Hmm, I’m thinking of testing a Dormammu/Doom/Strider team. Plasma Beam & Vajra seem to enhance Dormammu’s keepaway to a huge degree. Dark Matter mixups combined with those two assists look to be scary. It looks to be one of the craziest zoning teams in the game. What are your thoughts of that combination?
typically, you want everyone on your team to be able to combo off strider assist, w\o bar. Especially for your first character if strider isn’t starting. However, dormamu is very strong in this build so instead of having superb team chemistry, you have stronger character options. Its not the worst team possible but it does have some small flaws. Dormamu can’t only capitalize off strider with bar unfortunately or some type of 1 time flame carpet, xf dump. Other than that though, its pretty strong.
I think I’m going to go with dante\strider\doom as my main team. dante has some very nice mixups on this build if anyone has seen the nini heart video. On this specific team, dante can do about 450-500k of life off a combo no meter. Then he gets a pretty good teleport reset into strider that looks damn near impossible to block. Dante can vitually kill 1 full character with 1 very hard to block yet safe mixup attempt after a clean hit. What this does is kill a character obviously but you get to save some meter for strider in the process which he loves. Also, every character on this team is pretty good in xf3. while the dog in xf3+slowdown prevents people from being effective, it doesn’t exactly give the dog pin time to get something going. Dante feels like he’s a better xf3 character than the dog and if he can’t mix you up, he always has the option to chip you out with qcf+s in DT.
I also have this inverse team chemistry going on. I can either start dante or doom on this team. like if doom has a bad matchup, dante could have a better one and I still maintain team function. Dante assist is like a ghetto dog assist but I don’t get as much pin time which I trade off for a stronger character in dante.
Yeah, I know that Dormammu can do OTG Purification -> Chaotic Flame or OTG Liberation 3D0C -> Dark Hole -> Chaotic Flame if Strider assist gets the hard knockdown. If he has no meter, Dormammu can’t combo off it.
just got this game yesterday and haven’t played vanilla in a few months (so the following should be read with the understanding that im the worst scrub and am subject to say things that sound dumb). My my new team, is the same as my old mvc2 team, Sent, strider, doom. Sent drones, stider kick, and doom rocks. The idea is that i would have a team that works in any order: 1-2, 2-3, and 3-1 i dont think anyone would argue with this, regardless if they think something is a better fit. With sent on point, I have and anti air in strider, and a horizontal assist with doom that help zoning as you mentioned. In theory, I want to play sent either full screen or in your face. With these assist i can adjust my strategy according to who im plalying. For instance, if im fighting a rush down based team, strider will be my main assist until i get spaced correctly. Once im spaced I zone with spit and rocks. If im fighting a zoning team, mind you this would have to be a very strong zoning team because sent’s spit+ doom rocks is real talk lol, i could try and close the gap by double jumping, flying and calling strider assist to stop there attacks, and then improv with Sent. If Sent reaches low life he can DHC into strider legion which is safe. Now i have strider with exactly what he needs, a full screen assist with sent drones and a mid to close up assist with doom rocks. I believe that strider can actually zone quite well and will get people upset with all the drones and animals flying at them. When people get upset at team strategies they usually are subject to taking dumber risks to stop it. (they want to stop holding back) This does descent chip as well as builds meter along the way. So when the gap starts to close either by me or them, i have doom rocks. (This does not imply that it will only be used mid to close, instead, it can be used to help zone from full screen- as long as its not called super unsafe.) Strider’s standing H has an good hit box. So i could standing H+ doom rocks into eagle (or panther) to help cut off some angles angles- reminiscent of mvc2. (Panther when they are in more of a guard stun) If they are trying to jump dooms rocks, you could jump back with h or s ,which ever has the better hitbox, and cancel into his sword slash with H. (the dp motion move that causes wall bounce.) Doom rocks can allow enough space to wall cling cross up. I also watched a vid earlier today that showed strider tagging in another character to combo after that sword thrust attack-H version. I haven’t had the time to test it out to see if it works with doom though, but if so thats good damage coming in from doom+ good meter. You could probably air exchange into strider or sent before doom combo ends and do some more damage and tack on the meter you built. Anyway, doom is doom and the consensus is that he works with strider assist in which i agree. I haven’t got any crazy combos down with strider, but found some on the forums so ill try and practice those as soon as possible. Anyway this info taps into my gimmick. Shoultz i don’t think your crazy for wanting to go doom rocks. I am currently sold on this team and it’s the reason i bought this game and started playing again. I hurts me dearly that people are not playing this team or at least trying it.
