Discussion Main / DifficultButAwesome

Why were the general examples taken out? (like the fightstick example in the Fighting Games folder).

• In Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune, automatic transmission get this treatment instead. It requires sticking to the same power setting, good knowledge of the tracks and mastery of handling using brakes and steering, but when mastered players can get through corners which are hard to do using manual transmission.

This logic makes no sense to me. Under auto, your gears are at the mercy of the computer, and sometimes your car will shift at the wrong times. Can someone please demonstrate (e.g. with a video) how AT is superior to MT?

Monk Tanks in World Of Warcraft aren't the best example, considering their forgiving mechanics (Being able to react to spikes of damage rather than having to be highly proactive) and All tanks require heavy active mitigation these days.

I would suggest to broaden the scope of this article beyond characters, and split it into subpages, rather than pruning it or otherwsie stifling it. Also, Character Tiers can be argued forever; I'd say if there's something that's hard to pull off but really works, it belongs here.

"We can handle what is true, for we are already living it."

• Cyan. One common complaint is that his sword techs take forever to charge up; meanwhile, the enemy is still attacking. But if you get in the habit of having him go last in the party(teaming him with Gau also helps), you'll barely notice.

No offense to the troper who posted this, but Cyan really isn't the best example of this trope. He may be fun to use, but unlike Gau, for example(who is an invincible tank when used properly), Cyan is actually a low-tier character. He's Awesome, but Impractical incarnate.

• ...having the other characters go before Cyan doesn't really work as a great strategy, because the player has to wait for EVERYONE'S ATB gauges to fill up before they can do this. Even putting him with the "automatic" characters like Gau and Mog isn't really a very efficient strategy, since a well-trained Gau/Mog (in tandem with the rest of the party) will pretty much kill everything by the time Cyan's ready to go. Anything that isn't dead already can be worked over with pretty much anything in most fights, rendering his Bushidos effectively pointless. (which is sad, since they'd actually be decent moves if not for the charge times.)

• It doesn't help that most characters have attacks that are straight-up BETTER than Cyan's Bushidos that are to-go (as in they come out right away), and that nearly all of the other characters in the game have much more overpowered weapons, skills and setups, and much better magic power to boot. None of his weapons have game-breaking gimmicks like auto-criticals, randomly casting the game's uber-spells, randomly doing 9999 damage, significantly boosting nearly all of the user's stats, ignoring defense, or doing more damage as the user's HP dwindles. All they do is add to his attack, which doesn't mean a whole lot in a game where magic is broken and completely destroys just about everything. Did I mention that Cyan's magic stat is the worst in the game?

• The one weapon he does have a special effect, casts a Multi-target Wind Spell... but it is found early in the game, which means that it will be pretty obsolete by the time you get to the final areas of the game. Giving him the Genji Glove/Offering and setting him up with two of these can do decent enough damage, but isn't a very good idea since it makes him a Glass Cannon with no defense (due to lack of a shield), and that he'll be a sitting duck against many of the enemies that use status effects and instant death. Other characters can do better damage with just one weapon by that point while conserving their relic slots, thus preserving their defenses and status protection.

• The aforementioned Tempest/Kazekiri setup also renders him a one trick pony of sorts— he'll be pretty much screwed against anything that absorbs wind (leaving him with little else to fall back aside from the game's worst magic power), and he won't even be able to use his Bushidos effectively since the Offering/Master's scroll halves all physical damage to compensate for being able to attack four times. (The Fixed Dice and the Valiant Knife do not have this issue with damage penalties).

• The Quick spell (which stops time to give a character two turns)admittedly makes him more bearable in the sense that you no longer have to wait for Bushidos, but where it makes Cyan decent, it makes the rest of the cast utterly unstoppable Game Breakers.

Which leads me to my point exactly— he has relatively little going for him above the rest of the cast, and the things that make him workable make everyone else absolute monsters. I'm not saying that one can't like him, or enjoy bringing him along, but Cyan is quite frankly all Difficult, and very little Awesome (from an objective gameplay perspective).

