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
