remember he has. That QCFx2+B/D of his will just consume anything you throw at it too.

Grant comes up next in my book, though some people would argue his exact placement in the top. I think he deserves the spot because of one decisive attribute. Corners spell doom for you against Grant. If he manages to juggle you in the corner, you've probably got little hope of winning the match. He doesn't really have sure-fire ways to get you there (thank god), but it's still a deadly ass ability of his. Now, outside of corner-doom, Grant really doesn't have alot of combos. He's got a couple good ones, but he doesn't really need them anyway. He's got some fine priority and damage, and really safe and spammable specials. Overall he's a manly-man of solid and safe gameplay, complete with a manly-man TOP.

Next in line is Jae Hoon. Now when it comes to his overall game, there's nothing particularly impressive about Jae Hoon. He doesn't really have much of the things that make the above three characters do that make them so good. What he does have however, is pure, simple, and reliable damage. He's got some EASY confirmable hits with his crouching B to crouching C link, and after that you've got some pretty meaty damage you can deal. Alot of people prefer to use .25 TOP simply because Jae Hoon really benefits from that enhancement of his already good damage. Bonuses for him are his backdash move, which though not incredible gives you a free DM should it connect, and the ability to link his QCFx2+A into his QCFx2+B. 2 supers in a row for some stupid damage. The downside to Jae Hoon is that he's got very little mixup power, and his specials aren't very spammable or overly safe. Basically you've got to work to get your hits, but the effort pays off because of his damage output.

Last and probably least is Terry. Honestly, though Terry wasn't ever top-tier or anything in King of Fighters, I think he got slightly neutered in Mark of the Wolves. Why? He lost his good Burn Knuckle. It was the single thing that turned Terry from, "bleh," into, "OMG safe and quick rushdown move!" Really, his KOF game revolved around having a good Burn Knuckle, and now it's sort of lame. Nowhere near as much priority as before, not as fast, and Just Defense makes you think twice about spamming.

Terry doesn't have any particularly impressive impressive specials after that either. He's got the overhead crackshot and a decent projectile, but otherwise pretty bleh aside from having a very good break move in Power Dunk. His supers are sorta of "Eh", but he's got something great going for him. Some of the craziest Feint Cancel antics in the game. Crush that gaurd of yours right up and lay down some free damage on you. Without that he'd probably be lower middle tier, but thanks to it I think he barely scrapes being in the top tier.

The upper middle tiers like Marco and Jenet could probably give Kevin a good run for his money too, but I think those characters are in that order of priority, the ones in Kevin's park.

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Post by Burningfist » Fri Oct 21, 2005 19:00

Garou has a system designed to be 100% about playing it safe until you just defend something big enough to really fuck the other person up.

Third Strike has a system designed to stop the top tiers from being complete gods.

There are a lot more ways to dodge things in Garou, it's also alot slower, meaning things that are really hard to do are hard to do because you have to be fast. Third Strike is more like a regular fighting game, the stuff that's good is just retardedly easy to execute after some practice, and extremely hard to avoid (and no, red parries are NOT easy). Nothing in Garou really screams completely broken, even Grant; with just defend his moves become even slower and thus more open. Third Strike Chun Li would beat Grant for a lot of silly reasons.

Bottom line, Third Strike is more about knowing what the opponent is gonna do, cause the shit they are doing is so fucked up. Garou is about baiting big moves so you can capitalize on something as simple as a blocked attack, add in feints and dodges and it's easy to see, Garou is the more balanced of the two because you have more options per character to get around and trick the broken characters.

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Post by Cascade » Sat Oct 29, 2005 09:58

I play both and I feel they're both pretty close. I've never however experienced an abusive Kevin before, so I don't know too much about how top tier he is.
I do know that it is a major irritation to see only Ken and Chun-Li go up against my Dudley. But I also know that while it's definately a huge uphill battle, I can beat them if I try hard enough.
I am not that great at parrying, and I know if I was, I would be able to level many of the scrubbier players. However, since to be a very competitive player in 3s, you should be at least pretty good at parrying, I still think that the parrying "evening out the tiers" stuff is limited by the fact that I see high level players all parrying anything they can see coming. And when both players parry really well and one is Chun-Li or Ken, that player has the advantage because what advantage parrying would have given the opponent is nulified.

Also, I noticed in Garou that Kain is not so tough when played by a player, though he can be tricky and has an irritating projectile. I'm pleased with this because it indicates at least a little bit a good level of balance in that the boss really isn't that abusive. However, I would not say the same about the monstrous Grant. I think he's much worse and more evil, and as someone previously mentioned, especially in the corner.

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Post by Ry_Guy » Fri Nov 11, 2005 02:57

Kain's pretty nice but definately a solid mid-tier character. He can do some pretty fun stuff like juggle off this throw, though.

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Post by Nemyus » Tue Nov 15, 2005 07:24

While where talking about tiers theres something i need clearification on. Whats exactly the difference between "broken tier", "God tier","overpowered tier" and "top tier". I mean are they all terms for the samething or are they essentially the same. On that note whats the difference between low tier and crap tier.

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