Guilty Gear Strive has almost reached the conclusion of its third year in the community with Season 4 on the horizon, and a lot of characters are seeing success in the competitive space now.
Reigning Evo champion for the game TSM|Leffen recently put together his Season 3.5 tier list for Strive following the release of A.B.A and end of the Arc World Tour Finals 2023.
While he says that he’s not particularly happy with where his favorite characters are at in the current meta, Leffen admits that there’s a lot of good fighters to choose from.
One of them who isn’t, however, is his former main Zato-1 and placed at the bottom of the rankings by himself where he talks about why at length in his video breakdown.
At the top, Leffen has six characters he believes could be a contender for best in the game with some expected picks like May, Nagoriyuki, and Leo along with a few others that were not there last season in Goldlewis and Sin.
He also feels Millia and Anji are also much better with their changes and additions in Strive now with both of them ending up even higher than Ramlethal.
As for the character he won Evo with, Happy Chaos is put around the middle of the cast in A tier with Leffen saying his current iteration may only have a winning match up against Anji and Jack-O as far as high tiers go while needing to work a lot more than he used to.
Although it’s still early, he puts A.B.A in A tier because while she has bad match ups, her jealous rage mode is enough to come back against anyone in one or two exchanges.
He says they can’t really make her any better without running the risk of the homunculus becoming the best in the game.
Aside from Zato, no one is put below a B, so basically anyone should be strong enough to perform well at large tournaments now like we’ve been starting to see more with Johnny and Testament who are down there.
You can check out Leffen’s final tier list below, and be sure to watch his video breakdown to delve into much more detail on all of his character ranks.
Click images for larger versions