btw whats up with Mixup? Is he still playing? You told me he was beast in vanilla.
My 15 minutes of testing Doom rocks didn’t feel promising. I was looking mainly for post fly screen lockdown, which it works, but it doesn’t seem very advantageous over beam. A timed beam call on wakeup will hit once or twice but rocks hits all of its hits so damage is scaled hard. The only real advantage was in the corner you can call it to catch them from rolling out of the corner, where beam won’t or not easily cannot.
The biggest problem with rocks is it has projectile cancellation but not beam cancellation. Meaning it loses to Magneto and Doom beams without negating them. So you lose the assist call war if you don’t have another beam assist or similar. Drones beats Mags but not Doom beam. I’m pretty sure the rocks will lose to the drones but Doom beam clears that stuff out completely, then hits the other guy’s point character and Sentinel for good measure.
Doom rocks seems best used as a pseudo Akuma tatsu, meaning up close you call it and if they do something they get hit, otherwise they get locked down and stay grounded for high/lows.
Obviously if you are getting results they speak for themselves. Try using beam though and see if it beats tough zoning better than what you are using now.
doom rocks beat beams. doom has 2 phases, shield\projectile. During the shield phase, it beats all the best beams in the game doom\mag beam definitely don’t make it through. The only time you lose to beams is if they chuck out a beam during the projectile phase of the assist which is the part where it shoots the rocks. iirc the shield phase is has a lot of active. I think it was something like 25 frames for shield phase. You shouldn’t try to win zoning wars with projectile phase, you use the shield phase to get something going.
- more block stun time than doom beam
- comes out like 12-13 frames faster than beam iirc
- will beat beam assists during shield phase
the scale does suck pretty hard and I’m not going to lie about that but doom beam scales hard sometimes. You can time doom rocks as you would time a doom beam and only get 1-3 hits of the rocks to make contact during the projectile phase versus wake ups. Doom beam mid game when no one is knockdown-ed usually hits for 10 hits most times and in that same position doom rocks usually hit for 5 so its definitely better in some places. Both assists can be timed to get around damage scaling but obviously beam might be better for that trick than rocks are but rocks can be still be timed ugly to do the same thing.
beam will beat the zone but there is no rush down compromise if its just strider\doom beam. Mixups are pretty limited. With the rocks, you can still get BS pin time and beat zoning wars when used properly. Strider is not a zoning character, he has to get in to get something going and with the nerfs to his teleports now since he can be thrown out of them, its even more apparent he needs pin time. 1 month ago, I would of ran beam all day teleported+tech throw for free and I wouldn’t have to be scared, now that same strategy will get you killed.
yea mixup still plays and he’s still a monster
o.clock is pretty good but sentinel has issues in this game. He’s good just not as god like as other characters. Since XF is so strong, its very likely to get beat by ugly team chemistry but those characters are god like in xf. Pure team synergy isn’t the only that matters in this game anymore. A team with worse team synergy but better XF characters can actually be a more effective team to win with.
