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How Happy Chaos & Season 1's DLC Roster Shaped Guilty Gear -Strive-'s Meta
Take a look at how DLC characters impacted -Strive- tournament results with PG Stats.
The first season of Guilty Gear -Strive-'s DLC included five additions to the base cast: Goldlewis Dickinson, Jack-O Valentine, Happy Chaos, Baiken and Testament. How did these characters fare in the competitive scene? Were they factors in bracket, or are they still waiting for their time in the sun? Let’s call back the chart from the first article in the series, which you can read here.
Guilty Gear -Strive- Top 4 Finishes for DLC Characters
© PG Stats
Guilty Gear -Strive- Character Rankings
Only two of the DLC characters were released before the October patch, a period we covered in detail in our last article — Goldlewis and Jack-O — meaning these characters, particularly Baiken and Testament, had very little time to accrue results and did not appear in Top 4 in any 24-entrant events in our database. Goldlewis and Jack-O were hardly present at top level, but Happy Chaos was becoming a force — and winning quite often when he made it to top 4.
Let's make things a little more fair for the Goldlewis, Jack-O and Happy Chaos and only look at results post-October patch. Happy Chaos was released roughly six weeks after the October patch and playable for the vast majority of this period. Let's take a look at the results.
Analyzing October's Guilty Gear -Strive- Patch
Guilty Gear -Strive- Top 4 Placements after the October Patch
© PG Stats
This is a look at top 4 finishers at 24-entrant tournaments strictly after the October 15th balance patch. Goldlewis and Jack-O still failed to make waves. Jack-O had a few stellar results, like Eddventure's Top 8 finish at January's Frosty Faustings, but struggled to stand up to the power of the established top tiers. Goldlewis had some solid early results, with four players placing Top 64 at CEO 2021 (although with none making Top 16), but he failed to stick in the meta as well. Not a single Goldlewis was present at COMBO BREAKER 2022's Top 64, and our database suggests his luck hasn't been much better in brackets at large.
Baiken and Testament don't appear unless you expand the pool to Top 8 finishers. That leaves one rather large elephant in the room: Happy Chaos, who despite missing out on the first six weeks of the period covered here, landed fifth in share of results in the post-October patch period. Happy Chaos didn't have a huge player base, but those who dedicated themselves to the character were dominant. The above graph really doesn't do it justice. Let's take a look strictly at tournament wins in brackets of at least 24 players after the October patch.
Guilty Gear -Strive- Tournament Wins Post-October Patch
© PG Stats
Happy Chaos tops the list, the single winningest character in our database after the October patch. It's a close one, and because our database does not cover tournaments held on all bracket websites (like Challonge) and relies on character data provided by tournament players and runners on Start.gg, it's possible that one of the characters close behind him, like Ramlethal, Leo, or Nagoriyuki, could have topped this chart if we were able to cast a wider net. But in the over 250 post-patch tournaments we were able to sample, Happy Chaos was the king.
Thanks to two of his top representatives, UMISHO and LostSoul, Happy Chaos also took 2nd and 3rd at COMBO BREAKER 2022, a 1049-player tournament held in Schaumburg, Illinois in May, the largest offline -Strive- tournament yet, proving Happy Chaos's strength on -Strive-'s biggest stage to date. Next time, we'll take a deeper look into the rest of the COMBO BREAKER 2022 results and see what trends we can pull from the last major event of Season 1, which just happened to be the largest collection of international talent the game has ever seen in an offline setting. Simultaneously, we’ll take a look at the early returns of Season 2 with the results of CEO this coming weekend, and explore what the future holds in year two of Guilty Gear -Strive-’s vibrant competitive scene.
Stay tuned for more from PG Stats and Red Bull Gaming.
