These characters are slow, technical, and easily defeated if a player doesn’t know what they’re doing. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad, they’re just not recommended without extensive experience.
If you’re a beginner to Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate, these are the characters you’re going to want to stay away from, at least at first. They generally force a player to pay more attention to the fundamentals of gameplay and have mechanics that are harder to master.
Kudos if you excel with one of these five fighters.
Shao Kahn
Shao Kahn is notoriously one of the worst characters in MK 11. While his combos aren’t hard to pull off, he moves ridiculously slow. His attacks are also slow, making them easy to block.
His attack strings are fairly easy to break and leave him open because of slow frame rates. For example, both his forward 2,1 and 2,1 are easy to punish.
His best move is forward 3,4, which starts quickly and can be accompanied with a 1 + 3 for a grab. Unfortunately, it can be countered easily, leaving Shao Kahn with few reliable options. Anyone that knows the matchup will take advantage of these weaknesses.
Worst of all, he’s predictable and far less threatening than he should be given his franchise history as the big bad.
D’Vorah
D’Vorah is objectively one of the coolest characters in the game. She’s made of bugs and has some of the more grotesque fatalities.
Too bad that doesn’t translate into easy gameplay. She’s not for the faint of heart, both visually and technically. MK expert MadDoggGames called her “hands down the most difficult character to play” because of “a lot of things going against her” in his video on the same topic.
Like Shao Kahn, she has slow attacks and strings with gaps that leave her open to attacks from knowledgeable players. She requires more work to accomplish what other characters can with less effort and the risks aren’t always worth it.
Rambo
One of the newer characters in the game, Rambo is fairly uneven. He’s probably the weakest out of all the Kombat Pack 2 characters included with Ultimate. He used to have a glitch where he could beat every parry with a mid, but that was patched out, taking away one of his greatest strengths.
Rambo is also pretty slow, lacks good mobility, and has weak jumping attacks. Common to the other characters on this list: Holes in strings. Be smart with your move selection to avoid giving up your turn so easily. His fastest standing move is 9 frames, while most characters have quicker 8 or even 7 frame attacks.
Kollector
When you think Mortal Kombat 11, Kollector isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Or probably not the second. He’s definitely a lesser-known character, and the fact that he’s fairly hard to use doesn’t help.
Kollector highlights the same common weaknesses in the Ultimate meta: slow normals and weak gaps, plus mediocre mix-ups. In addition, his playstyle leaves a lot to chance.
His forward 1 attack is low, and while it can be used to punish and bring a player closer, a good opponent will learn to block and counter it fairly quickly. Kollector is difficult but worse of all there are other characters that do what he does much better.
RoboCop
RoboCop is another incredibly exciting DLC character that suffers from sluggish movement.
He has meterless combos, but you can duck most of them. His animations are easy to predict, and that’s never a good thing. He’s easily punishable as well, as many of his mids are unsafe on block. The best thing about RoboCop’s game is his keep away, but things get problematic when you close the gap unless you’re running his mid command grab, which requires baits and mix-ups to succeed.
Hard to Play Doesn’t Mean Bad
These characters have something to show for themselves despite their difficulties. ArnKratos recently won the Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate Weekly Invitational with RoboCop, while Mustard and Ketchup believe Rambo has a lot of untapped potential as one of the newest fighters in the realm. SonicFox upset players with Kollector in major tournaments before the character rose in the tier list with custom variations.
MK11 is one of the more balanced fighting games. That translates to more character diversity in tournaments and even more unique results. If there’s a character you really want to learn to master, don’t let anything hold you back from improving at any level of the game.