Junior Member
To start, the Roachi, is the safest character to play.
He has so many combos/moves that are safe from being punished. he has 2 back dash then forward high dmg hits which will pretty much always give him a free 1 or 1-2 combo straight after. He can Guard break and follow up with a Top Hvy (top attacks being his bonus dmg) Everyone else (excluding NOb and PK) has to use enviro or throw to ground somehow to get a free hvy. I feel this is a little to good, his lights are super quick and beat the warden top light super block thingy even if they attack top same time. His parry Sure hit hvy thing is F*$ked tanks don't get sh*t like that! he is a counter-attack/offense/adaptable/straightforward/hybrid.
His Guard Break animation is in fast forward while say, the Berserker a fellow assassin is in slow mo.. (PK's GB is crazy good! they nearly teleport to you from a distance to immediate 3 stab you for 1/3 of your health, I block them by accident when I enter a seizure from the shock of a medieval wench with the ability to teleport! I assume that I would get a GB animation.. how wrong I was). Roachis Hvy attacks are nearly on par of speed with any non Assassin (excluding berserker who is a normal non super speed human) side light attacks and top for the tanks.
I noticed that Stam was of little issue for Roachi and PK and Nobs for the ability to attack 4-5 times followed by 3 zone attacks and another 2 attacks after. Nobs Zone attakc 360 degree attack as fast as the wardens and much less stam... Come On!!..
I did meet a kind gentlemen/lady onlin ewho explained that the 100ms or something along the lines of servers/lag/frame rate/ interenet speed made the super quick characters more playable because if weird techno **** was happening you can just spam attacks and know that your faster than everyone and have no conern for stam, high chance of winning when the techno earth quake ends.
How I fight the Roachis and PKs is I swing Hvys and pray to F*ck they dash into the attack because they will dodge and throw a 100 strikes at me before I finish a swing.
Nobs, well luck is my friend there I have to hope that they have broken fingers or I just somehow pull gold from my anus.
Junior Member
Absolutely agree. Orochi is hands-down the most overpowered character in game. He does more damage faster than any other character and has way more combos that comparable characters. Also the spin and attack combos are nearly impossible to block if you are attacking which doesnt seem right. If everyone and their dog is an Orochi, obviously there is a problem.
Junior Member
OK, so I will preface this by saying that I am a nerd for this sort of thing, that being game balance and advanced, seemingly tiny tech tidbits in games. I play fighting games, spectacle/combo fighters like DMC, and Dark Souls, as well as the venerable JKA. I am gradually applying the same mindset to this game as I did to those, carefully studying everything I can about the tech and finer points of the combat and how things interact.
Alright, you address a few different characters here. Now my area of expertise at the current time, that is the characters I feel like I have a very good grasp/advanced understanding of, is sadly limited to Warden and Orochi, only one of which is mentioned here. Since that is so, I won't comment on the other two since I don't feel like I understand them well enough or what they are capable of..
You make several statements on the Orochi, and a lot of them are somewhat correct. First thing you go over is his two backstep moves, which are (IIRC) Riptide Strike, the glide back overhead, and Storm Rush. These are both definitely dangerous moves which can deal a lot of damage, and used perfectly they can be spectacular as an Orochi glides in and out of your range, slipping away from your strikes and retaliating faster than you can defend. Riptide Strike, however, is definitely the less 'powerful' of the two moves from a utility perspective, though it does deal a few more points of damage. The timing on Riptide Strike is extremely tight, and in almost all cases, aside from when the enemy is spamming heavily telegraphed, especially slow heavy attacks, it almost universally requires actual prediction, and very tight prediction at that. A whiff on a misread can be fatal, since the recovery time is immense, and furthermore that glide back is often completely insufficient to avoid an incoming strike. For an example, Warden's otherwise slow heavy attacks often carry him a shockingly long distance forward, so without exactly perfect spacing you will not be in a position where a) the Warden is confident enough of striking you to attempt a heavy and b) you can actually dodge outside the reach of the Wardens attack with Riptide Strike.
Storm Rush is much more useful, as it not only can be activated much more safely, but also often gives you enough time to land an upper light combo (except on Raider and maybe a few others for... reasons. I have no clue) This is a huge amount of damage. Except there is one problem: Storm Rush is insanely easy to parry, and once you parry the Orochi you can get him in a guardbreak which cannot be countered for massive damage to him and a crippling hit to his stamina.
On the subject of guardbreaks, Orochi is in fact NOT the only character with a heavy after a guardbreak. Just the only character to my knowledge with a TOP heavy. To give an example Warden can always land a side heavy on a GB'd target. If Warden throws that person into an object and staggers them + is also in top stance when he starts the GB, he can land a guaranteed top heavy as well for even more damage than Orochi. Many other classes can take similar advantage of guardbreak under different situations for massive burst damage. Check out a great series of vids on youtube called "For Honor Hero School" where the youtuber Klyka invites in some of the best players of different classes to discuss the intricacies of their chosen characters and demonstrate some great tactics, including how best to take advantage of guardbreaks. Check out the ones on your favorite classes! I learned a lot from them!
