Arcadia magazine's latest tier list

Not as important as in other games though.

 

funny how people keep sayin tier list dont matter in VF and yet the threads keep poppin up

 

This character is SS tier. Nothing will change my mind... NOTHING

 

No!
Who told you that lie?!

 

The sabaki isn't that useful when you're getting thrown and he has a MDP launcher which makes Goh fly across the screen.

Let's not bring Goh into this.. He is very fair LOL....

 

Right into my signature :°D

 

Yes. Just hold B or DB, just like in Tekken.
You did not know that?

 

@Marly for the sake of a reasonable discussion, I'm only talking about games that have been accepted by a general public, and recognized as being "competitive" fighters.

Should we separate the idea of tier lists and matchups? In some games, S tier characters have the best options and strongest tools, but might have a really terrible time fighting a certain character - that character might even be accepted as placing as low as C tier.

Also, 2D and 3D are different beasts of a genre overall.

But yeah in an extremely short summary the S tier characters have the strongest options/best tools. In some cases the lower tiers might not have anything even comparable to an S tier.

It can be very tough to make a game that's both appealing and balanced. You can tell that FS took risks. SF4 (and even SFxT) has had a TON of balance changes. Nina in Tekken has literally only become worse and worse over the years since Tekken 5.0. /blabbing

 

exhibit A for F this list

 

Except for too bad lei is showing to be possibly at the bottom of both lists!!
I am not surprised after i've read the changes that have been inflicted on lei. From what i see they have nerfed parts of his game that were already a weakness. For example you cannot oki a low rising with the backturned stance (the one from 6k). This is was a completely idiotic nerf. Any good play would mid k you for adv and damage anyway. Therefore it was a nerf of a tool that was already not particularly good.

Well, i'm extremely disappointed by the changes i see in my fave character. This makes me very sad and not want to get the game. I can't really take either list worth a grain of salt when they both verify a concern i've already seen. Poor poor lei.

I suppose i should just be happy, as i had moved on to jacky/goh/akira on vf5. But but but...sigh. No thanks.

 

I should clarify. F this list for eileen. I understand components of why she's listed as E but I disagree with her being the bottom of the bottom. She's at least a solid mid level, though I don't know what criteria they're using for this list. If it's just a matter of how easy it is to get win with, then yeah I agree she's right where I'd expect her to be. She is hard as nails to use, but I think she's more fun imo so I can't get myself to drop the girl. There are moments where I think about it, sometimes longer than others but at the end of the day I'm also going back to the monkey bitch.

I also get why she's so light now and can get killed in two good combos. She basically can kill someone off of three right guesses, including oki, and she's fairly safe during all of them. If she was any heavier she'd be broken as all get out. This girl has some crazy oki stuff that will just kill you dead real fast. The thing is it's hard to pull off, and the timing for all the stuff is tight and she has different max dmg combos for almost all the cast (including foot positions). So She's hard, very hard to use.

This is what makes the VF tier lists different than some other fighting games like marvel 2 where the low tiers have no hope to do anything against the highest rated characters. It's just a matter of how much harder you'll have to work overall for the wins.

 

I can definitely agree with this list. Its almost exactly the way I feel about the characters myself. I would promote Lei slightly, though.

And you Eileen players, IMO the purpose of the tier list is not to measure tournament success. Its to measure the potential of the characters: attacks and tools, safety, versatility, frame advantages, damage potential etc. With this in mind this list is pretty good.

Doesn't change the fact that a better player playing bad character can win over worse player playing a good character since this is VF.

I've not seen such gaps in VF tiers since VF2 though. Tempora mutantur.

 

FS isn't as balanced as previous iterations, disagree if you want but it feels that way to me. ^^

 

There's a difference between characters who are theoretically better (i.e on a tierlist) and characters who are better practically (i.e in an actual match...duh).

Aoi's and Lei-Fei's provide the strongest proof of this point.

It feels like these tierlists are based on the quantity of good tools a character has (including damage), rather than the quality. It would also leave out things that are ambiguous but hard to actually deal with...because we are not robots. There are things that will screw with us not matter how bad it is on paper.

Tier lists are a logistical tally and don't take as examples things like ease of use or mind games...it basically doesn't factor in the 'human' side of things, the one with errors and shortcomings and etc.

So the sign of a good game (i.e VF5FS), is one thats practicality isn't so closely tied and held down by its theoretics (unlike say...SFIV, because we all know how close tier lists and actual gameplay outcome are. Hint: Very).


TLDR: The game is balanced. Enough for whatever character (except maybe Jeffrey) to be tournament worthy, so people shouldn't pay too much attention to the tier lists lest it hold them back.

 

It's good to know other people agree with my suspicions that Akira and Jacky are in a league of their own and hopefully I stop hearing about how broken Jean is. The Jean vs. Jacky matchup is his worst matchup imo.

BTW, using this list to say the game is imbalanced is kinda pointless. We have no idea how they feel about the spread between the tiers themselves. They could very well feel the game is broken, but we don't know that yet.

 

People think Jean was broken at first because they didn't know what he's capable of. Anyone belongs to S/SS has better tools than Jean.

Haha, I have pretty much the same experience like you say GT. But I think that's due to my lacking knowledge of Jacky.

Both Akira and Jacky require a lot of work to unleash their power. A LOT~~

 

I really wish people would discuss tier placements instead of regurgitating the same old "I don't care, tiers don't matter in VF".

I feel that Vanessa belongs in D tier, right between Blaze and Kage. I could give my reasons from the perspective of someone who's clearly not that good, but I think it would be more constructive and very interesting if those with better insight would discuss random characters for a while.

So what do you think of Vanessa?