Her divekick is a really good mix-up tool for blowing up anti-air attempts and creating ambiguous cross-ups. By itself, it's okay. If they had centered her gameplay around her divekick, she would have been fine.

But... they also gave her a virtually safe cartwheel with armor, so she can rushdown for free. Then they gave her the second best D+4 in the game which leads into pressure, so now she's one of the best footsie characters. Then they gave her a safe 50/50 setup with military stance, so now she has some of the best natural resets in the game. Then they gave that stupid bitch energy rings, so she has a zoning game now! Why did one of the best rushdown characters (in a game of rushdown characters!) need a zoning game!

Sonya is cleanly number 3 on the tier list, IMO. The only reason she's not better than Kenshi is because Kenshi blows up the bottom tier better than she does. At least Kenshi a good character design (aside from reflect; why the fuck does he need reflect?). They just turned his abilities up to 11. Sonya is an ace of multiple trades. Stupid slut.

I dunno...I haven't watched much tourney footage in a long time so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but can't recall ever seeing her get much, if any, play, so she can't be that bad. It's still Kung Laos, Kabals, and Cyraxes, isn't it?

Well, Sonya didn't get much use early on because people didn't understand how pressure worked in MK9. It wasn't until about March 2012 that we started to see sophisticated footsies in MK9. Before, it was a lot of rushdown and risk/reward shenanigans.

Since then, she's become the #1 counterpick. Sonic-Fox (Mileena main), xKhaoticx (Kitana main), and Wafflez (Smoke main) often counterpick with Sonya when they lose a match. Showtime, debatably the world best Reptile, dropped Rep completely for Sonya, and until they retired, Morty and Death were pretty much all Sonya.

But wins aren't always indicative. Cyrax has a reasonable one-meter 100% combo (2 meters if he wants to steal your breaker), and he has yet to win a major.

Then there are also FOREVER KING and CURBOLICOUS, both top class players, who are also not shy to pick Sonya.

There were something like 4 or 5 Sonyas in Top8 (either as a main or as a counterpick) at WB recently. Flood!


I'm most amused with the quick recovery on her energy rings, why dafaq would such a tank of a rush-down character ever need such a solid projectile?!

If I could hack the game I'd make her regular dive-kick have a knock-down effect (8-9% damage, on block as it is, make it overhead so that it's still good) and her enhanced one would be possible to combo off of. This way her enhanced dive kick would actually be worthy to use and she'd have less meter to abuse the enhanced cartwheel which I'd leave as it is (it's an armored launcher, safe on block but it can be punished by NJPs if you read/guess it coming and it costs one bar of meter so with the modified dive kick properties it'd be fine overall; everyone needs some dirt). And add some recovery frames to her energy rings. Buff her shitty X-ray, the damage scaling is hilarious, make the overhead kick in the X-ray animation actually be an overhead and maybe buff her enhanced arc kick (not sure how, but it's hardly used at the moment).

I'd like to see how this Sonya would work.

/offtopic