I think Shang is one of those characters that's just worse online than offline.

Have you seen DetroitBalln's Shang Tsung at NEC XII? He won the tourney and he forced CD Jr. (!!) to switch from Jax to Smoke in grand finals.

I'd rather they just fix some fixable glitches and stuff that's not supposed to be in the game (like inescapable Cyrax resets :p) and maybe give a little bit of help to Jade and leave it at that. Shang wasn't considered great, but then Detroit came to NEC and showed just how good he is. Shang is just one of those characters that takes time to break through, he's not easy to get a hold of.

As for Sindel, she does seem to struggle when she's forced to defend. Some people want armor on her enh. cartwheel. I also don't like that her scream is breakable- makes no sense.

Noob needs his shadow ball to be faster and an overhead

Seriously though, Sindel sucks because her attacks are too freaking slow and she doesn't have a good wakeup attack.

LOL @ Shang Tsung needs buffs less than a week after a Tsung player wins a major. And that's after Shang making numerous top 8 appearances.

As a zoner you should be happy with the armor. With very rare exceptions the armored moves that "blow up" fireball zoning are not a problem. Moves like EX Shadow Kick, EX Slide, EX Flying Kick are blowing a stock of meter for a knockdown. If I'm playing a Cage I'm happy with them using meter on that instead of EX fireball traps, breakers and X-Ray.

Tom Brady stamped Sindel as one of the A-tier characters, and after seeing what's become of Jax since recent patches, I don't think I can ever support character buffs with confidence anymore.

I realize that her zoning game fails in a lot of match-ups, but I think it has more punch then people realize. I don't see her low-damage output as a flaw anymore after viewing Urichinan's video on her resets.

What I don't like is that some of the rushdown characters have better defensive tools than most of the zoners or keep away characters, Liu Kang having a parry makes no sense for his playstyle and Kung Lao's spin being the best defensive tool for a rushdown character also makes minimal sense.


The zoners have been buffed with everyone else, keep in mind.

My only gripe about buffs is that EVERYONE should have armor on all their enhanced attacks, if you use a bar of meter, you should get that extra protection in my view.




Jax was never bad, people didn't know how use him right and proclaimed him as garbage extremely early on, so they kept buffing him. I remember when the game first came out, Jax was fairly easy, if my other favorites hadn't been in the game I would have picked him up, Jax has always been deadly and he was never garbage, people exagerate the "garbage" aspect of characters far too much.


Sindel isn't garbage, no but I don't think she's A tier, If I recall he put the majority of the roster in A tier which I'm not so sure I agree with that. I mean certainly the game has a respectable balance, but if everyone's that close, everyone has almost the same chance according to that assessment except for Jade, Noob and the other characters they put outside of that range and if that were true, I just feel like we'd be seeing these characters A LOT more, not just once in a blue moon.

I'm not saying the tier lists are set in stone or anything mind you and I don't think there are any garbage or unviable characters in the game.

I remember there was a lot of complaints early on about Jax being awful and it's probable he needed a bit of buffing, but in the end they just buffed him up too much. He got the ground pound cancel AND armor on the dash (plus extra reach if I remember well) AND less recovery on the projectile AND some of his strings were buffed-up (better frames on block, I think he got an overhead kick/knee which originally was a high). Just too much.

However, I do remember hearing them say that they do the tweaks "on their own" without taking into account all the bitching.



As for Liu, well he's kind of more of an all-around solid character, so I don't mind the parry (plus his wake-up options aren't that great, especially when cornered), but yeah Kung Lao was ridiculous early on.



I just saw Riu48 play Jade at last VSM. He played against Maxter's Cage and didn't win a match. Poor Jade... She's got so many issues. I even saw her getting kicked out of her purple glow on start-up, you know I saw the purple color show up on the screen but she got kicked out of it. O.o

No disagreement here. I even get why the community thought he was weak at face value. Most of the S-Tiers at the time were rushdown mix-up characters, so Jax fans weren't going to rest till Jax had better offensive options. That's just how they thought MK2011 was suppose to be played. Every game has that one character that gets kicked to the side at first and then after six months rises to high tier. It was the same thing with Adon in SSF4.

I'm just as guilty. I flipped my shit because Smoke's normals had long start up and figured he was low-tier. I now know I was just playing the character wrong. The whole time I was trying to poke and pressure when I should have been going for a knock-down and mix-up.


Honestly, I'm not sure what Brady means by A-Tier or A+-Tier. The videos were all taken down, so I can't even reference what he said about Sindel, but I believe he called her the most underrated character in the game. I hope he's right. If she is a reset character in essence, then it's going to be hard to unearth her potential. Trying to practice resets on a fighting game's AI is about as fun as a punch in the balls.


Well, two A characters can be similar rank and still suffer/excel in different match ups, and as a general of pattern in fighting games, the mid-high tier tends to have the most characters (though usually not THIS many).

As to why there isn't more character variety... I hate to say it, but I think that has more to do with how easy it is to use some characters. Most people aren't going to bust their ass with Sindel if they can do fan combos all day with Kitana.
In retrospect, the patches should have been purely for infinites, exploits, and maybe for Kung Lao and Raiden. A full roster rebalancing shouldn't have even occurred till at least six months after the fact. You just can't properly test a game in two months.

But the character variety in MK tournaments is pretty good. Just at NEC there were 7 different characters in top 8. Evo had 8 different characters in top 8 or something like that. And the game is not even 12 months old yet.

I don't think "how easy to use" certain characters is affects the tourney guys' choices, at least not the choices of the ones that aren't newbies. Kabal has been going super strong pretty much since day 1 and he is considered one of the hardest characters to use.

EDIT: Nvm the rest. Sorry.

That's true. Within the high-level circle, there is a strong variety of character use. There does seem to be a trend in the top 8 brackets, though. A lot of the characters in NEC's top 8 were characters who have recently had their potential revealed. I'm particularly throwing out Jax and Sonya (some would say Shang Tsung, but we've kinda always known he was really good).

Smoke in some weird way kinda makes that list as well. The community dances around his tier ranking like none other. Smoke is good. Smoke is bad. Smoke is good. Smoke mid-tier at best. At the moment, Smoke seems high on everyone's list, and that will probably be where he stays.

Everyone else in that top 8 has had their spotlight time, and that's really okay. If we're talking why there isn't mass variety specifically within the tournament scene, then I'd say the reason is just lack of players. We need a bigger community. We don't have people flying in from Taiwan and Puerto Rico to play Mortal Kombat.
EDIT: Specifically regarding Kabal, I don't believe the character as a whole is difficult; his frame traps and nomad cancelling are what make Kabal a pain to learn. Once you overcome that skill, you just have zone well and make good reads when using your EX Nomad Dash. Then again, that was Kabal from another patch. I haven't studied a lot of post-patch Kabal.

^ Good points.


As for Kabal, yeah, he's very execution-heavy, requires super quick fingers. Unfortunately that also means that his players are more likely to suffer from the input bug.


Btw, I simply love your sig Temp, don't ever change it.