I tried o.clock for a bit and I can even play sentinel fairly well. The thing that sucks is that sentinels drones just aren’t as good as they were in part 2. Mainly because they go from down to up angles where as in mvc2, the drones protected sentinels head first. doom\sent drones have already managed to get top 8 multiple times so its already a proven team. I personally don’t think o.clock is that bad, pretty good. Also, sentinel is 3rd slot meaning that he’s your comeback character most times depending on how you play and sentinel just stand up to the other power house xf3 characters in this game not to mention that every character in this game I believe has instant overhead combos on sentinel so that 1st time you block could actually be the end of sentinel. He has to guess on defense WAY too much to be super effective
my top 3 strider teams ATM are
o.clock
n.clock
dante\strider\doom beam or rocks
in terms of everyone helping everyone to some degree, these are the 3 best teams I’ve managed to find. There are some runner ups in there like wesker\strider\doom and maybe a zero version but thats mainly because wesker is just stupid good in this game, he doesn’t actually help the team that much. He can’t really help strider\doom that well so you’re just sticking a power character on it to make up for strider\dooms weaknesses.
This sounds like a silent buff / assist quality. In vanilla rocks definately lost to mag beams when on point, every shield frame. I was very salty about disruptors in vanilla. I am going to test this out as soon as I get home.
I personally believe doom rocks are slept on. The ONLY reason I’m weary about it is that I don’t think I’ve seen a top 8 team to have doom rocks on it yet. That doesn’t mean by any stretch that doom rocks suck, they are just unproven ATM and I’ve been 2nd guessing myself for about 2 weeks now about that particular assist.
specifically on my build, beam is fantastic for dante but it doesn’t help his bad fights like wolverine\x23. Characters that shit in his face and he can’t hit buttons back because of the speed of his normals. With the rock assist, dante is always to jump around then call the assist out to either get some positioning or go for something. If someone is going to sit back on me from full screen, I don’t think there is anything wrong with calling strider and trying to get him in the mix from that position.
on alternate builds for other characters, I can see rocks being incredibly effective. Characters with great zone and sit behind shield phase and chuck their shit out pretty clean. Maybe something like chris\hawkeye\rocks would solve the problem because you have 2 alternate assist that cover the projectile wars and you still have doom rocks for other things where as on my team, doom rocks kind of have to do everything. You can easily balance out the rocks weakness on other builds quite easily.
Something strange here. No matter how I try Magneto beam blows through the Doom rocks. Point, assist, doesn’t matter.
I wanna give my 2cents in on the strider optimal position debate.
Striders main 2 weakness are his low health and damage. I feel that the 2nd slot is his best placement for a few reasons.
His low health means if he gets hit by any charecter amongst the top tiers (which are played quite often) he gets killed. 750k isnt hard to come by and if someone is doing resets on strider he is dead. Mixups kill strider and incoming mixups are the hardest for him to avoid. So why play him at the 2nd position you may ask yourself? Yes he has a very good assist in vajra but i think thats his second reason to play him at the 2 position. He has access to xfactor 2 is my main reason. Which goes into his next weakness his low damage. If strider is played in the 2nd position behind someone like Wesker or Wolverine (great point charecters without the need of meter to do damage and the ability to reset and mixup oppenents) he should be coming in with 3 meters. If not he is very close to 3 meters. Strider with xfactor2 lets him do really good damage still have access to an assist and build meter so that he can crank out ouruborus to mixup With boros out the oppenent is lockdown to eat mixups which means no attacking (THEY CANT HIT YOU effectively nullifying his low health). Strider can effectively run it back on someone’s entire team off of a borus and xfactor 2. The situation should look something like this
1Strider comes in with 2.2-3+ meters.
2.If you have 3meters activate borus and mix them up til they die, if you dont have 3 meters land a combo which should net you ur 3 meters and get your kill
3.Worse case scenario there second comes in and u have no ouroborus left and 0 meters
4.You mixup the incoming charecter ( which is really good with strider) land your hit and activate xfactor to build meter and get your kill (if you cant kill in 1 combo you can always tac out to your anchor to build that extra bar you may need for another borus.
5.Activate Borus Mixup incoming charecter and get the kill
Of course you dont have to use borus you can always use ragonorok which is just as good but just more useful for a different scenario. This is of course how i think it should play out in the worse circumstances thats NOT including a happy birthday and assuming the strider player is both smart and has at least decent execution to perform the most damageing and optimal strider combos for his/her team setup. This allows strider to effectively maintaing control over the entire match.
