9 Bar Elder

you do not need a guide for this character, every second move is an auto win button

Not really, but sure.

just go in sword stance and press random buttons

That works...
On noobs. All it takes is one experienced player to attempt to predict a guard break or an attack that'll hit regardless of the offensive moves you have access to.

If you think Elder is op for his "easy sword swings" you probably cant frame time parries

Accurate lol. Anyone with half an understanding of how the blocking works just needs to predict well enough to at least partial block if not parry.

How do I deal with an Elder that's Zoning like crazy and spamming their heals without needed ranged moves

Originally posted by Sasiyue:

How do I deal with an Elder that's Zoning like crazy and spamming their heals without needed ranged moves

The heal only procs when Elder blocks. The rest is just really crazy mixups and stances.

Originally posted by Mdbgamer:

That works...
On noobs. All it takes is one experienced player to attempt to predict a guard break or an attack that'll hit regardless of the offensive moves you have access to.

Originally posted by cj:

If you think Elder is op for his "easy sword swings" you probably cant frame time parries

To me, it's not the sword swings. It's the 3 frame options. Those kill attempts to grab, which removes the "S" in "RPS" since grabs are effectively a suicide option since attempting to grab means eating a 3 frame strike.

That's why almost every character made that tries to be "Balanced" makes sure that their fastest attacks are 4 frames or more.

Elder is absolutely strong. Unbeatable? Of course not. It's not like trying to beat Spectrum or Early versions of lumberjack when he had a 1 frame projectile

Experienced players will see past the flashy stuff and look at the numbers. His "dodge" is one of the best in class for example. His ability to floor someone in 3 frames can lead to silly games of oki-whack-a-mole. His mobility in sword stance is quite good, and his overall frame-data is EXCELLENT. And taking 15% less damage from all sources as well as having a heal mechanic? Like, YEEESH!

He's far from something like Spectrum, or early versions of lumberjack that had 1 frame startup unparryable projectiles that had no recovery frames and could be just spammed endlessly to make anyone without a safe teleport a free win, but he's hardly "Bad" and with me and my Yomi-partner's tier system where we look at characters through an "Objective" lens and assign point values to various aspects of characters (IE: does a character have a projectile at all? +1 point. Does that projectile have high durability? As in: Can it destroy a ninja Shuriken and continue flying to hit the opponent? +1 point. Does a character have the ability to heal or buff or debuff, do they have attacks that come out at faster than 4 frames, does the character heal or take less damage, ect ect.) Elder is, by our metrics, looking like an A-tier character.

That would put them in the same ball-park as characters like: Archer, Blade Dancer, Illuko, Morion, SOLDIER, Undyne, Wizard, Nari, Netizen, Sky Hunter, Mutant and Nero.

For reference...Cowboy ended up in B tier along with Jomm, Malachi_LOB, Ninja, Robot, Salesman, Xiao and Zessen (Which is just Anji from Guilty gear.)

Because while we do give a point for having a varied move-pool, you don't need to carry a tool belt if you have a swiss army knife, and Elder is absolutely a swiss army knife of a character. They don't need a BUNCH of tools because the handful of tools they have are just REALLY good judging by frame data, reach, and raw numbers.