Since release I always saw him in the top 10 echelon of the roster, if not just outside it, but I had an open mind to if he was top 5 or not.
In this version of the game, I barely consider him top 5 material. He may have not that many losing mus, but I'm willing to bet the actual number of winning mus he has is less than who I currently consider top 5. To me, as a person whose labbed and grinded the shit out of him since release, he's high mid tier at worst. If I want to be an optimist, he's probably within the 7-9th spot but that's too unrealistic to expect from me.
It goes without saying though that the character was annoyingly upplayed since EVO, and has been ever since. Just because one player can bring out the best in a character, doesn't mean that the character is necessarily as good as they claim they are.
I don't deny that:
- His lunge is a good tool.
- His chip and meterbuild is still very good.
- He has very good neutral and passable space control
- He has very good setplay.
His weaknesses, that he's always had since forever, are his bad wakeups in the corner and his below average damage. While he's relatively the same character at a surface level, the patch affected him more than you'd like to think it did both directly and indirectly.