Also just to be clear ven-Midori is Midori advantage. There is no need to consider that matchup for the purposes of his changes.
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Honestly same.
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You are so 100% wrong about this. Ven dumps all over Midori. Iāve wrecked Leontes every time weāve played a set of the mu.
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This raises an interesting point: In roughly what order should we be making and testing changes to characters? It seems like the top-tiers have to come first so that we can fix whatever parts of them lead to bad dynamics, but after that?
It would make sense to test little tweaks before giant overhauls.
Also, rather than just a shuffling/tightening of the tiers, Iād like to see some new characters come out in v3, now that we know they exist in the Codex realm.
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Right it must be that Midori has the dominant throw, the dominant attack, the dominant block, and the dominant dodge. Thatās probably where ven wins it.
So youāre just theory crafting that he wins it? Midori has the dominant attack, throw, dodge (whatever that is), and possibly block vs Rook and he still loses that mu.
Ven wins it because of how front loaded Midoriās combos are. There probably isnāt many other mu where Ven avoids more direct (as opposed to indirect) damage with acro then vs Midori. In addition since Midoriās power is concentrated into a few cards it makes losing them to acro even more painful. In order for DF to do much Midori doesnāt just need a few face cards he needs many to get through the acro.
A good way to play against Midori to begin with is to disrespect him, at least in human form. Ven can play disrespectful better than any one else and he can take that disrespect into DF.
Once Ven secures KD he probably has the dominant throw now and Ven K loops are terrible for human Midori to deal with.
Venās problem of needing specific cards and drawing funky hands his greatly mitigated by the slow pace that Midori plays through out the early to mid game. This allows him to draw more acro and anything else he needs.
This thread is really popping off these days! Weāve got a playerbase that is as unhealthily preoccupied with totally hypothetical things as I am, itās good to see. 
You have a good point. The issue, as you already discussed, is that when Midori can get DF that easily, his moves in DF have to be nerfed A LOT to compensate. Which stops him from feeling like the occasionally overpowered Dragon we all know and love. What if we made the ability more costly, while still keeping it uncounterable and able to be powered up for:
A* - Dragon Form - [Draw Phase] Discard another Ace to attach this card to Midori and it gets: Ongoing. You can play Dragon moves. Discard this when you lose combat to a throw.
Interestingly enough, thereās actually little to no reason to think Midori shouldnāt be able to use any moves he wants without ending DF - in fact, he already can! Midori can combo and dodge into any human attacks or throws without ending DF. I have found that new players get confused by this rule, āif Midori can combo into these and stay a Dragon why canāt he use them in combat and stay a Dragon?ā. This is almost certainly a case of this rule having been a certain way for so long that we as players forget that itās not all that intuitive. If it had been the other way from the beginning, we would likely feel that the current ruleset is wrong. Imagine if Sirlin decided that Geiger couldnāt reveal normal attacks or throws in TD because it only makes sense for Time Spirals to function during āTemporal Distortionā.
Gameplay-wise, Iād argue itās one of the healthiest buffs you could give Midori. The better his draws are, the less it helps him. If his draws are poor, Midori can better justify going into Dragon Form as a bluff/mindgame to scare the opponent into a less threatening range, since he can at least do what he was already doing.
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I am also really pleased about this, the MU discussions this thread has prompted are really interesting.
@ClanNatioy @niijima-san My own personal thoughts on Ven Vs Midori are that Ven without acro is completely screwed vs dQ. It literally shits all over everything he wants to do except block, and he dies in about 3 combats without jokers. As soon as ven has acro though the situation is much better. Venās in a pretty nice place to disrespect midori with prejudice and make him waste his good cards while threatening big damage if his hand is also large. Itās not the best thing that both these characters are so stochastically problematic, as I can imagine the match feeling like a crapshoot from either side.
Something like that *could* work for DF, though I find it kind of inelegant, at least on first reaction. Maybe dragon form is good enough to be worthwhile two aces though. I guess Iād need to think about it a fair bit and see how it tested.
While I canāt really disagree with you from a logic point of view, honestly the more I think about it the less I want to change midori (outside of buffing glimpse) without more insight into his advantaged matchups, in particular against Gloria. From my personal experience using midori as a Gloria CP, he absolutely destroys her unless she can manage to land Sun and Moon. dQ is so unbelievably strong in that matchup that his slow, inconsistent build up doesnāt even matter.
