My guess for "less popular" characters include Sonya, and I dunno, like Jax or something? I feel like nobody I've ever known who was a huge MK fan ever mained Sonya, I've personally never especially liked her moveset, and to my knowledge she's never been considered a top tier character.

I don't especially want to see combo videos of her, but if you're looking for a character that will have fuck all combo videos on YouTube, she is my guess.

@bisonhero: I've heard that one of the Sonya variations is essentially Cyrax so I'm guessing she'll see a boost in popularity.

I dunno people already using Jax in tourneys.

Glad you're doing this again, now I can live vicariously through you.

@starvinggamer I'd love to see if Scorpion's Hellfire variation allows him to play like a shoto. How good is the fireball?

I'm finding it pretty hard to tell who will be unpopular at this point. If I had to guess I would say Sonya, Kano and Quan Chi. I think Jax will be used more in this game then in the past, personally I really like his pumped up variation.

You know how people generally seem really into a projectile heavy character early in games to zone (ie Striker and Deathstroke from the previous NR games) I think at first people will be drawn to Erron Black for that. But I think people may realize that Jacqui can be incredibly spammable. I'm currently watching Justin Wong stream and he was playing as Jacqui and getting bodied pretty badly by Ferra/Torr, then he started zoning hard with the machine gun and blew through the guy, it shoots 4 projectiles and does 7% if I remember correctly and when EXed it adds a rocket on the end and does some very solid damage (I believe it was in the mid-teens).

I imagine there are lots of Jax fans since MK2.

Sonya is widely considered S-tier in MK9, which puts her in roughly the top five characters.

But you're probably right. From a visual design standpoint, there's a certain amount of redundancy between Sonya and Cassie, and I'd be willing to be Cassie's going to draw a bigger following than Sonya will, this time around.

@historyinrust said:

I didn't keep up with MK9 balance changes for very long, so I was under the impression that Reptile and Kung Lao and Kabal was S-tier. Don't remember seeing much Sonya use from what little I watched back when it had tournament appearances.

@geraltitude: :D

@flstyle: It's... interesting. His fireball has really slow startup (or so it seems, I've only played Scorp so far), but you can delay it and dash cancel out of it if you have Stamina. You can cancel the Dash into a Run which you can then cancel into pretty much anything. Seems like a potentially insane ability but also fast reactions and high execution required. Like, you could hold the fireball, then cancel it into a Dash into a Run into an anti-air Uppercut if you were quick enough.

Also Hellfire seems like a good tool in zoning battles if you can time it right. He also has this weird flame aura thing that when activated does damage over time to enemies at point-blank range. You can also link, like not a buffer but a legit link, out of the activation but it's so unsafe it's hard to imagine it being useful in combos.

@bisonhero: At the end Kabal was S+ tier (the spammage was fucking crazy), then S tier was Kung Lao, Cyrax (specifically the robot one, not the human form), Freddy, Kenshi and Sonya.

But tiers don't really matter unless you are good enough to use a character to their full potential. Look at Shiva, she was one of the two lowest tiered characters in the game (the other being Kano) but if you don't have the ability/knowledge to get out of the way of her stupid slam she can body you to the point that a lot of new players would get all upset because she was "OP" or whatever.

That's more than I hoped for really, sounds interesting!