Cool discussion. It's funny how a lot of execution discourse comes from the idea it's a tax you pay at the beginning, and stops mattering after you "get the execution down". Be it with motion inputs, korean backdash or StarCraft Broodwar economy, it's a permanent tax to your attention and muscle memory that you can work on "automating" but there will always be some cost.

Genuinely if I’m playing against an execution heavy character while I’m on Faust I start throwing items instead of looping mixmixmix simply to fuck with their mental stack

As a newer player maining Nago (and only Nago). I find that his major limiting factors have much more to do with how I view his difficulty rather than his max output. When I get going with Nago, it’s hard to stop me, but as soon as I’m not the one in control of the fight, that’s when I feel the difficulty of him creeping in

As someone who's played jack-o for over 2 years and has now been playing sol for a few months, I think the way majority of the community sees difficulty is by 2 metrics - at least in strive as of now How hard is it to execute your gameplan And how much damage do you dish out off a single combo. Personally I find that is a really weird way to go about it. People focus too much on characters offence while completely disregarding other aspects of play when making judgements about character strength. And I agree the ease of character is more synonymous to how many of those aspects in a round they actively force you to engage with. Sol may have more Kara cancels than jack-o, but doesn't require the consistency and flawless play she does to contend against top tiers. Meanwhile sol's consistent damage heavily relies on quick reaction and precise motion while jack-o can string up a combo on the spot (albeit sub optimal). Elphelt throws it all out the window and is a ton of fun to play even if she sucks and doesn't really have an execution barrier to be optimal like the other two, she's more knowledge reliant. So difficulty comes in a mixture of 1. Mechanical execution 2. Theoretical knowledge (how much you know about them and oponnents) 3. Characters overall consistency (no weird interactions or rng) 4. Strength of their offence, defence, neutral And you can't really efficiently measure that as like you've said in your video, it's very subjective - but I think asking how much effort it takes to consistently win at a top level with said character is probably the most acute metric we could go by

I honestly kinda expected this video to be something along the lines of “If your character is easy you’re CARRIED!!!” (I play May and was scared of being called out lmao) but I got treated to the exact opposite of that! I like how you brought in other things besides execution which is usually the first thing that people’s minds jump to when they think of character difficulty. Overall great video! I also liked the pun at 6:27 lol

It feels like character difficulty comes initially from the more technical of understanding how to properly execute. I got back into Strive recently and I wanted to learn Asuka. I spent some time trying to lab him out but I eventually dropped him for Johnny since I found it more easier to learn his BnBs and understand how to use deal than try to learn the muscle memory for using and changing cards on top of learning his normals and the cards in each deck. But as I started to play more and got to floor 10 with Johnny, I'm finding that character difficulty is coming from interacting with certain characters in a match up. I have to change the way I play against certain characters such as faust, gio, and potemkin/anji since they could either low profile moves that I get my best reward, rush in and force me to not throw committal moves or armor through my moves and combos even with card out. I find that this is also accounts for other characters such as ky and sol who could either dp on wake up or use vortex/stun dipper to make have to respect those options. Even with playing having a hard time playing against the cast as Johnny, I'll still play him even if other characters, such as potentially Slayer may be less "difficult" in this sense, because it fun trying to bring back by my offense and mix it up with special cancels through mist finer card or ensenga and adapting to my opponent.

Based outro song choice. Good video, I agree with a lot of what you said here.

3:52 as a chipp main... You have mearly seen the abyss, i was born in it, moldet by it.

I-no is pretty execution heavy - not nearly as much as in games without dash buttons, but she’s designed to have almost no combo routes, and a lot of the ones she does have require you to link from a move that isn’t cancellable (like the new one, mad love, or doing a double chemical love). Most characters have meterless half screen wall breaks combos that don’t require a lot of execution - I-no the best you get without some tricky shit is just pushing the opponent away and having to get in again.

Ramlethal is actually the hardest character in the game and is super low tier as well. This is canon, it’s in the lore

It's a mix of everything; technical difficulty, theoretical difficulty, tools and matchups. Simple characters like Testament have a low execution ceiling and lower mental stack, and straight forward tools, which can get you pretty far. But eventually you have to work a lot harder than a high execution/mental stack character like Asuka and Happy Chaos since Testaments tools are just objectively weaker in comparison.

another big thing that I feel like makes a character hard, is complexity of the branching tree of decisions a character has from moment to moment but especially on offense

i like hearing your thoughts on shit like this Sym! also the audio volume is very low

I like the video and the points you made and I would also tack on the a lot of if a character is hard or easy is on a person to person basis cause all humans are different we approach situations differently we have such complex minds that it will never be a clear answer example: if a person is very head strong likes to play risky high damage not a lot of blocking gameplay they could find characters like Leo gio sol etc very rewarding while a person who is more reserved and prefers to play a more defensive think through every situation and analysis heavy game plan they might find fast paced high risk high reward instinct characters stressful and and unpleasant while they could excel at characters like jacko venom zato axl etc that doesn’t mean one player is more skilled than the other or one character is easier it’s just means there different people even the smallest differences like hand size and mobility could completely change how a character feels to play from one person to another. So tldr in the end it’s all people to people basis when talking about characters difficulties.

