Xiaoyu

Tricky and evasive stance-based mixup

Xiaoyu is a tricky and evasive stance-based mixup character who excels in slipping past her opponent's attacks in order to land powerful mixups. She is a specialist character who thrives in the hands of players who love spending time in the lab, discovering setups with her many evasive stances and unique move properties. Xiaoyu is defined by her evasion. Her infamous Art of Phoenix (AOP) stance allows her to slip under many highs and even mids, allowing her to turn an opponent's offense against them. This, along with her Hypnotist (HYP) and Rain Dance (RDS), are highly flexible stances that can be entered into manually, or from many move cancels. These allow her to present a very unpredictable and jarring offense that makes opponents freeze up, where she can land powerful mixups. Xiaoyu thrives on creating setplay situations, whether on oki, after certain combo enders, or at the wall. These can devastate the unaware opponent, making them unable to play the game. Heat makes her mixups even more potent, granting her a tremendous boost in damage potential. Xiaoyu's evasion and trickery naturally make her frustrating and difficult to defend against, and she has an infamous reputation as a "lab character". However, she is just as much a lab character for her pilot, requiring good matchup knowledge to take advantage of her evasion, flexible and creative use of her stances to freeze up an aggressive opponent, and a breadth of effective setups to increase her damage output. She pays for her evasion with generally low poke and combo damage, and has to land many more mixups to equal the damage other characters get with a few. Her short poke range makes it difficult for her to approach, further necessitating creative stance usage.