This last fact solidifies my thoughts on the matter of stochastically troubled characters like Midori, Vendetta and Valerie. Iām probably repeating myself here (itās Easter long weekend and Iāve been drinking) but their woes are best served by nerfs to the top tier, who all share good damage per card and a much more consistent game plan. Thats not to say this type of redesign is unwelcome, in fact within this thread it should be explicitly encouraged.
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Iād probably go about it like this:
- Consensus Nerfs to Troq/Zane/Geiger/DeGrey
- Quality-of-life changes and character reworks (only changes for reasons of elegance/intuition/flavor/logic, ignoring balance as much as possible)
- Add new characters?
- Identify matchups that are probably worse than 6-4
- Minimize the # of mus worse than 6-4 as elegantly as possible
For #1, I think balance changes that have a very high consensus are:
Zane - MA 0.3 speed
Geiger - TD ends from any hit including Gold Burst and loses +1 damage to Spirals effect
DeGrey - MHG doesnāt affect AA
Troq - AA 1.2 speed, remove J ability
For #2, examples include limiting War Stomp to once/turn, Shenanigans triggering before the opponent chooses whether to facedown, Rook special block changes, etc. Then rework whoever we want reworked, the characters most often brought up being Jaina, Midori, and BBB.
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Iād agree with a fair amount of that order, with a few caveats because the changes donāt happen in a vacuum. Iāve tried to be as concrete as possible here.
My Reasoning
is the most important character to nerf for the most other characters, so he has to be the starting point. It makes sense to nerf 
with him since he dumps on them pretty hard.
Where is 
you ask? Well Iād actually suggest we leave nerfing and testing him to step 1b, when we already have a in mind to compare him to. Iād suggest we also take a look at 
when we do . Sheās already strong vs a lot of the cast so itās important to evaluate her strength in a world of top tier nerfs. Iāve seen a fair amount of people suggest she shouldnāt be able to recycle 7s with 7* and I donāt imagine her changing much outside of that, maybe also an AA damage nerf. Because has always been her toughest matchup it makes sense to look at them together.
Buffed 
special blocks are fairly consensus and actually quite important to test along so I would table those fairly early on. I reckon it makes sense to implement 
changes to bubble shield here too because it interacts with fairly strongly.
The other thing we can do very early on is identify characters who we expect to stay almost exactly the same, to use for testing. Right now I think this would definitely include 
but maybe also more. Having on this list is fortuitous since they have bad matchups vs . It also helps to have here to help assess a healing clause to bubble shield.
Imo we would ideally want to be fairly confident weāve addressed the existing bad matchups before we move on to introducing new characters and the chaos that will likely bring. So for now lets assume thatās possible and make a tentative plan:
-
Primary Nerfs / Buffs
a. Nerf
b. Nerf
and assess 
c. Buff
special blocks, Tweak 
bubble shield
d. Maybe spend some time evaluating the above characters with each other and the stable pool (
others?) -
Secondary Nerfs / Buffs / Quality of life / Reworks (Order is less concrete here)
a. Assess
(thinking specifically of here)
b. Assess
since theyāve been mentioned a lot
c. Make sure weāve also checked
d. Rework
(potentially developing Anachist Jaina alternative deck)
e. Anything else Iāve missed
(thinking specifically of 
since theyāve been mentioned a lot
(potentially developing Anachist Jaina alternative deck)<ā Be really happy weāve got to Yomi v2.5 (!!!) ā>
-
Add new characters (only a small step obviously)
-
Testing of new and old characters for bad matchups
-
Try to find elegant fixes for identified bad matchups
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I canāt believe after all this time you guys still think that .3 is slow enough for Max Anarchy. .3 is not trickshot speed.
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FWIW, I did suggest an alternative that makes Maximum Anarchy more flavorful a little less than a month ago, and a couple of suggestions related to it were made soon after by other people. Even if my exact idea isnāt used, something along those lines would probably be better than a barely slower version of the current move.
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Agreed. MA needs - at least - to be slowed to the point where it helps the characters that Zane gives the hardest time to.
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Absolutely agreed.
I wasnāt sure who you were including in āyou guysā but I for one really donāt think Zane changes can stop at a very marginal speed reduction to Anarchy.
