My Review of Mystic and Spectral Since the Patch, Read Only if your Interested (Note: this review is subjected to my personal opinion as a character designer and as a MK player)
Spectral:
So from what i gather Spectral seems to be the topic of soem discussion regarding if it is really, good or not so much and what you should be doing with him...
Well i have been playing it for a while against some of the best i could find, and honestly what ended up happening is exacly what i predicted and thats exacly what im going to review here.
Whilst, MOS can make the opponent respect you from a ranged standpoint, Spectral cant... The soul ball will make opponents think twice before doing anything to reckless, the same cant be said for Spectral. Its main problem is that for Spectral/Ascension footsies to work you need to be "grounded", but the character is designed to be in the air 90% of the time so you can take advantage of the high mobility he has while floating, This was what he was designed for...
You can see where the thematic contradicts the necessity of Ermacs gameplay?! Ermac is by no means a character that can give himself the luxury of being full Screen for very long, But Spectrals Design rewards Exacly that.. Being full screen and Pounding/evading your opponent with Ascension as much as possible because he is so fast in the air.
Now lets say you contradict its design purpose which obviously we must in order to have success with this variation: You are now taking the offensive, selecting your moments carefully.. With the added "bonus" of Ascensions TC´s you have a hand full of overheads, and you are able to "mixup" your opponent by interropting the string at any point for a groundpound. Cool right... Wel,l when you really look at it, no, Not that cool honestly. Why you ask?
well its quite simple, if you look closely at Ermacs gameplay he has plenty of Mix up game already thats way more effective then Ascending just to do a couple messy overheads into a low pound that doesnt even let you combo afterwards... So what do you gain from actually doing any of the Spectral specific Stuff? well you gain Cool kid points, and thats probably the only thing really... The name of the game is, keep it simple, the fact that you have to do all this extra inputs just to get couple poor overheads doesnt reward you as a player for having skill or reward you in the match because there are way easier mix ups Ermac already has in his standard kit...
What i think Spectral really needed: Well someone gave the idea that EX groundpound should be a launcher (apologies i cant remember your name, so sorry bro) While this goes against Spectrals base design, it is in fact a great idea... Because now going into Ascension Tc´s can be rewarded with a combo instead of just some shitty pressure and messy/poor dmg combos... Another thing that could be relevant for this variation and Mystic but ill get to that in a second, is for him to have a Fireball, This is a necessity for Spectral because he needs to have a tool that will make the opponent think twice before pressing that run Button...
Mystic:
Now Mystic the variation everyone wants to Love but just falls short of being what it needs to be... Well This i will keep Short because its honestly quite simple, Mystic Falls short of being great because they are to afraid of providing Zonners in this game with true Zonning power, because of the big lash "Casuals" feed NRS with this type of gameplay... in 2 simple Buffs Mystic could be better or just as good as MOS.
Mystic doesnt need such gimmicks as "gain 5% life when you EX Force Choke... WTF? gain 5% life? what are we, predators?!? In this patch they had the brilliant idea that the solution was that Choke simply was not doing enouth dmg to be rewarding enouth to use, due to is poor Frames, so they upped Chokes dmg... so ill be forced to repeat myself with a good WHAT??? WTF??
Choke did not need its damage increased... it needed better frames... So before i get lashed on for saying any particular number on its Block or recovery data, i simply wont, but ill say this instead... With a very minor decrease in frames and without new damage from this patch this character could be what it needs to be. By simply having a fireball to compliment the fact that Choke tosses the character almost full screen, Ermac could do exacly what this variation was designed to do, Reward the player with good reads on Choke and punishing the opponent for being to aggressive or impulsive by having a fireball to slow his progress down...
This is What i think of the new changes and the variations the patch affected, hope you guys enjoy and if you agree of disagree about my opinion feel free to Reply to this coment and everyone can talk about it. Cheers everyone
Words straight out of my mouth.
