is painwheel a good starting character?

[irlfilia]

im really interested in getting into competitive online battles, and painwheel is one of my favorite characters, and i thought i would rly like her fighting style, but i saw somewhere that she was usually considered one of the hardest characters in the game to use because of her flying resets, so i wanted to ask if it would be smart to start out using her or to go with an easier option first. thank u!!

 

[skull person]

She's difficult because she is different.

Learning how to defend and control your air space well when you don't have access to blocking in flight is difficult.
To block from flight you have to press two punches together on the same frame to 'Unfly'.
Even a one frame timing difference in the two punches gets you an air normal which will be counter hit.

Learning to play Painwheel just takes a little work to understand how to survive in the neutral game against good players.
A lot of intermediate and beginner players actually find fighting against Painwheel to be extremely difficult with her always in good positioning for air normals.

But the most important thing:

If you enjoy Painwheel the most out of all the characters in the game, play her.

She's certainly not weak, so if you enjoy playing her then just keep practicing!

 

[flio-turbo]

A lot of intermediate and beginner players actually find fighting against Painwheel to be extremely difficult with her always in good positioning for air normals.

 

[digereedoodah]

Let me preface my advice with this: if you want to eventually play painwheel, then I think you should start with painwheel. Also, I'm also new so take what I say with a grain of salt.

As someone who started with painwheel and is now learning other characters, I would say that she isn't the easiest character to start with. From my experience, her play style is a bit harder to get into than other characters and her combos can be quite a bit more involved in terms of directional inputs.

That's not to say that you start with someone else; if you want to play painwheel, then start playing her as soon as possible so that you get used to her. It's not like she's a lot harder to use other characters (but I would say that she is, in fact harder).

Also, since painwheel's inputs can be harder that others, when you eventually want to start other characters their combos will be a breeze to pull off. If you start with someone else, then learning painwheel might seem really difficult in comparison.

Hope this helps.

 

[Sinclair]

Let me preface my advice with this: if you want to eventually play painwheel, then I think you should start with painwheel. Also, I'm also new so take what I say with a grain of salt.

This is the truth, I remember buying the game a year ago (I have 650+ hours of game time in SG now) and I had a few friends who started playing the game around the same time as me. Their first pick was Painwheel, they can still play her despite dropping her. The friends who didn't pick her up at the beginning and instead picked bella/val/filia or whoever were never really able to play Painwheel because.........she plays SUPER different....like mentioned above.

I have tried to pick her up so many times, and it's so hard. Because I'm not used to her play style and i don't think i'll ever get used to it. It's simple like that. When you play Fortune u get the choice to either go headless or not, when you play Squigly you get the choice to either learn how to stance-cancel or not, but you're not forced to learn it in order to pick them up.

With Painwheel u have no choice, so its the best to pick her up while you're a beginner!!

 

[Senjin]

I also started out with Painwheel when I first started trying to get competitive with this game. I don't know how familiar you are with fighting games in general, but for me this was my first that used all of the directional inputs and whatnot, so from that perspective, every character was an uphill struggle for me since even just doing a basic fireball motion was a struggle. Personally, because of this I found learning Painwheel first to be a huge benefit, because she forced me to get comfortable with doing all those inputs all the goddamned time. It was definitely a little frustrating at first, but you'd be surprised at how quickly you can adapt to that, even with just 10-20min of focused practice a day.

I guess what I'm saying is, yes Painwheel can be a difficult character to learn, but in the end so is everyone else. It might be easier to learn a basic BnB with someone like Cerebella, but no matter who you pick you're going to run into difficult challenges with their playstyle eventually. Ultimately, you'll probably have more fun and be more motivated to stick with learning the game if you're doing it with a character that you like, so just pick who you like =]

 

[Sparties]

tbh, i did much better with painwheel after gaining a better understanding of how her armored moves and buer works.
your only problem with playing this character at this stage is that you'll be fighting a lot of players who have a comprehensive grasp of how to deal with the match-up.

to me, she's like a slower, more powerful double. all i can say right now is get real familiar with her moves before trying anything intermediate because diving right into her is a lot to take in and ultimately leaves some players confused.