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Analyzing the Guilty Gear -Strive- Meta at COMBO BREAKER and CEO
After two major IRL tournaments and a significant balance patch, let's see how the -Strive- meta has shifted.
Over the past month, Guilty Gear -Strive- has seen two of its biggest and most stacked offline competitions since its release last summer: the 1,000+ entrant COMBO BREAKER 2022 and the 500+ entrant CEO 2022. Not only are these two of the biggest collections of Guilty Gear talent that we’ve ever seen offline, they also give us fantastic points of comparison for the Season 1 and Season 2 patches.
The data featured here is aggregated from public-facing results at CEO and COMBO BREAKER — and while it's not official data from Arc System Works, it provides a compelling snapshot of the latest shifts in the competitive, tournament meta.
Take a look at the top characters from Season 1 of Guilty Gear -Strive-
COMBO BREAKER, which took place May 27-29, was the final major tournament of Season 1, which ended June 10th with the release of the Season 2 patch. CEO 2022, which took place June 24-26, was the first major tournament run with the new changes, which included a number of universal mechanic adjustments as well as significant changes to much of the cast.
Let’s start with COMBO BREAKER. First, let’s take a look at the character distribution at COMBO BREAKER within the Top 64:
Character Prevalence in COMBO BREAKER Top 64
© PG Stats
The Big 4 from our previous analysis of Season 1 – Sol, Ramlethal, Leo and Nagoriyuki – are all present at the top, but two characters stand out. Chipp tied Nagoriyuki, with five of each (7.8%) making the top cut. And above Nagoriyuki and Leo, tied with Ramlethal and trailing only Sol is the most surprising of them all: Zato-1, known as one of the most difficult characters in the game, had seven representatives in Top 64, over 10%.
To really see how shocking this is, let’s compare these COMBO BREAKER results to the results from the PGstats.com database for Season 1 as a whole:
Character Prevalence in -Strive- Top 64 at COMBO BREAKER
© PG Stats
This is a comparison of each character’s result share at Top 64 of COMBO BREAKER to each character’s share of results in the Top 6% (the equivalent of 64 out of 1,050 entrants) of all brackets in our database in Season 1. Characters with a bar sticking out in red were more represented at COMBO BREAKER, whereas characters with a bar sticking out in blue were less represented at COMBO BREAKER.
Dive into how Season 1's October patch shaped the -Strive- meta
The obvious winner is Zato, who had his results share more than quadruple at COMBO BREAKER. A number of the best Zato players in the world were in attendance at CB, including international talent like Canada’s PepperySplash and Sweden’s Leffen. But our data also indicated that Zato was significantly improved after the October patch, and this performance from Zato at COMBO BREAKER seems like it was a perfect storm: A difficult character, with international representatives in attendance, after time to develop the meta and some buffs, finally broke through at the biggest offline event ever.
Baiken also broke through, with two making Top 64: ShinPhil and Alpaca21, both finishing 33rd. I-no main Diaphone also busted out Baiken as part of his run to 9th, although this data is only looking at primary characters; still, for a character who was a non-factor for much of Season 1, this suggests Baiken was starting to find a foothold in the meta even before the Season 2 patch.
The losers here were May and Potemkin, both characters that had dropped off hard after the October patch. Leo and Nagoriyuki, who were both still very common, but not to the degree they were for the majority of Season 1 tournaments. They still had major successes, as Leo won the tournament behind TempestNYC’s monster run, and Nagoriyuki finished 4th thanks to Hotashi. Happy Chaos also continued to follow the pattern we noted in our previous analysis, where there weren’t a ton of Happy Chaos players, but the ones who were there did major work, as UMISHO and LostSoul piloted him to 2nd and 3rd respectively.
Explore the impact of DLC characters like Happy Chaos on the meta
Everything changed, though, with the release of the Season 2 patch on June 10th. Would the Big 4 from the previous season still reign supreme? Would Zato be able to carry his momentum after another major patch? Would Happy Chaos still be the huge threat we saw in the second half of Season 1? Would any of the underplayed Season 1 DLC finally break through?
CEO 2022 was about half the size of COMBO BREAKER and did not have quite the international presence, but it was still a major event, with 550 entrants and a number of the best players in the world in attendance. How would the results compare to COMBO BREAKER?
Character Prevalence in -Strive- Top 64 at CEO 2022
© PG Stats
As before, characters whose bars stick out in red were more prevalent at COMBO BREAKER. This time, characters whose bars stick out in yellow were more prevalent at CEO.
Two things stand out: First, the fall of Sol. Punk was the only player to pilot Sol to Top 24, and just two Sol players made Top 64 compared to seven at COMBO BREAKER. The Season 2 changes decreased Sol’s damage output and added scaling to combos beginning off his vicious standing K. It will be fascinating to see if this drop-off in Sol’s performance sticks; he was a clear top tier in Season 1 but didn’t perform as well as the other top tiers late in bracket, as we analyzed in our first article. Were the nerfs really this extreme? Or will the Sol players find their way back as Season 2 continues?
Not only did Jack-O and Goldlewis lack the power to contend with the top tiers in Season 1, but they had the added difficulty of having to start from behind as DLC. This season, both are looking much stronger. Not only did each character get four representatives into Top 64, but both were able to push deep into bracket. BeefyManatee was the top placing Goldlewis at 13th, with Nitro headlining the Jack-Os at 17th.
Here’s another look at the CEO character distribution in order of Top 64 representatives, with a comparison to Season 1 performance:
CEO Top 64 results compared to Season 1.
© PG Stats
Once again, characters whose bars stick out in yellow were more prevalent at CEO. Characters whose bars stick out in blue were more prevalent in Season 1 in the PGstats.com database.
CEO suggests we may be moving to a meta dominated by Nagoriyuki and Ramlethal, but a number of characters are close in their wake. The next few months will tell us if these storylines, as well as the declines of Sol, Leo and Chipp and the rises of Faust, Zato and the previously forgotten DLC, were merely a fluke or will reflect the tale of Season 2 to come.
Check out some reactions from the Panda Fighting Games team to this data, and let us know your thoughts on Twitter by tagging @RedBullGaming.