As for stamina consumption by Orochi I can certainly say that Zone attacks wipe that stamina bar like nothing else except maybe a parried Storm Rush. Overall though I don't have too much trouble doing stamina management with Orochi, though that's partly because I prefer a very cautious, counter-attack/punish playstyle. If you want to make all those average Orochi players suffer though, I highly reccomend checking out damnnohtml's great (and short!) video, which I'll put below, summing up just how to shut down that irritating spammy Orochi you always seem to run into everywhere. Getting in those parries and just purely shutting them down the instant they try to do something really puts the fear into them and teaches them to respect the heck out of your parry if they don't want to end up out of stamina and on their behind watching that tiny HP bar vanish in a puff of smoke!
To wrap all this up though, the Orochi is often a very overwhelming and relentless enemy, and an Orochi with a little bit of skill behind all that spam is even more terrifying, but once the community starts to get their defense down and understand exactly how the typical Orochi likes to think and move... well I can't say they will vanish. After all, a lot of attraction to the class comes for the sheer 'cool factor', just like everyone in Overwatch wants to be that Seagull v2.0 pro-Genji god. :P However, as an Orochi continues to advance through the ranks and face off against higher and higher skill levels, the more difficult he becomes to play, or even to do anything at all, since a good defense player can almost completely shut him down and even end him as punishment for the most minor slipups. Orochi's kit overall, when used to it's highest limitations, is large and variable, but heavily relies, in many cases, on the player completely outplaying his opposition, learning their moves, their habits, and how they think, then taking them apart with baits and precision counters. Once you get into the higher skill tiers, Orochi isn't a Raider, at the very least, but he sure as hell is no Warden. That said I'm pretty happy about that. I enjoy the challenge of the battle, and the satisfaction of completely downloading and predicting someone so I can take them apart with one smooth prediction after the next is like no other.
Hope at least some of my over-detailed rambling was able to help!
Member
@Sicon, that was a very helpful post but here is the problem. That video is title, how to counter the AVERAGE Orochi. Any average Orochi is TRASH because they are playing Orochi simple because he is so easy, and over powered. Good players who put in a little time to know how to counter his cheese **** all over average Orochis. The problem is that even if you know how to counter an average Orochi, they can still possibly get a kill or two on you simply because of how broken he is, even if there IS a huge skill gap between the two of you.
The real issue is playing against an ABOVE average player who is using Orochi. If you are a smart player and know how to use under powered warriors to beat the over powered ones, then putting an Orochi in your hands is simply not fair for the other players lol.
I didn't touch peacekeeper once in the beta, I finally gave her a go yesterday and after only 5 mins of training, let me tell you, it was freaking stupid. I literally closed the gap on people and light mixup spammed them to death. If I saw them do anything, I would just sidestep heavy. I don't even wanna touch Orochi because I know it would be so much worse.
Nobushi on the other hand only gets in peoples heads because of her range, but she is not a problem at all. She does NOT need a tweak. People just need to realize that once you close the gap on her, she is useless, especially against assassins. Her attacks are slow AF and can be sidestep punished by almost anyone.
Junior Member
If that were true Orochi at high skill would be far easier. Unfortunately, when you look at class balance ratings in high level play, Orochi is very low. Like I said before, not Raider low, but still very low end. In fact, one of the characters that might even be the single most powerful character is actually Warden. This is due to the fact that while his kit is simple the combination of interlinking hard and soft feints possible, revolving around his Shoulder Bash, means he can counter basically everything and even a person playing perfectly is forced to try to anticipate and guess what he will do next, with a failed guess resulting in immediate punishment by the Warden. Think about it: Warden does a dash. From this dash, he can start a Shoulder Charge. If you stand still and guard and he follows through with the charge, you get staggered and unless you have a Full Block stance Warden gets a free Side Light Combo and can go back into Shoulder Charge startup. If you dodge to the side, he can cancel the windup of the Shoulder Bash into a Guardbreak which cannot be countered because the enemy was caught while dashing. Free Side Heavy or Throw into Top Heavy follows. If you have a dash attack, you can dodge to the side and activate the attack to protect you from the Guardbreak, but the Warden can Hard Feint the Shoulder Bash with the cancel button and instantly parry you instead, getting a free Guardbreak > Side Heavy/Guardbreak > Throw > Top Heavy.
Orochi, on the other hand, has essentially one thing like this: Hurricane Blast Cancel. Yeah. That is almost never relevant and cannot be looped forever like Warden. All his other moves and attacks require the enemy to actively make a mistake, or the Orochi to predict the enemy's actions before they happen. While he capitalizes very well off of guardbreaks, he has no tools to assure one (Aside from Hurricane Blast Cancel, which as previously mentioned is barely relevant) that all the other classes do not have. Storm Rush > Double Top Light is very high damage but is painfully easy to parry before it even happens, resulting in the Orochi instead taking massive damage from an enemy guardbreak. Aside from Parries which everyone has, and Deflect > Wind Gust, Orochi cannot confirm any damage without tricking the enemy player into making a mistake, and has only one technique that can force the enemy into a "guess what I'm going to do now" situation, and that is Deflect > Hurricane Blast, which will basically NEVER come up.