People very often say things like āThe only problem with Zaneās design is MAā but thereās not a huge amount of evidence Iāve seen to support it. Anecdotally, I tend to see Zane ruining people with his massive damage efficiency off of meaty attacks. What I would really like to do is have some skilled players test Zane vs a bunch of the cast in a series where MA is banned. That way we would have some better data on the problem.
@Hobusuās approach makes Zaneās super more like the Bison super it was originally based on, by massively nerfing its damage to the equivalent of a āget off meā move. He also suggested giving it an ability that resets all playerās hands in some way, which is very like the version of MA implemented in Codex (a full board wipe including Zane himself).
Iām pretty partial to this kind of change plus some nerfing of his damage efficiency (the least of which would be Meaties not benefiting from normal draw) as I reckon both sides of the Zane paradigm need to be hit with the nerf hammer to some degree.
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That change to meaty attacks sounds interesting! Another thing Iāve seen that might be worth testing is making Anarch Crusher (J) a 2 combo point move so that he has to make more of a decision between damage and knockdown.
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Imagine putting all four Aces on the table only to be outsped by Graveās TPoS. I wouldnāt wish that fate upon anyone, not even Zane. :^)
In all seriousness, thereās a number of reasons why testing MA at 0.3 before nerfing it into the ground is a good idea.
Flavor-wise, Zane being the x.3 guy and having a 0.3 super is pretty cool.
Balance-wise, Maximum Anarchy is very relevant in the Troq mu and making it any slower than 0.8 would hurt that matchup significantly (the consensus Troq nerfs would definitely still leave the mu as worse than 6-4, especially if Zane is nerfed as well). 0.3 also happens to just barely undercut Grave TPoS and Lum Q, which is convenient since those characters arenāt getting nerfed and Zane would struggle against them after nerfs to his damage. And 0.3 MA already positively affects a ton of matchups where Zane is advantaged to varying degrees (Gwen/Perse/Arg/BBB/Geiger/DeGrey/Sets/Jaina/Val).
No matter what you do to MA, Zane is still going to wreck Gloria/Quince/Midori until you address his crazy efficient combo damage and KD. I also think that Zaneās Crash Bomb is stronger than it was intended to be, and as a result Zane is a lot less weak to knockdown than he was supposed to be since his wakeup options are so good.
I would test three changes to Zane:
-MA 0.3 speed
-Jack 11 damage 2 CP Ender
-Crash Bomb canāt be interrupted except by knockdowns
The last change normalizes Crash Bomb to be weak to KD just like BBBās Overdrive Long Arm, Oniās Generalās Armor, and Rookās Rock Armor. In general, this will help reassert KD as a key weakness of Zane. Matchup-wise, Crash Bomb being interrupted by KD is also very promising since many of Zaneās best mus have recurring KD attacks (Gloria Kh, Quince Pat Mirror, Perse Slow J, and BBB Cog Shot).
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Imagine putting all four aces out for DSD, only to be outsped by Talon Swoop. I would wish that on everybody, because 50+ damage moves shouldnāt run the table. Plus itās already a thing.
Troq is also receiving nerfs in this new version, with the included changes being AA to 1.2 and removing J ability, making Troqs response to Zaneās biggest remaining power center - meaties - much less effective. Yes Zane will still lose the MU, but itāll be perfectly reasonable. He doesnāt need a 50 damage speed dominant move to win, there or anywhere.
EDIT: by āyou guysā I meant everybody, since Fenix listed it as a āconsensusā. Unless consensus means some new thing.
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Pretty sure the definition is just āgeneral agreement,ā not literally everyone in the room. More to the point, I think itās generally agreed that making it 0.3 is better than leaving at 0.0, whether or not thatās enough of a change.
Unrelated to the rest of this discussion, Iāve never understood why Troqās J ability worked for both sides. Did he ever really need to be able to armor through normals on a 2.2 speed attack? Thereās only a couple characters who can actually outspeed that with a normal anyway.
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I feel this. If it were up to me Iād make dodging into moves requiring 3 or more Aces illegal because itās pretty lame/anticlimactic. But we have the game we have and 45+ damage supers are quite centralizing right now. We could address this a bit by lopping 5 or so damage off TPoS/BU/DSD/MA/FDB. Iād be on board with that.