Hatred guard is supposed to be used in tandem with painwheels flight... Theoretically speaking:
Hatred guard absorb any move or series of moves from the opponent hopefully giving painwheel a combo opportunity, and when the opponent starts to throw hatred guard, that's when you start to use fight as a reversal since it is airborn on frame 1.
Multihits should be blocked and punished since most special ove multihits are minus on block.
^^^ is I guess "somewhere" along the lines of how defensive painwheel is supposed to be played in mikes mind... Or at least how she's supposed to work in theory. In practice though, multihits are simply to strong and not minus enough on block to be punishable very often.
So basically the instant that painwheel starts to absorb stuff, the multihits come out, and at that point painwheel doesn't have the greatest answers. So armor basically forces a strategy that is hard for painwheel to counter from the opponent.
I once thought that charging armor moves while calling assist would be really good... And to be honest it isn't THAT bad... But age conveniently pointed out that simply blocking while calling assist was way better in almost all circumstances... And after that... There really is little reason to use painwheels armor except to reactively go through updo/pillar on those rare occasions where the spacing/timing and opponent predictability all coincide to make the reaction much easier to do, and in those off assist situations where painwheel wants to attack/defend while her assist is on lockout or cooldown...which is rare cause most players are just going to back up till the time wears off.
Her armor moves are basically a little bit better than garbage, most if not all of them confirm on hit into full combo... It's hitting with them, while also using the armor to absorb, that is the hard part.
If we look at sentinel as and hulks armor... Which are probably like the best armor attacks of any non boss/broken characters in any game, they have huge differences over painwheels armor attacks:
Don't require a charge
Armor past the first active frame
Huge hitboxes/range
In the PC version painwheels armor received some significant buffs before and after the hit, the affects after the hit are negligible, the affects before the hit have 2 huge buffs:
Armor starts up much quicker.
Armor is active to the first active frame.
But this is still mostly inconsequential since she still has those stubby normals, still plants herself in one spot, still has terrible startup via charge, and there are still lots of hard/impossible to punish on block multihit moves.
With all of that going on, her armor moves are just simply very hard to use effectively and could still use some buffs if the creator of them truly wishes to see them being used with frequency in competitive play.
And as far as buffing them AGAIN...well when they were as weak as they were... Which is somewhere between terrible and complete ass... It makes sense to buff them again.
Simply put, I won't use armor normals for anything other than shits and giggles if my armor continues to be so easy to break.
Why would I use a tool that doesn't work for what it's supposed to work for? And if it isn't supposed to beat multihits, which I agree with, then it basically isn't really designed to be a big part of her game since multihits in the form of actual multihit moves from the point character, or multihits in the form of multiple hits from the point character and assist combined, is so easy and rampant and safe.
TLDR, painwheels armor moves are to slow, and to small to be good unless I'm missing something BIG.
