Nope, not me! Never had forums admin access.

4/ To answer your Q: No, R4s can't risk taking more damage. They are starting with lower potential, MUCH lower actual health to begin with! Only gets worse the longer a round goes.

Ultimately, a team of 3 has built-in time/health advantages to work with. R4s have to work harder use their power adv.

3/ In the thread's 2nd pic you can see R1 Yama has 9100 effective HP vs. R4 atk pwr. For the weaker R1 to do the job vs R4's more eff. HP, it needs to remove 5700 HP *after* accounting for health recovery.

5700 target + 3000 potential recovery = 8700 total
R4 8700 potential < R1 9100 actual

Oof...

2/ Obviously, any damage the R1s do vs the R4 must also factor in health recovery for the R4. But even in the best case scenario the R4 is behind from get go & falls further behind with every tick of the clock.

I will prob make a video later about this that will include detail. But here's the math:

1/4 Simple version of health recovery: You get back as health 3x what was left on the timer at the end of the previous round. Essentially, you start a round with 3000 health available for a win and that goes down linearly with time. This is a flat number that does not scale with ratios. ...

AND JOIN THE CvS2 DISCORD
tinyurl.com/CvS2Discord

/fin

13/ And it fell just short! Congrats to Justin on his ~content~ and to Bas for thankfully winning CEO and not setting back CvS2 tournament meta 20 years (*nervous laughter*).

I hope you enjoyed this terribly deep dive into CvS2! We'll see you at Evo 2025 for more CvS2 tournament action!

12/ Justin understands the math of the CvS2 free ratio system! He's also uniquely qualified to make an R4 character work, given his prowess with footsies and fundamentals.

K-Groove Ratio 4 Haohmaru is the meme, but C-Groove Ratio 4 Sagat was the best shot at doing what he did.

11/ Understanding all of this, you can see why Justin was still patient and selective in many of his last matches at CEO, even in the games where he wiped out Bas's R1 Yama. The Ratio 4 advantage in CvS2 is not that good of one, actually, especially against elite level competition.

10/ Also, in Time Over games the winner is the character with the highest % of health regardless of ratio. R4s recover less health with long rounds and may need to be more aggressive to keep their advantage and/or avoid time out losses, which can lead to mistakes & losing more health than budgeted.

9/ While the Ratio 4 character can kill an R1 pretty easily, they have to be careful not to take too much damage along the way. If they do, the R2 anchor character in the last round will often be ahead—at least according to the math)—neutering the R4's advantage over the R1s and the team as a whole.

8/ The Ratio 4 character, despite having more HP & damage output than the Ratio 1, *is actually at a disadvantage* in the grand scheme of things. Their opponent, as team of three, has multiple chances and MUCH more total health and time to work with (scam) to deny the R4 their power advantage.

7/ Consider the first image above, showing the daunting difference between a Ratio 4 & Ratio 1. But that only shows what the R1 has to do to OCV the R4. (Which Bas did in a game!) When you rescale it to show what an R1 has to do break even for the team as a whole, things look different!

6/ Notice that this isn't 25%! This is the first clue as to why Ratio 4 characters are generally not optimal for high-level CvS2 tournament play.

It turns out that R4 characters are at a disadvantage due to their their high damage output not being enough to overcome their low total health.