The sagat Debate

[Zombiebrian]

Every other forum on the web has had this discussion so lets have a euro debate about it.

Sagat - brokens, ovepowerd or fair.

My vote broken, His damage output and his options make up for his one weakness (speed) make one or two mistakes in a match and your done getting hit from a f.hk. f.hk tknee for example takes off about 30% of your energy.

His speed isnt a weakness really due to the tigershots being the best fb in the game. in other words to do damage you need to get up close.

Then you have his ultra one of the most distructive and one of the easiest to hit.

Also some of his specials lk tknee no recovery ex tigerupper so much damage his normals like the j.mp (peoples elbow) cuts through lots of other moves

[Kieron Baird]

I feel he has/is :


Over-powered attack
Relatively fast
He can take a beating
Has an amazing long range move (also over the top damage)
Has an ultra that can counter almost all others (from what I have seen).


All in all, he seems to have no weakness as far as I can see. If he isn't tamed down in Super Street Fighter 4, I will have serious doubts about these "tweaks".

[JDK]

In my experience most people who call sagat or any charecter for that matter cheap or overpowered usually dont know enough about the game to comment.

In the uk the two most dominant players, zak bennet and ryan hart use sagat (zak exclusively and ryan always falling back on him when he really needs to win) so maybe there is something to it or maybe the uk scene players just arent good enough with other characters to challenge them.

Sagats massive health and heavy damage dealing specials certainly make him seem very powerull at the lower end of the skill spectrum, that said that doesnt mean he is broken, far from it, it just means most of the people playing the arent skilled enough to go beyond special spamming and thus assume sagat to be overpowered.

Just look at the states and japan where the players are undeniably on another level (japan less of a good example cos they all play in arcade and apparantly sagat is less powerfull there), the character usage amoungst the best players is very diverse which suggests a balanced roster.

So what do i think about sagat, well prolly should lose 100hp and 10 pts of damage off his tiger upercuts to bring them in line with ryus shoryukens, beyond that i dont currently have enough knowledge to suggest anything else.

also one little thing, i've seen you mention a couple of times zombiebrian about moves with no recovery, might want to be a little bit more specific there as ofcourse all moves have recovery just perhaps not a lot of it, 13 and 9 frames respectively for sagats tiger knee and blankas electricity ;-P

Good job on event hubs btw, ill have to check out your forums sometime as you are totally right srk is very bitchy.

[emgotcha77]

According to 'Play to win' i'm a scrub :)

And i play Sagat because i can win with him.

I started with Ruy, won with him a few matches too but the big advantage of Sagat is his damage and health which suits my style: block a lot, still get hit a lot (but Sagat has a lot of health), wait for an opportunity and HK, TU or TK the **** out of my enemy.
Of course i could do that with any other character but it's way more effective with Sagat.
He is slow yes... but not really a disadvantage i think. In my scruby opinion he is good at long range and good at close range.

[Electric Leo]

I don't mind Sagat's power, personally. We have a lot of Ryu players in the office and in the right hands, Ryu does as much damage as Sagat. What I don't like about Sagat is how BORING he is to watch in tournament play. Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! *YAWN*

Really, he's only a fraction more powerful than Ryu in real terms, but he's easier to use. That's the deciding factor in why he's picked for tournament matches so often, I think. His moveset was the easiest to figure out in the beginning as well, which is why I think so many players have stuck with him.

Every fighting game has tiering, and SFIV is pretty balanced in comparison to almost every other fighter out there. Without tiering, Liam the Vega player wouldn't have shone so much at the official UK championships, when he took Ryan Hart's Sagat to the final round. That was such a great match, and on paper Vega is one of the weakest characters in the game. Which to me just shows it's the player that counts, not the character they use.