This is a fun discussion as I am a new player that tends to gravitate towards "harder" characters because I enjoy the challenge of mastering difficult combos. So I find it funny that someone can argue "if you just get HC inputs down, it's just muscle memory" and then argue that Sol and Potempkin have hard inputs so they're difficult. If we exclude input difficulty and focus on ease of offense and defense, HC for example is easy because of his insane offense but hard because of his awful defense, I like that I-no could be considered difficult due to her awkward movement and need to adapt to different matchups. So if input difficulty is moved aside, I feel it comes down to options like DPs and reversals and range that make characters easier, so someone like HC is hard not because of his meters but because of his lack of tools like a DP and reversal overdrive, despite a really strong offense.

I’ve been maining ino since launch so it’s really interesting to see her thrown around as an example in a lot of these discussions regarding character difficulty. I like the idea of separating between the difficulty of playing a character and winning with one. Still even within that frame I find it hard to define ino. Sometimes I feel like she’s ridiculously easy, sometimes I feel like the game is built against her. It’s hard for me to know if she suffers from being strange or if she really does just have some serious flaws. I feel like I only have my own opinions. Daru is great but he’s also the only one consistently exploring the character and sharing information. It’s hard to find discussion on this character, let alone matchup charts/stratagies. I wish there were more top tier players who could speak on her current state. From what I see most people just don’t have strong opinions on her.

This is a question I ask a lot. I think it's hard to really say. I've been a diehard bedman main since xrd and in strive I sometimes wonder if he's just bad or difficult. He's not very good but at the same time he also functions so differently from the rest of the cast that there's not really a great character you can just contrast him with similar to the Jack O Zato comparison

All i have to say, is Cubes. if you know, You know

I’ve always loved this discussion because of how nuanced it is. It’s interesting, I took a break from the game and I actually found it easier to win with HC over Johnny. On HC if I drop steady aim reload mid combo and just get reload, at worst im just mid screen with HC at advantage. On Johnny If my S MF whiffs and I don’t get my hkd, Chipp is in my ass and I gotta do all that work to get a hit again.

Seth theme played let’s gooo

kara DP combos are one of my favourite things with Sol, even if i'm not 100% consistent with them

The only significant determinant of characters difficulty is MY personal opinion If you wish so, I can give you my judgement regarding thy main

I play Baiken, I'd consider her hard because of the amount of info you need to learn. Just learning all the mix, combos, pressure with tether alone is like learning an entire character. Kabari knockdown is a lot as well. You could just safejump tatami, or you could learn the OS's and mix. If you want to safejump jH Yzn/Parry OS off Kabari knockdown then you have to learn the frame advantage you have with Kabari, which is different for every kabari knockdown. You want to throw and do the same OS? Ok just Superjump jP IABD jH 236S~P and don't be off by a frame. You want to do the cool mix instead, simply manually time Superjump AD FDC Yzn. On defense she has the unique parry, so you need the knowledge of what strings have gaps in them and what you can parry. Baiken also has executionally challenging things like kara tatami/kabari/super, TK Yzn and IABD Tatami, but I'd agree that all this just become 2nd nature. TLDR: The amount of knowledge you need to play a character optimally can be considered difficult. Also when you have many options to choose from for one situation it's extra mental stack.

I just picked up zato after maining pot for about a year, and I think character difficulty wise mr puppet man will always fundamentally feel a “harder” character than pot just because of his higher brainpower requirement. Sure potemkin had harder execution, but he doesn’t have that extra layer of thought needed to play him at all times.

thats a cool point to bad imma just ignore it and play baiken like she's a rush down

I got a question, am I actually good at guilty gear or is it just my character being easy? Let me elaborate, I play sin kiske and am currently floor six and recently tried playing bedman, I sunk to floor 4 rather quickly. Do I have skill or is sin carrying me?

I play Ky cause I'm not good enough for anyone else so I say, no, no my character is not hard

May is currently the hardest character in the game. I refuse to elaborate.

I play asuka, elphelt, and aba

I'm maning slayer this week so I confidently say no lol

As jacko, I have a lot of strategical advantage in most matchups, and a lot of tech the opponent never expects, but doing those things and finding them is not easy to use or play. However, the one thing that makes playing as jacko really disheartening is making ONE mistake versus a gorilla like Sol = 70% lost health... casually. This is where the game just feels unbalanced, where one player does a ton of work for no pay, while the other may not have all the options but are payed handsomely for little. The comparison between Zato Vs Jacko is simply the latest patch making zato neutered compared to his past self. Its mind boggling to me seeing the devs not see the disparity between gameplay effort and reward. Again with Jacko, her Shield command got changed so many times, it has now changed to become kinda bad. Previously just 2 or so balance patches ago, she could do shield command that results in guard crush, but there were so many more applications for it. But because they changed it to now launch opponents for a scaled combo, they nerfed it. A ridiculous buff resulted in a nerf that reduced creativity and flexability. Jacko at the very beginning used to start with only 1 minion resource! Despite dumbing down jacko with her buffs/nerfs, can you believe she was not a 1 star difficulty character, but a 2 star? They pushed her difficulty rating down on some of the character select overhaul even if they made Jacko better/easier. *It is as if the developers do not understand or play these complex characters.* I wouldnt be surprised seeing Asuka nerfed because the developers notice him often in top 8s, they themselves wouldnt know how to play him.

no the character is not difficult. its my friends that are. ;-;