1st slot-If strider is your primary point charecter he doesnt have access to the lengthy xf2 and meters to do 1 touch mixup kills. He does however have access to a 2nd assist but i dont believe that a second assist will grant you as much control or damage as xf2 and 3 meters. If he gets touched he gets killed (which doesnt really matter no matter where you put him) BUT he does give the oppenent less bars to work with so you can be up on meter. You also lose access to his Vajra assist and in all honesty depending on your team you may not need it but the vast majority of the cast can use this assist to great effect and it also helps neutralize some matchups aswell. Also Dhc synergy is a problem for strider since its difficult for a lot of charecters to dhc into and from striders legion.
Anchor slot-Your entire team gets assess to vajra which is a great assist for reasons already stated in this thread. Strider also loses access to an assist which will mean he could be in for a serious uphill battle if he cant get his mixups off. He gets access to level 3 xfactor which is more damaging and gives you more speed and some loops that he couldnt do while in xfactor 1. No ability to dhc which doesnt matter much anyway since his dhc sucks (not including oroburos).
A good example team i believe would be Wesker/Strider/Beam or projecitle assist. It gives strider a good point charecter that can combo off his vajra. Also vajra helps wesker with some difficult matchups like trish. Wesker can Actually dhc into legion pretty well. And wesker can reset and kill charecters without meter so that give Strider his 3 meters for whenever he comes in. Wesker and Strider BOTH benefit from a beam/projectile assist. With strider on point and wesker at the 2 he gets access to HARD TO BLOCKABLES and an assist that will allow him to store a formation b for extended damage and relaunch combos while combo’ing. He can also dhc into weskers maximum wesker hyper if need and he also gets access to a pretty decent crossover counter by having him cc in to wesker and then rhino charge immediately upon entry to counter physical hits (wouldnt recommend it but its there for use).
This is just my opinon and some examples…there is a lot more to explore but this is just from personal experience from what i’ve seen both playing online and watching streams and tourneys
Okay, so. I haven’t seen anyone mention Dante, Vergil, and Strider being on the same team for a while now (Cisco was the last to mention it, I believe, which was on page 2). Skimming the thread, I see a lot of Dante/Strider and a lot of Vergil/Strider, but Dante/Vergil/Strider is seriously being slept on here. It’s about 3:30AM right now, but tomorrow I’ll do some writing and share my thoughts on each order of the team, along with synergy crap.
That’s the team that i have been using. Yes it is slept on, maybe its because of their very low health.
well dante\vergil\strider as a team build doesn’t have that many good things about it.
dante likes full screen beams and fast assists that setup s.m+assist, teleport for mixups. Not on this build. Dante can’t win zoning wars and can’t check from full screen with the luxury of terribly slow assists. Its pretty crappy for him.
vergil likes full screen beams, meter and fast assists that setup mixup attempts. You can use weasel shot to get SOME mixups going but assists like akuma are very ideal for vergil. Take out projectiles, nice pin time etc…there is no way in fucking hell vergil is going to win the game with his sluggish ass normals, limited bar and only vajra assist to set everything up if dante dies
I’ve said many times on here that 2\strider is very awful because of how limited vajra assist is. Vajra assist coupled with another assist makes for some BEASTLY ass point characters but trying to use it as a stand alone assist is not its strong point. The best 2\3 combinations in the game are shit like wesker\akuma because of how multipurpose akuma is. Not only does akuma win zoning wars, he sets up pin time. Strider does NOTHING like that for vergil.
the 1st character starting on this team is messing his best possible tool set and usually, the 1st character has access to the teams best possible team chemistry. When your fist character doesn’t have many good options to choose from and his assists aren’t helping him while being in the first slot, its not a good look anymore and you need to rethink your team.
if you play 1\2\strider and 1 dies, 2 basically dies for free especially on this build. Vergil would never be able to play his game. In a perfect world, dante\vergil would love a mag beam and akuma tatsu. like in vanilla, one of dante’s best teams was mag\dante\akuma. When dante came in on that team, he had full screen check to win zoning wars and he had akuma to create pins. This specific team doesn’t exactly add to dante’s recipe of his perfect team. Its not slept on, more like people realize the severe weaknesses the team has.
