What's your KOF XIII team(s) look like, two years later?

[Great_Dark_Hero]

*stuff*

I understand all that, but honestly, the DLC trio are more or less the Doom/Vergil of KOFXIII. Of course plenty of other teams can, and do work, but having at least one or more will instantly make a team better, have incredible damage, easier execution and far less weaknesses overall. KOF isn't exempt from the benefits of tier-whoring, balanced though it may be.  After using them, picking a team without at least one of them feels underwhelming. And I absolutely hate that. Pick one or two, and fill the rest of the team with Beni/Hwa/Kim/regular version of DLC character and ta-dah!

If a character is comfortable in any team slot, it logically follows a team filled with those characters is more solid than a team that relies more on team order. It's about going into a match with every advantage you feel comfortable using.

And honestly, there's more than one person who refutes the battery/utility/anchor system. Pick three top-tiers and it doesn't matter who has meter or who doesn't. Why pick someone like say, K' when I can pick Hwa Jai and wreck people for 700 damage with almost no effort or execution?

My standards are probably too high. I've played fighters too much to try building teams around favourites anymore.

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I started out with Andy/Mai/XX, just because I was only playing for fun when I started.  They can both run 1st or 2nd, and Mai really loves the meter as anchor. But running them together caused problems, because they're both very dependant on drive meter, not so much EX meter. Andy in 1st would end up hogging a lot of the drive meter that Mai would have wanted for Ryu Enbu loops. So I split them up.

Right now I'm trying Andy/Billy/Kyo and Kensou/Mai/Yuri.

I don't think it is a good idea to compare the DLC characters to the likes of Doom/Vergil from the UMVC3 series. This isn't SFIV or MVC3. While those characters are very noteworthy in the high level game play of KOFXIII, picking those characters don't automatically mean you have the advantage. It isn't that simple. How good you do in KOFXIII, depends on how well you know the fundamentals, how to manage meter, the options you have available, your play style, and your opponents play style. Every character in the game can do up to 700 damage just as easily as Hwa can. Every character is viable for high level KOFXIII game play, but it comes down to a matter of preference, as well as all of subjects stated above. Many top players are winning tournaments on a consistent basis and they don't even use all of the characters you described.

[Coffeeling]

*stuff*

I understand all that, but honestly, the DLC trio are more or less the Doom/Vergil of KOFXIII. Of course plenty of other teams can, and do work, but having at least one or more will instantly make a team better, have incredible damage, easier execution and far less weaknesses overall. KOF isn't exempt from the benefits of tier-whoring, balanced though it may be.  After using them, picking a team without at least one of them feels underwhelming. And I absolutely hate that. Pick one or two, and fill the rest of the team with Beni/Hwa/Kim/regular version of DLC character and ta-dah!

If a character is comfortable in any team slot, it logically follows a team filled with those characters is more solid than a team that relies more on team order. It's about going into a match with every advantage you feel comfortable using.

And honestly, there's more than one person who refutes the battery/utility/anchor system. Pick three top-tiers and it doesn't matter who has meter or who doesn't. Why pick someone like say, K' when I can pick Hwa Jai and wreck people for 700 damage with almost no effort or execution?

My standards are probably too high. I've played fighters too much to try building teams around favourites anymore.

----

I started out with Andy/Mai/XX, just because I was only playing for fun when I started.  They can both run 1st or 2nd, and Mai really loves the meter as anchor. But running them together caused problems, because they're both very dependant on drive meter, not so much EX meter. Andy in 1st would end up hogging a lot of the drive meter that Mai would have wanted for Ryu Enbu loops. So I split them up.

Right now I'm trying Andy/Billy/Kyo and Kensou/Mai/Yuri.

First, Doom/Vergil? No. There's several things wrong with that analogy.
First, this isn't Marvel. In Marvel you pretty much need Morridoom or Zero to win. That game's tiers are way less compressed, the gap between the top tier teams and the rest is much higher, and team synergy is stupidly much more important than in KOF.
Second, grouping the DLC trio together. EX Iori and Karate can reasonably be considered the best two characters in the game, but EX Kyo is a notch below that. Benimaru and Kim, at least, are both better characters than EX Kyo. So there's having to have a DLC character to have a top tier team refuted.