This was brewing in me for some time and i need to let it out my fellow souls...
I went through some serious character crisis with my beloved Ermac :winkwink:
As much as i love him, always did and always will, i can no longer play with him even in online.
I like to keep my mkx mindset of characters divided to keep it simple: Ermac MoS in mkx is an antizoner and vortex character, Ermac Mystic is Zoner, Ermac Spektral is ... i dont know what he is w/e; Raiden is pure 100% vortex character; Quan Summoner is a vortex/zoner, Quan Warlock is a zoner/pressure, Cage is 100% pressure, Kenshi is Zoner/Antizoner and so on and so forth.
Now, im not talking about who is how good with his type of gameplay. That is a different discussion. Now, i love zoning. I love the thrill of ranged battle, i love how my opponent struggles to come at me, and when he finally does, I love sending him fullscreen with amazingly timed throw... MK9 Ermac... <3
Mystic in theory should be a zoning character, but he is, lets for civil purposes just say "unviable", and outclassed by MoS. And MoS in itself is not a zoner, in fact, i consider him quite opposite of a zoner. If I were to look up definition of an antizoner it would probably say something like: all ranged trades are in his favor...
Ok, so by gameplay limitation and from pure validity perspective im stuck with MoS.
Well, alright, since i love this character so much i could try to change my play-style to fit with the gameplay of master of souls... And this is where I hit the wall. I'm not saying i don't have skill to play any different type of character, I do, and let's consider this just a fact... It's just I prefer zoning, and that is all. But somehow pressure oriented Ermac of MKX does not suit my playstyle.
The b2 unblockable and air soul burst in mk9 were one of the most amazing tools in that game (Ok, maybe this is little fanboy in me speaking) And when I compare MK9 Ermac and his tools to MK10 Ermac and his, it is apparent to me that MK10 Ermac doesn't have same qualities as his MK9 counterpart. For example MK9 Air burst was a force of power, it had an impact both physical and kinetic. It had a sound of blast! And from gameplay perspective it had amazing hitbox, recovery, plus frames on block and pushback. Now go and compare it to MK10 air soul burst... it's like comparing Dezert eagle to Makarov... It has neither feel nor impact. And in online his instant bursts are pretty hard to do and borderline useless. You have to time it as close to ground as possible. And those + frames you gain are lost in online... so yeah... moving on.
It just im sad that i was hoping for buffs to Mystic so i can finally try out his zoning variation. But apparently NRS, and also us, ermac community, considers Ermac pretty balanced and viable. MoS maybe. But Mystic needed more that 5% damage increase or whatever they gave him... LOL.
And spektral... well, yeah, im not going into that territory of abyss.
And to be frankly my dear fellow souls, it is mostly our fault.
It is both privilege and burden at the same time to be a part of such civilized community as ours. We are literally the most civilized community in all forums combined on TYM. But you gotta remember man, the upplay gotta stop at some point... How long do we need to keep quite? How long it will take for us, not a single person, but all of us, to accept that all 3 variations combined objectively, we're sitting bottom 10, people.
Wake up already, or Ermac is gonna be new Jade of MKX.
5 years of TYM showed me that those who cry the loudest, get what they ask. This is probably the only language NRS/paulo understands. And this is were we hit the wall. We're so civilized, that we never cry and never complain. It is nice. I agree... But all this combined made me turn to Raiden, and the fact that only 1 week of playing with him wields better results than yolo unsafe god is already saying in itself everything...
And to add a salt to the wound, latest patch completely killed execution for me. I am not sure what they changed or how they changed or what the hell they did. But my execution fell to the level of a scrub. I'm on a pc and haven't had the privilege to see if this is fixed with latest hotfixes yet...(shortcuts are on)
And its not just casuals... lots of ppls outside casuals hate on zoning and brand it as cheap and skilless etcetc not realising going ham on somebody is at least as cheap and skilless. 
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