It really does depend on your hands and which game you're playing.
Yeah. However you could play it in any style since it's based on your comfortability with how you handle the controller to play the game.
One thing I've noticed is that Pad Players on Tekken who play a plethora of characters have adopted to the "Claw Style" for holding the pad.... they do this because Namco said "Fuck It" to practicality into designing some of the Simultaneous button presses of some characters moves and strings.... essentially a thumb is inadequate for some of the inputs players need to do.... so they have to firmly grip the pad with their left hand and then hover over the face buttons with their right hand's fingers in a "Claw" like position.
Tekken is originally a 4 button game. You could probably say that it's literally a direct transfer from the arcades into the console while keeping the button placement. It's still kind of a hard topic to go into because number of reasons, one problem is that players are trying to play Tekken in the same grip as they play other games (but then you also have players that do well in the regular grip), and other problem is execution being hindered. If you look at it from a different view, it's mostly a controller problem which usually makes them shift their hands to play on a claw style, not really them. It's still very possible to play pad on Tekken like how they play their other games.
Now Tekken does allow you to Macro some of those inputs but the point I'm making is:
A) There aren't enough buttons to Macro all of them.
B) Different characters will require you to change the Macros... which is an unnecessary mental burden.
The Claw Style negates the need to have to deal with any of that.
I do agree that addition to macros would be nice since you have a number of moves such as 1+3/2+4/1+2+3+4, but you have no room to add more additions which leaves to the controller problem once more. We are talking about pads that were never meant for 100% fighting games, it was meant for versatility in all game genre.
So yeah... if you're going to play Competitively I'd recommend getting a Stick.
You could play competitively without a stick, some of their top players play on a pad. Stick is only recommended to try something new, not to improve one's gameplay to be honest.
Mark Julio (US Community manager for Tekken): No you don't need an arcade stick to play Tekken, there are people on our streams that play Tekken on a PS3 controller! what makes you happy will work and don't believe people that say you need one just to be high level with the game.
TheMainMan also beat Tekken's story mode on the hardest difficulty on a PS4 controller and doing electrics on them without the shortcuts. Some say that the reason is because they played Tekken for too long that they are used to the game, but that still shows that it's possible to play the game on pad.
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For me towards Arcade sticks, I think they are really good. Like Sly mentioned back, playing stick is like writing with your off hand (in which case, I'm a righty so I write with my right hand and playing stick is like writing with your left hand). It's a weird experience at first and makes you feel like complete shit the first time doing combos and moving around the stage. I thought I wasn't going to like it at first but ended up liking it the more I use it. Sticks also last longer than pads because those D-pad just wasn't meant for fighters so they make Fightpads, the Hori ones, become a thing. If you learned stick, then in my opinion was well worth the money. If you didn't then it's not worth the money.