And yes, it's true that a team with 2-3 universal top tier characters is has an advantage over a team that has as much raw power but needs a strict order because they can game matcups a bit. But that advantage just isn't very large if the strict-order team is built properly. There's no appropriate-slot matchup in the game that'd be worse than 6-4, and it's doubtful even a free-order team can finagle themselves more than one point of matchup advantage somewhere, if even that.

Also, with a mono-top tier team, meter use still matters. A lot. You're going with no meter against an anchor with tons of meter, you're at a disadvantage. It may be a slightly smaller one, but you're the underdog full stop because you're the one that will die to a touch.

So not going to contest that a team of universal top tiers is a better idea than some other team, but you're blowing the issue out of all proportion. There's way more things that have an effect - team construction on the not-mono-top tier side and the players' affinity with the characters themselves (very relevant in a game as fast-paced as this) being the biggest ones. What's best in a vacuum may not be the best for you. In SF4, I could play Cammy. I mean, everything ever says I should. She's super easy, super strong, and I could often just autopilot a bunch of wins. Just one problem: She just feels wrong, so playing Cammy is actually negative EV for me.
Consequence: I don't play her and play all manner of shotos instead, plus a bit of Dhalsim because those feel correct to me in that game. KOF is more balanced than that game. Just play what feels good instead of dragging yourself down mentally.

[Wasted]

Fighting games can absolutely be compared, and KOF and Marvel are no exception. The top-tiers have the damage, the flexibility with meter, the mixups, etcetera, etcetera. Characters with more useful options end up higher in the tiers. It's a universal law of the genre.

Fundamentally, rosters all work the same. There are always characters that are more well-rounded than others and have more options than others. KOF is simply blessed that characters with less damage or options can compete.

I would be snarky and say "You clearly haven't played Marvel", but I'm not going to bother. ChrisG wrecking with Morrigan does not make Morridoom a requirement to win. There are very, very few good Morridoom players, as well as very few good Zero players. There are definitely Morrigan and Zero armies, but very few that can compete at the top. Needless to say Morridoom almost always has Vergil in the back, and almost no competitive Zero team runs without Doom or Vergil.

But, I don't need to prove this. It's more or less a common consensus amongst the Marvel community that adding Doom and/or Vergil to the team instantly makes it a more competitive team. The third doesn't really matter. Morrigan, Zero, Spencer, Magneto, even Jill if you want.

All the while there are numerous high-placing players who use one or more of the DLC trio.

I am comfortable enough with this game that I am happy to learn any team. I don't have any particular playstyle anymore. I just shouldn't have to pick a team of DLC characters to have every minute advantage available.

I really have to disagree on the need for character affinity. Affinity has absolutely no impact on your skill or your ability to read your opponent. You can stick with your favourites all you want - I did, for a bit.  Eventually, there comes a point where many players feel they're making life too hard for themselves.

You really can't just pick the characters you like if it's counterproductive to winning.

I'm done. I appreciate the feedback, but I've tried your suggestions before, and it didn't work.

[Great_Dark_Hero]

snip

KOF and Marvel are two completely different games and they don't really translate with each other all that well. In fact, comparing this game to Marvel is egregious. Another thing that needs to be understood is that not everyone plays Marvel. You don't "need" to pick any of the DLC characters to win in this game. Picking a DLC character or even another particularly strong character in KOFXIII is not going to matter as much because the gaps between the characters in the tiers are very negligible and the player still needs to understand the neutral game, mechanics, fundamentals, how to manage meter, and how to make decisions quickly in such a fast paced game. Tiers are important but it is nowhere near as blatant nor the same as you would say for Marvel. Should you use the said characters, you still need to understand how the game works anyhow sense the game really isn't overly match up dependent. This is not the kind of the game where you can simply "play this character and you'll instantly" and that has been proven countless times. You can easily go a long way with any character you like in this game as they are build around the system (this is a system-first/characters-later scenario - you can't play this game in the same manner as you would with a fighting game like Marvel). Many players like Louffy, KBR, Romance, JuiceboxKing, and even MadKof himself for example did very well in big time tournaments without even using the said DLC characters. In fact, MadKof recently won a FT10 against XiaoHai using just the random select.  You're playing a completely different game here.