*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.
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.