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So you wanna beat the power meta? Here’s what you need to do.
TopSpin 2K25: Best tips to beat Power Players
Here’s how to easily beat those players that just focus on power and don’t really know how to do much else.
1. The difficult to swallow truth – you must perfect return serves most of the time
A lot of people who complain about power in Top Spin are actually complaining about service returns without realizing it.
Perfect returning serves is an essential Top Spin skill for high level play. While newer players may struggle with the difficulty of serving with the analog stick, once you get used to it it’s easy to pull off god tier serves. So as a result, the defending player has to pull off god tier returns.
This is tricky but with practice it will become second nature.
When returning, position yourself a couple of small steps behind the baseline. As your opponent is about to hit their serve, push up on the stick and start moving to the baseline. When you hit the ball you want to be at the baseline for an aggressive return, or just past it.
Unless you are standing in a truly terrible spot, this method allows you to forget about everything else going on and just focus on staring at your meter for perfect timing, or at the ball bounce, depending on whether you turn off the meter or not. IMO the meter makes serve returning way easier than the past, but it’s down to personal preference.
You’re gonna need to return the serve with a slice or top spin. Sometimes people struggle with being late on starting their shot, so what you can do is just immediately start holding top spin or slice as the serve comes at you. Aim all the way to the left or all the way to the right, depending on where the server is. You want your return to go to their side, not the empty space. This will give you time to reposition and can sometimes be a tricky shot for the server. Instead of the server dominating their service game, you are forcing a rally and sometimes even gaining immediate control after the return. It’s absolutely what you need to do against really good servers.
It might sound odd that you should return towards the server basically, but it’s crucial. If your opponent is good and your return to empty space, your shot isn’t going to be that good and your opponent will just whip one down the line.
Now when should you slice vs top spin? It depends on your opponent. I usually pick my backhand as the slice and my forehand as the top spin at the start of a match. Usually that means when I’m on the left side I’m slicing to the right. When I’m on the right side, I’m top spinning to the left.
Personally, I prefer to slice all the way to one side and also aim diagonally down sometimes, so it’s closer to the net and not as deep. For top spin I like to send it towards the top corner, so it’s very deep. But you’ll have to play around with this because every opponent is different.
By the way, I’m doing all of this with 60 reflexes, 50 stamina, and 62 speed. I don’t even have the third skill or any level 3 items equipped, I only hit level 30 today.
2. Power players are only good when they’re in control. So take it away from them with good timing
If the power player controls your positioning, you’re absolutely dead in the water. If you can perfect most serve returns, the rally starts either contested or sometimes even with you in power. After you return the serve, unless you have an ezpz opening, you now have to make the power player run.
All you really need to do is hit well timed balls cross court in the corners or to the sides. If you can do this, the power player is on the backfoot and won’t even have time to actually power up their shots. You’ll either win in a quick rally or they’ll strugglebus a bunch of shots for a while with you eventually finding an easy opening.
When you want to force the power player to run around, use deep or shallow top spin cross court balls. Or if you’re hitting from near the center of the court, do the same with flat shots. It really is that “simple,” it’s just that your timing needs to be good which takes a lot of practice to be fair. Don’t forget you can aim until that last possible nanosecond of your shot, so you can always change your mind at the end if you see your opponent moving.
If you need timing practice, stop dodging Sharapovas or level 30 power players. Play with them to get a feel for things. Power in Top Spin is ALWAYS going to be super important, even if they nerf it in the current game.
3. High Reflex is awesome
I’ve been testing a build against level 30 power players that has 87 Reflex. You still need to time and aim well like always, but it works really great against power players.
Is Power Actually Broken?
The game is barely out. No one knows. The truth is that power is just a super easy playstyle, and My Player or World Tour or whatever it’s called started on clay courts, so it’s even easier to play power. The % of overall players who are fully maxxed out with equipment, coaches, and levels, is super low. If you are getting wrong or flat footed, that’s your fault, that’s not a sign of power being OP. It just means your positioning was either too fast, too slow, or straight up you went to the wrong side (or were forced to guess).
My gut feel? Perhaps it may be a little overtuned, but also no one out there is actually trying Reflex builds. In Top Spin 4 you could basically do service returns that would be considered the greatest returns of all time on a consistent basis. My best guess is that you can do that in this game and the same to power shots with good reflexes. I say this because mine are 60 and I’m already pulling off things that are very close to what I was doing in 4.
Anyway, timing and aim are always the most important things in Top Spin. If you play and practice enough, you’ll get good at that and power players won’t trouble you so much. Top Spin is a great game but you have to remember it’s not truly a sim. You can pull off GOAT shots on a consistent basis if your timing and aim is good. Even with shoddy positioning/bad shot selection. Hope some of you find this helpful, cheers!
Bonus tip
If you are not in control of the rally, play behind the baseline! This will help potentially give you more time to reorganize yourself. Players don’t drop shot often, you don’t really have to worry about that too much.