(Tiers are alphabetically ordered.)

This page tracks changes in my opinion of how strong and fun each character is. Changes are mostly me getting increased understanding of the game, but patches obviously change things too.

Design is roughly how easily a character can be balanced. Worse moveset designs require more serious reworks to make the character both fun and balanced.

March 2025 (patch 1.13)

Design

Bryan

It’s not clear how this character functions without qcb+1 and qcf+1+2. Snake Eyes is also extremely boring. Without those he’s got nothing, but with those he’s lame as hell.

Clive

There’s nothing wrong per se with having a noob friendly character with big dumb buttons, but if that’s what the character is then they also have to be mid tier at best. This is what bears have historically been, but the excuse there was not only they’re noob friendly but they’re also joke characters.

It being intended that Clive is shallow isn’t a valid excuse. A stupid design goal is still stupid, even if done well. You can have noob friendly characters that also unlock deeper levels of the game if the player decides to look into them. For example, Claudio and Lidia do this well.

Devil Jin

It’s overstated how much hellsweep limits his design. There’s still a lot of room to make it harder to enforce, e.g. it could be slower, have worse range, worse tracking, or worse reward. If this were done, he could get buffs in other areas without turning into a Kazuya clone.

Dragunov

No ground hit on qcf+4 and char is almost perfect. If needed, reward on wr2 could be nerfed without issue.

Eddy

See Clive.

Heihachi

Just needs WI hellsweep to be the same as regular hellsweep. WI gives a whole bunch of cool utility to existing moves but none of it matters because all you need to do in WI is spam hellsweep.

Also, df+1,2* shouldn’t reversal break.

Hwoarang

Delete heat RFS.d+4,3,4 and CH db+4 and CH SS.4 and the character is almost perfect. The i10 CH launcher isn’t that offensive, but could nerf it slightly by making 2,4 recover faster to make the confirm less practical.

Jack-8

Strong reversal options to compensate for bad movement makes sense, and Jack’s armor stance is way more interesting than King’s. It’s just too weak, which simple number changes can address (e.g. faster armor, stored GMC stock).

Also need to unnerf debug (unless the point of the move is to be dogshit and punish misinput blue hand).

Kazuya

Heat hellsweep and heat smash are just “same character but better.” The heat hellsweep is particularly offensive because not only do you get looped but you have to watch a stupid cutscene every time.

They have tried addressing this by giving other uses for the meter, but fundamentally the issue doesn’t go away until those moves do.

King

Kill df+2 and character is fine.

Kuma

Abomination. Unfixable. No idea what they were thinking.

Lars

The demon flip nerf was excessive—it should be a little evasive.

Issue remains that he becomes unplayable when db+4 and f,F+4,3 are reactable. That entire class of move needs to be revised, but he’s the biggest victim of it.

Lee

Abomination, but easily fixed. Boring heat, boring overpowered regular moves.

Nerf b+3,3 and 1+2 and wr3,4. Buff db+3 and give blue moves more utility in heat, e.g.

• More damage on Acid Rain
• More active frames on slide
• Faster mist trap, or some counterplay to it being ducked on reaction
• Better knockdown for b+1:1+2 and b+1:1,2

Would still have the design fail of a low heat smash and safe df+2, but that’s more of a systemic issue.

Leroy

Entire character revolves around db+3, and low cane launch is stupid. Remove those and there’s not much else there. Serious rework required.

Lidia

Mostly perfect, but needs a small rework to HAE. Her only real design flaw is leaning too hard on the HAE mix, and more specifically the slow cinematics into pure 50/50 HAE.

She also has quite a few useless moves, but that’s an easy fix with some attention.

Raven

Degenerate mixup character who can’t survive in a world of busted mids.

Similar to Shaheen, having a homing df+1 oversimplifies his standing options. His BT is too weak and his FC is too strong, so all he does is spam df+1 followed by gorrila FC mix. If BT isn’t strongest, there’s no real reason to use BT or play db+2 mindgame. Nerf to BT.d+4 and addition of FC.df+3 screwed this balance up. Simplest fix is probably moving Aqua Spider to BT.

Heat needs rework to focus more on utility. “Make unsafe moves safe” is boring as hell. “Get heat back from correct guess on best mixup” is even worse. Some ideas for heat:

• Clones still recover heat on hit, but they’re always -14 on block
• qcf+2 gets clone extension, turns into -14 launcher
• b,B+2 improved parry frames, parry attack speed, recovers heat on parry
• b+1+3 and BT.b+1+3 improved parry recovery, reduced life loss, recovers heat on parry

Shaheen

Abomination. Everything this guy has is a design fail: Safe df+2, slide loop, guard crush loop, endless force block ws4 and ws1 situations, brainless homing moves, borderline homing df+1.

Steve

He’s male Xiaoyu now, apparently. Except Xiaoyu’s evasion is low profiling, whereas Steve’s evasion is lateral and backwards—the same as Feng’s.

The latter is good design, and the former not so much. With lateral and backwards evasion, both can be beaten by generic movement (dash realign into button), but with low profile evasion, it’s mostly a question of the attacker’s hitboxes. This leads to low profiling characters like Leo, Xiaoyu, and Zafina having quite skewed matchups, whereas Feng matchups are more consistent.

The only real problem with Steve is LNH.2. Compared to Feng’s KNP.3, it’s much faster and much safer, making whiff punishing with a launch too easy and thoughtless. The moves in LNH should all be considered options as whiff punishers:

• LNH.1: fastest, safest, lowest reward
• LNH.2: slowest option, mid, highest range, very unsafe
• LNH.1+2: fastest launcher, high

…and this is a simple change to the speed and block frames of LNH.2.

Otherwise, the character is unique, strong, and fun to play, despite the whining of Tekken 7 Steves who would prefer playing a brainless df+2 bot.

Xiaoyu

Xiaoyu can’t be buffed without dominating characters with bad hitboxes, and she can’t be nerfed without being dominated by good hitboxes. This has been the case for all of TEKKEN history, and it seems like nobody has any idea what to do about it. The changes in TEKKEN 8 removed her setups and gave her some braindead mixes as comp—uninspiring.

For her design to work, every character needs good low profiling options, where they can and must choose to specifically counterplay AOP with those options, and there must be a reasonable tradeoff between those moves and the ones with worse hitboxes.

This would be an absolutely massive rework to almost every character’s movesets.

Zafina

While somewhat affected by the same problems as Xiaoyu, Zafina’s evasion is not as central to her design. She is more oriented around particular attacks being evasive where the counterplay is defensive (e.g. reacting to d+3, low parrying SCR.df+4 if block punishers don’t work).

Tarantula—her most evasive stance—is not AOP, because entering Tarantula takes longer. She can’t do anything remotely similar to Xiaoyu’s SSR AOP.

However, Tarantula is boring, and the changes they’ve made so far make it even more so. After she punishes with 1,4, it’s just a pure 50/50 with nothing else to it. Almost every situation with Tarantula ends up being a 50/50, with the only exception being when she’s minus with the heat powercrush available. The stance needs something to make it more dynamic, probably some kind of lateral movement.