missing nerfs says:

i am 100% sure, you haven’t played an elesis against this characters. When you do 4 games against an ain. Then you will understand that even with gear. You gonna struggle your butt of to catch.

Unwanted says:

Iron body strong- What!!. Counter- Reckless fist with awakening and archenemy, the seconds you have on super armor will expire and then rf continues with their combo, or cbs with 2 delays+ you mean the iron body that was gutted to 34 seconds cooldown. Basically the skill is useless unless you can catch of it now. We have a lot of classes that has superarmor and get more rewards with no downside.

Dodge and slash- its superarmor- unlike ravens shadow step- it is way slower. Classes like ara can power stun without so much effort.

Crimson avenger- heals are useless now, its so little that its not noticeable, and you can’t be healing yourself when you have literally no ways to catch except be thankful that your opposition does not lag(unlikely in Na) or someone is below the platform, and you manage to use ejection stigma (gigantic) to catch. The only skill- chaser sword that was used for catching gutted and decreased.

Iron body strong superarmor for elesis – you mean the bug or something, like when an elesis stoic out, she kds( Yes, i don’t know if this is a bug, but i got an elesis that kept stoicing and then she did still be hit and kd in superarmor.

I just wish they give this class some good setups especially cra for catching. And get skills for catching air borne characters. In other words, all melee classes need skills for catching airborne classes like ain, rose, ara.

Phikage says:

Hmm I would care to disagree with a couple of your points. While I am not under the presumption that Elesis is bad (I main grand master myself) I believe she is a little lackluster as opposed some of the other characters this season (BH is the only one I exclude from this argument due to the presence of Fire Wall and Fire IV + Explosive Fist which do incredible damage. Even with the Invincible Flame nerf, she is still completely overbearing from the other Elesis’s.) My reasons are as follows.

1.) Her strongest defensive skill, stoic, got nerfed heavily. The strongest part about stoic was the ability to use it midcombo or pre-emptively when expecting a strong special active (Like Pandemonium) and counter it by having invincibility for 1 hit. With the nerf to stoic she loses this mindgame and becomes incredibly susceptible to special active catches. Additionally if you want to use stoic efficiently at all anymore, you have to know when you’re going to get caught because if you use it midcombo (assuming you don’t have ERP) it becomes a cooldown of 34 seconds, which is absolutely absurd for a skill that costs MORE than a manabreak to start with. Even using the trait makes it 25.5 seconds and if you have ERP for cooldown MAXED OUT, it becomes still a whopping 22.1 seconds cooldown. It doesn’t seem like much but this in itself is enough to make her a much worse character do to the heavy nerfs to stoic. Additionally she can’t even protect herself from first hit debuffs (Again, like Pandemonium) because she lost all invincibility on it. Granted I can sort of understand why this is the case (I don’t plan to ignore her access to evading HA’s.) But this could’ve been fixed by making it so HA cancels stoic, like how all the HA’s with Power Stun still locked her in.

2.) GrM and CrA lack consistent approach options. This doesn’t apply AS much to CrA due to the access to a projectile (>>^zx/>>^zxV) and a better freeze frame skill in Chaser Sword, but it is still relevant to her. While this isn’t 100% true due to the access to Super Armor, her Super Armor skills are extremely linear with very little deviation to this. It’s extremely easy to just dodge her Super Armor and punish the lag afterwards from the move. As for Special Actives, they can be very powerful catching tools, but GrM and CrA’s special actives have 2 forms (useful catching ones at least.). The first is an extremely linear straight line, this is skills like Chaser Sword and Critical Dive. The other is an AoE around said Elesis such as Sonic Blade, War Prelude, and Blood Falls. The biggest problem with these catching tools is 1. with the exception of BH, Elesis has a hard time gaining MP in the neutral to have access to these tools. and 2. even having access to these tools can give trouble to opponents who can space themselves correctly while far away from you and making sure to avoid your linear skills. This can be incredibly frustrating for CrA and GrM, and can single handedly decide games. A large portion of their gameplay relies on bait and punish tactics, so their lack of actual options to catch spacing opponents can make them much weaker, and decides matchups spreads pretty hard. A perfect example of this is NW. NW is a very powerful melee/range character that relies on actives to do massive damage, but has decent access to very powerful special actives that have large hitboxes to both catch, and do damage. While close up, GrM and CrA can manage with NW by using super armor skills to bait out options. But while NW is spacing and using special actives to keep GrM and CrA away, they lack any consistent options to deal with her. This gives them glaring matchup issues against opponents they could normally do perfectly fine against.

3.) The vast majority of CrA and GrM’s damage come from combos. While yes, CrA CAN do massive damage on her special actives, the vast majority of your damage comes from actives and combos that extends INTO said special actives. Skills that have heavy requirements to be powerful, such as Brandish Breaker, are not consistent forms of DPS, and are heavily situational but can be powerful if used correctly. With the presence of mass MP dumps such as BH, GA, and EM, it’s quite easy to acquire 100 MP to manabreak combos. For most matchups, this is strictly a loss as most characters can recatch quite easily and burning 100 MP from the opponent is purely a plus, for GrM and CrA, this is detrimental. GrM and CrA lack powerful skill damage and require heavy comboing to have any output, so each manabreak means a potential loss of the game due to their problems catching. Even recatching is incredibly difficult depending on where they manabreak. GrM and CrA have no way to gain MP outside of hitting the opponent or BEING hit by the opponent, but with most of the meta being powerful special actives that take huge chunks of HP, being hit by the opponent is too large of a requirement. This means that their damage is severely gimped by the fact that they can’t consistently do damage to these top tier characters that can generate hundreds of MP off of a couple moves.

And Finally
4.) This is more of a subjective point as this is my own personal opinion and experience from playing Elesis. I believe Elesis’s strongest strengths are very dependent on player skill, and not on actual statistics. With the way the meta is shifted, a large portion of character’s strengths is in their incredible %s and buffs/debuffs along with hitboxes. Elesis lacks many of these, and her gameplay relies heavily on how good the player is, similar to BM (Not QUITE as heavily though.) This means that unless the player is much better than the opponent, Elesis becomes a much weaker character due to the vast majority of power coming from mindgames and just simply outplaying the opponent. Whereas characters such as Freyja (No hate intended) have very powerful tools that require very little setup and do not require too much practice to become devastating in a match (My personal example being G-35L Flash Grenade). While skills such as Dodge and Slash, Rushing Sword, Injection Stigma, among other things may be powerful skills, they are only powerful because the players using them are usually much better than their opponent. While this is not always the case, if two players of equal skill were to fight, say one with GrM/CrA, and another with a character of around the same tier, say SD or AS, then the SD/AS would almost always win simply due to having better tools and not being completely outplayed by their opponent.

Granted the majority of this is subjective to my own opinions and experience, I still stand by this as my opinions on Elesis in general in the meta right now. Keep in mind this is applying to SOLELY 1v1. This has no relevance to 2v2 or 3v3 as I do not play those, but I’m sure they have other problems there anyways.