In addition to whats been said, on this team the order should be Dorm/Strider/Doom. Any team with Doom in slot 2 needs the 3rd to be a lockdown assist or Doom doesn’t function right. Drones, dog, akuma, Dante are typical.
Strider is a fun assist for Doom but he doesn’t contribute what Doom needs (lockdown) as much as Doom assist contributes to Strider.
Another alternatate is Doom/Dorm/Strider, but where Dorm loses his assist instead of Doom.
ok so johnst was telling me there were things wrong with doom rocks and he was right. Took a bit more time to break it down.
This is how doom rocks act. During the shield phase, they have a durability limit per frame. What ends up happening is that when magneto beam makes contact, it dumps all it durability on that frame of contact with the rocks and overrides the shield phase. However, doom rocks do beat hawkeye askmaster arrows, chris gun assist, doom beam, level 3 buster from zero. From some fast testing it loses to modok, ironman, magneto. modok\ironman are very skillsmithy characters so it would be unlikely to run into them and especially really good ones @ that. magneto is the problem though for doom rocks but its only 1 character of the top tiers. its probably still “good” just not as good as I had mentioned before.
one more thing about the rocks. On the projectile phase, the rocks end up covering this vertical distance. Magneto beam will shoot though a part of the projectile phase but since his beam is so much smaller vertically, some of the rocks always make it through and rocks also do this against other projectiles
i had jumped to conclusions really early because I tested shield phase against doom beam. even though doom beam beats mag beam, mag beam still beats rocks. The way the projectiles stack up on a frame per frame basis is still somewhat tricky for me to understand. The book doesn’t make very much sense.
I think on another build, rocks are fine as long as you have alternate durability to rely on meaning that its probably not that great for strider. Its still good but now I’m pretty concerned about it now. mag\sent just utterly fucks the shield phase horribly.
so yea new best strider teams after some more testing
n.clock
o.clock
??? lol
both n.clock\o.clock have duo’s on them that get top 8 regularly. doom\sent and doom\dog so @ this point, I would say they’re proven concepts to reliably work effectively. I think on some level, akuma tatsu is good for strider. The fast characters love tatsu, the teleport characters love tatsu, strider is both a fast eleport character so he must REALLY love tatsu but I do have problems trying to get it to work the way I need it to.
I haven’t stopped in these threads in awhile since I’m mainly working on my tournament point characters. However in that process I ran a bunch of various Strider on point teams to become more accustomed with just playing him in general.
He’s so incredibly fun to play but I’d like to state a few opinions on things that have been said in the last page and this one first:
Point/Point/Strider issues:
I agree that Strider isn’t an assist you can use to win ground wars, what this means to me is that your first 2 characters need to be stupid enough that they can technically win by themselves. I run Viper/Firebrand/Strider and if Strider gets blasted both characters are easily capable of fighting the ground war without help so it makes pairing them with Strider much more viable than having some lower tier character in that spot. If you have a really solid game in neutral is when you can have Strider as your primary assist, otherwise you need to have it as a secondary assist and use a more dominant/fast/controlling assist as your primary. If you’re running him as the secondary assist I definitely advocate Point/Strider/Assist instead of Point/Assist/Strider to be able to cover more situations.
Strider/Akuma:
I actually think a great team for this would be a modification of Kn1ves’ team making it Spencer/Strider/Akuma. People often forget that Spencer gets free massive damage off of OTGs and that he can abuse Akuma excellently as well. Thanks to how a lot of his things work he doesn’t utilitze DHCs much in getting damage which is huge since Strider is rather lacking in the DHC for damage field outside of ragnarok.
