Sup, guys. I put together a tier list for the game and was hoping to get some feedback. If you disagree with any of the rankings, I invite you to explain your reasoning.

This tier list was NOT put together with match up numbers nor was it based on tournament top 8's. I made the list purely on tool sets. There's two reasons I did this.

The first reason is that there are no authoritative match up numbers for low-tier characters. There's just too little footage of high level play in the bottom half of the cast. That's without controversy. This is not to discredit the low-tier tourney players. Huge props to the all the low-tier warriors who broke down characters like Jade and Stryker (Espio deserves a medal). That said, match ups cannot be learned in a vacuum.

Look at Cage. For the first year, most people thought Cage was outside of the top 15. The very thought of that is laughable now. Hence, any match up chart made with a character who hasn't made numerous top 8's is not sound IMO. If you disagree, I invite you to post your match up chart.

The second reason is that the match up system is fundamentally flawed. It's based off two abstract players of equal strength, but under analysis, no one actually knows what the hell that means. Are they equally talented in the same skills? If the two character require different skill sets, are their skill levels equally relative to each player? No one fucking knows. It's a bad system that needs to be reworked. Also, it's circular! Saying the two players play at the highest level assumes you know what the character looks like at the highest level, which is clearly not the case with the bottom 10. Any numbers are based off the assumption that we've seen Jade or Sheeva at their best. We simply have not, and again, I invite you to explain if you disagree.

So this is my list. I put suggested nerfs in parentheses. Let me know if you guys would suggest any other changes. Personally, I don't recommend nerfing anyone outside of the top 10, and I don't recommend buffing anyone outside of the bottom 5. That's me, though. Finally, rankings aren't terribly strict outside of the top 6. I mostly tried to make sure characters were in the right tier class. Anyway, let me know what you think.


S+
1. Cyrax (Make bombs drastically scale; fix corner infinite)
2. Kabal (Remove Ex-Dash armor; Cool down on IAGB; make ground saw hit high)
3. Kenshi (Less pushback on shoulder; more scaling on armored combo starters)
4. Sonya (Remove Armor on Ex-Cartwheel; Damage Reduction)

S
5. Kung Lao (add three frames of recovery on whiffed divekick)
6. Smoke (Fix Ex-Bomb reset)
7. Freddy

A+
8. Johnny Cage
9. Reptile
10. Kitana
11. Skarlet

A+
12. Liu Kang
13. Jax
14. Shang Tsung
15. Sektor

B
16. Raiden
17. Quan Chi
18. Sub-Zero
19. Mileena
20. Sindel
21. Ermac
22. Scorpion
23. Rain

C
24. Nightwolf
25. Noob Saibot
26. Stryker
27. Baraka
28. Cyber Sub-Zero
29. Jade

D
30. Kano
31. Sheeva