… indeed, if Akuma’s flip palm would not be armor breaking, the mu would still be very difficult, but not that insanely one sided.
I play Gouken more as a defensive zoning and poking type with occasional wake up mix on hard kd mostly relying on character specific safe jumps in true block strings (e.g. meaty flip kick in true block string cl.MP or cl.MK), cr.tech counterhit set ups and occasional KONGO FADC “guessing” if I see the opp crouch techning. Pure close range pressure I only try to apply in the corner or if I lost life lead. And particularly for this, the SENKUs are great for corner carry followed by two safe f.dashes for positioning or transition to zoning. Imo one main goal of Gouken is to SENKU slam the opp into corner. Gouken is just so strong in the corner and can kepp the opp there really well with his far reaching normals, numerous anti airs and angled HADOs. Depending on this my emphasis strongly lies on strenghtening the ground game by a low damage 1fr hitconfirm in LSENKU from jabs, strenghtening the main max range poke F.MK, strenghening the poking tool cr.LK in LSENKU, an immediate horizontal double hit HADO and a improved backdash for positioning. To balance that out the loss of b.throw in Ultra and a slightly decreased overall DMG output seems reasonably in my opinion. But, yes, just my opinion.
Looking restrospectively at my first brainstorming list above, there are definitely several points that can be skipped.
A one time per round reversal, i.e. crouch hitting EXTATSU FADC ULTRA would be nice though… 3EX Rufus stlye
Edit: to balance out the immediate horizontol double hit EX HADO, maybe the shotos should be able to tatsu thru Gouken’s normal horizontal fbs which is currently not possible.
Truth be told that is deed quite possibly the only change needed to solidify Gouken, it’d still be a weakpoint, but once a game he could get out. All the rest is window dressing and just tiny nudges. Making every Tatsu hit low is a direction I never see them going in as no Tatsus in the game hit low and Gouken essentially had his srk and tatsu flipped, they even said it was such, and while our vertical tatsu does whiff lows, our horizontal srk does connect with crouchers, unlike any horizontal Tatsu. It’d be nice if our horizontal SRK was just a bit more SRK like in some stituations.
As for Akuma palm, it’s already nice that since 2012 it no longer counts as an overhead, but indeed it’s trouble for Gouken whose fast reversal gets armour broken and just has to take the move :(.
If all tatsu’s could suck the opponent in like the EX does, that’d be great!
The amount of times i’ve been punished for using lk tatsu as an AA when they fell out after the first hit and quick rised.
Doesn’t sound unreasonable.
EDIT
Haha and while I’m at it, make akuma’s DF-Palm have recoverable frames!
At least so he can’t use it as a free getting around move.
Also would taking away Adon’s Jaguar Kick Armour Breaking properties be too much?
He’d still have everything else, and be safe on block / hit.
Possibly just Ex have Armour Breaking.
It might sound like i’m saying this because they’re our hardest matchup and I want it easified.
But really, they’re some of the best characters in the game, and that’s the reason why.
Well Df palm has the same recovery frames any air normal has(and the same df divekick has), but because of df having a much faster descent than jump and palm doesnt stagger like DIVEKICK(we play for souls yo) it seems really fast.
As far Adon, it would kill him. Air Jaggas already dont armourbreak and with that threat absent. Rather than kill the por fellow I’d rather we either get a more reliable AA normal that can beat it or maybe my palm changes.
We had a 3f backthrow? The grey damage is a very reasonable nerf and to be honest has made me a lot more interested in possible un/hardtoblockables. What might be interesting is having the groundhit of backthrow(if we do no followup) do 80-100 DMG and 50/100 Stun. Keep the 5f and scaling though.
if there’s a change that they’ve done to gouken that bends my dick, it’s the extra zone on kongo. i liked the chances of 50-50 not 33-33-33. that’s just imo. and did they ever say why they took away goukens demon flip overhead?
not really, but theres an easy guess, to bring the shoto flip and jump divekick under the same rules. In vanilla akumas df dive is not an overhead, but gouken and akumas jump divekicks are overheads. Sadlyhe still had palm overhead all the way up to 2012, so thats a rebuff we can count on never happening.