He's not better than anybody. Except Umaro.

Edited by OrangeSodaGuy

• Albert Wesker of Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is arguably this. He's recognized as one of the best characters in the game due to his unique teleport, speed, counter moves, and combo options, but actually learning all of his tricks takes time and patience.

I still cannot believe that somebody put this on the page. For those who don't know, Wesker regularly receives hatred (Not simple dislike, I'm talking about seething hatred) from the competitive community because he's one of the most braindead characters in the cast. Here's why.

• His normals are some of the safest in the game, with his launcher originally being + on block (Now it's neutral) and his standing H and crouching M both being massively + frames on block. For those who don't know, + on block means that Wesker has more time to attack after a blocked attack. His crouching M is also a projectile for God knows what reason.
• His gunshot moves are some of the best projectiles in the game; in the first version of Marvel Vs Capcom 3, they were the best projectile in the game, since Wesker could start a combo from nearly fullscreen off of one. Despite this power, the gunshots are command normals activated just by pressing a button and holding a direction.
• His teleports normally have to be done with a reverse dragon punch command with the control stick, but if you cancel them out of a gunshot, they are just button presses.
• His combos are some of the most lax and easy-to-execute in the game; his moves have massive amounts of hitstun.
• He has fairly high damage with simple combos.
• He has some of the easiest mixups in the game; summon a beam assist, teleport for an instant 50/50 chance of your opponent getting hit by the beam.
• In the first version of Marvel vs Capcom 3, he had Rhino Charge as a get-out-of-jail-free card
• In X-factor in the first version of Marvel vs Capcom 3, Wesker had a pitifully easy death-loop that was literally holding forward and pressing a button repeatedly.
• His assist lower gunshot is fast and hits both low and off-the-ground, meaning that Wesker has a very good and very easy to use assist that lets him fill any spot on the team.

Tl;dr: There is no fucking way that Wesker is difficult in comparison to the other cast members.

Edited by GildedATM

The Difficult but Awesome page is clogged up with way too many examples for several franchises. For example, in Team Fortress 2, Difficult but Awesome is applied to over half the classes.

• The Scout in Team Fortress 2. Normal scouts are cannon fodder. Skilled scouts are nightmarish, appearing from nowhere to kill and as easy to hit as smoke.
  • The Spy (and to a lesser extent the Sniper) are also good examples for Team Fortress 2. They're really hard to play right but because of their potential lethality, a lot of people try to play them.
  • Pyro players are usually derided as noobs by a lot of TF 2 players...then you meet 'W+M2' Pyros, also affectionately known as Pyromancers. These players don't merely charge into battle flaming the entire time but instead use the compression blast ability and ingenuity to overcome enemies. This playstyle is by no means easy. Pyros are short ranged, a bit fragile, and aren't all that powerful...until you see guys who do things like this. 1:15 is even considered a sort of rite of passage for W+M2 Pyros thanks the unpleasantly narrow window of opportunity and the amount of damage you'll take if you fail.
  • The Demoman also requires a significant amount of predictive ability to play effectively. If you don't want to just spam grenades everywhere, you will have to become damn good at predicting where your opponent is going to be in a second (with a grenade launcher), two seconds (airbursting stickiebombs) or thirty seconds (with the stickybomb Launcher).

As well, a lot of the characters (Pyro from Team Fortress 2, Ike from Super Smash Bros, Iron Tager from Blazblue) are also claimed to be skill gate characters in this article or in others. The idea is obvious (These characters go from godly to sucky to godly again as skill increases), but it's just confusing when these guys turn up everywhere. As well, a lot of the characters are low-tier; how can Ganondorf be difficult but awesome if he's the worst character in the game?

I think the main problem is that a lot of people think any sort of reward counts as awesome for a character with a high learning curve, when the point of Difficult but Awesome is that there is a large reward for that effort.

So, I was wondering whether I should take a scalpel to the article?

Edited by Scardoll Fight. Struggle. Endure. Suffer. LIVE. Hide / Show Replies