Guilty Gear Strive players were very interested to see just how much of an impact the game’s Season 2 balance patch would have on the highest level of competition, and this weekend serves as the perfect test bed for just that.
CEO 2022 is going down as the first large offline major for Strive Season 2, but how much did that re-balancing change up which characters and players made it far into the tournament?
Although every character got touched up, things are still kinda looking like the Ramlethal and Nagoriyuki show considering they both had 7 players maining them in the top 64.
Leo wasn’t too far behind them unsurprisingly at 5 picks alongside Zato-1 and actually Faust with BC|Apologyman representing the good doctor in top 8.
While there are 2 repeating characters in the finals between Ram and Leo, there was still a wider range of competitors who made it into the top 11% of the bracket including some previous low tiers like Jack-O and Goldlewis showing up with 4 players apiece.
There was only 1 character on the roster who didn’t show up that far at all, and that was Anji Mito once again.
Happy Chaos and Sol’s nerfs do appear to have potentially slowed them down a decent bit compared to what we saw in Season 1 with only 2 of each making top 64 and just 1 gunslinger going as far as top 16.
We’re sure that fans were hoping to see the meta shake up more to make Ram, Nagoriyuki and Leo a bit less ever-present, but Season 2 has only been available for a few weeks at this point — so hopefully we’ll continue to see things evolve in the coming months.
You can check out the full character usage breakdown for Guilty Gear Strive’s top 64 at CEO below.
• Nagoriyuki – 7 (1)
• Ramlethal – 7
• Leo – 5
• Zato-1 – 5
• Faust – 5
• Ky – 5
• Goldlewis – 4
• Jack-O – 4
• Millia – 3
• May – 3
• Giovanna – 3
• I-No – 3
• Axl – 2 (1)
• Happy Chaos – 2
• Sol – 2
• Chipp – 1
• Testament – 1
• Baiken – 1
• Potemkin – 1
• Anji – 0