Strider on point fun stuff of the moment:
As I said earlier I’ve been messing with Strider on point just so I have a more fluid understanding of the character. I feel that Shoultzula is right and that he’s better in second with someone who can abuse him and someone he can abuse, but for learning him running him as a point character is excellent! Here are some teams I’m using in casuals with him and why I love them. Of course I’ve also tried things like Clockw0rk’s team and it’s awesome, but these are just some I’ve ran.
Strider/Sentinel/Magneto:
I put Sentinel in the middle here for a few reasons. I think Strider having the fastest horizontal space control tool in last is most effective for him. In neutral/far games when you aren’t mixing people up is when I don’t feel it’s really ever safe to summon Sentinel against competent characters as they all have really simple ways to blow him up and make your life harder. Having both Mag and Sent assists when you’re in close is awesome and with the speed/durability of them contrasting with each other I think it gives Strider good options for controlling the ground.
Strider/Magneto/Viper (burn kick):
I really like this team although it doesn’t follow the more traditional Strider set ups. Instead of using a lock down assist to force mix up this uses a ranged assist to get in, then a high assist to force unblockables. Thanks to how formation B works Strider’s dash C+Viper can easily lead into unblockables. This relies a lot more on playing against your enemy than starting mix up then playing the mix up game. This also transforms Strider into a 1 touch character which is bloody scary with how crazy his offense is.
Strider/Firebrand (hell spitfire H)/Hawkeye (Greyhound):
Hell spitfire H is an even shorter ranged Amaterasu in effect but attached to a much more powerful character. This configuration albeit weird follows a more fundamental structure of Strider + lock down + space control. I really like Greyhound for Strider, it lets him abuse formation B + gram shenanigans a lot more which is essentially free mix up anywhere on the ground since you recover so fast after formation B that you can do stuff while having a projectile on the screen and having your enemy in block stun. It also leaves enough time so that your self covered teleport lets you immediately bust out with Firebrand assist for lock down and making your enemy miserable longer!
Strider/Firebrand (Hell Spitfire H)/Viper (Burn kick):
My real team in reverse order. This is far from the ideal order for the team but you can get a lot of work done with it. You need to be really good at dealing with projectiles and knowing when it’s safe to get formation B, Gram, dash C, etc out cause this takes a lot of being patient without one of those full screen horizontal control assists. However once you’re inside Strider is 100% unblockable and high damage which is quite lovely. Better yet when you raw tag him mid combo it leaves you in the ideal team configuration with Viper on point paired with a good DHC and her best assist.
Just wondering, is this both with the raw tag stuff or are you really TODing people? Also why viper is last instead of second?
Glad you asked! The raw tag stuff lets you ToD people, can’t find another good gauge safe way to do it with Strider otherwise, however it’s a legitimate functional tool, just takes time and practice to get it. If you’re able to consistently do the hard knock down, formation B, wall dive, Gram combo it’s just doing different stuff after the wall bounce and isn’t too bad at all. The reason Viper is third is that your neutral game DHCs suffer if Viper is second. Firebrand has a state change hyper and unblockable he can set after the legion DHC so it’s much more valuable.
I think Doom can use the raw tag off gram H. I was doing orb shot, wall cling/dive, gram h , tag to doom, and follow up with c.L,c.M.c.H S into whatever. I was too lazy to double check a jump in, knockdown orb shot combo.
Assuming Doom puts them in the corner and you can use both assists (Strider/Sentinel) you can do some damage with one or two meters.
If that still works then the n.clock and o.clock teams also get TOD combos from strider.
Edit: confirmed to work with s.L Hardkick into combo
Completely agree with the point/strider/assist strategy. I really don’t like when put just keep him in the back and hope that their pseudo-phoenix strategy by hittin orbs and going nuts works. Strider with assists is just too good to pass up by holding him in the back by himself. This team order lets you keep a good hard hitting character or even decent battery up front with 2 great assists to keep your opponent pinned. Characters I like to use in that team would be Mag/Strider/Akuma Doom/Strider/Akuma Trish/Strider/Akuma. All DHC into strider very well and have good assists to back him up if you want to run strider point instead.