It does bother me sometimes to think of the overhead divekick nerf. If they had buffed the command divekick as a compromise I would understand the nerf more. Because Gouken’s follow ups to his divekick are all relatively slow in comparison to other character’s hit-confirm follow ups to their jump ins (3 frame cr.lk, 3 frame cr.lp, > special), he is more unsafe on block on average. An opponent who is very good at simply crouch blocking and crouch teching has little to worry about. There is no guess for them to make. We G-men depend on his frame traps and opponents pressing buttons that we predict. We like to talk about our vortex but it only works well on people who mash because there is no real guess for good players to make…just crouch block or AA if possible. Yes, we have flip grab…also unsafe and with lag, unreliable. I like how our divekick works…the hitbox, the distance, the speed…but the mix up isn’t as powerful as I’d like it to be. I had a brief discussion with a really good Bison and I told him that the match up is really difficult for me because Bison is so safe with scissor pressure plus he has all of these tricky cross up/stomp/crusher mix ups after the scissors that can punish me for doing anything other than continuing to block. He tried to down play that by making the excuse that Bison doesn’t do massive damage and that if he makes a wrong choice Gouken can do a lot of damage very quickly. The problem is that once a player reaches a certain level where they are making very few mistakes the playing field becomes very lopsided. Then tiers become more clear. Gouken has to guess and read constantly and be on point with punishes. He’s not going to win at high level play because of divekick pressure…because of the lack of a real mix up. I’m not saying he can’t win, just that divekick pressure is not going to get him there often enough. In short, because of the nerf to overhead, divekick becomes less important the better your opponent comes. It doesn’t become irrelevant but it’s effectiveness is diminished. On the other hand, something like safe scissor pressure doesn’t lose it’s effectiveness no matter how little the chip/hit damage is. Maybe scissors isn’t the best example to compare to, but hopefully my point is still made. I know overhead isn’t coming back so my rant is nothing more than personal reflection…and watching some high level play on youtube. I just watched Infiltration vs. Daigo and Infiltration was very unsuccessful with divekick…Daigo let Infiltration use it for wake up pressure after a Gouken sweep or throw, and basically used it as a way to close the gap without moving…Infiltrations divekick was used by Daigo…as a way for Daigo to get close and punish…he blocked, back dashed, and attacked or blocked and reversal’d.
indeed. Too often the divekick is nothing more than gouken making the mistake of letting the enemy get close.
It just gets annoying, when characters like bison, cammy, akuma, adon, elf, sakura, rose etc can just put on a nonstop safe-enough offensive against gouken for however long they like and then just bounce away to complete safety in the rare case that the can openers didn’t work and they got bored.
There’s nothing wrong with the dive kick (d+mk sucks but EX Flip is SICK.) Gouken just needs other areas in his game to be addressed.
It ends up being either you are zoning or you have to be dead up in somebodies jock strap to be able to combo/control them.
Gouken has NO far reaching combo’s of any substance…
If we could cr. lk > cr. mp / cr. mp > hado/sweep Gouken would be set. Shit… even add far st. mp > sweep.
The problem with all of the characters isn’t what they are able to do, it’s b/c Gouken can’t keep them out or punish them effectively. You cr. mp one of them and they are like OK so what??? Conversely they can hit you once from afar and link into it to be all up in your ass. I find those things absurd as they would really round Gouken out and it’s not a good reason why he can’t do atleast that much. (Ibuki and Akuma have hard knock down everything)… why can’t they ensure all of Gouken’s endings can end up in a Vortex?? Sure would solve 95% of my problems with tatsu hit low being the other 5%.
Bison, Elf, Sakura, Rose can’t do jack shit without meter on wake etc, regardless the reversal they want to try… lp palm destroys their reversal options if they are just mashing it b/c they can beat out your normals/grab. And lp palm is safe for Gouken. the only problem is… if you land it, they go the other side of the screen and then they quick stand. and Gouken loses momentum… MAKE THAT SHIT HARD KNOCK DOWN!!!
Hmmm I do like the Idea of far MP comboing to sweep, already been using it for counterhits to sweep or frame trap if blocked. It’d defnitely be nice to do MP, MP Sweep. They could also revert close MP to it’s old pushback so on a lot of characters you could get close mp, close MP and then sweep. But the reduced pushback might result in crazy corner stuff, so that’s a risky change. Far MP becoming +6 would be, in the wors of Bipson, DELICIOUS.
BTW I think most divekick complaints were about Tenmakujin(dj.Divekick), not Gojin(gf divekick). It has very little hitstun and can only combo to c.MP if you get em in the toes. Intermission as I do some quick comparisons in training mode Well all the Tenmakujins pretty much work the same. I think the move in itself is fine, just maybe we could use a smidgen more hitstun cause we can’t do jabs to anything like the other 2 can(Poor Oni actually had the move, but they took it from the poor bastard, no tenmakujin for you untill you share how to command normal close roundhouse!). Our other downside is that it isn’t a mixup with us as we can’t crossup Tatsu. Actually if Gouken had say LK Air Tatsu act just like the other shotos, we might be in business :3 But thats one of those too easy fixes I dont like and while it would be great, isn’t very Gouken, it’s lazy(same reason I dont like having our jabs lead to something, I like the 1f link to super we have though. When Gouken jabs to srk he brings real business srks into it :3 or having Tatsu just hit low, I like the theme Gouken has, but I would never fight allowing EX to hit low )
The coyface indicates silliness : :3 I was just making a callback to the fact I said it, didbn’t blame you for anything ^^
and Back in vanilla backthrow was still 5f. It’s always been 5f. What’s changed is it’s recovery(iirc it feels liek it takes ages to do so these days, whiffs like a command grab, yet easiest tech time in the world :3 ) and it’s scaling.
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