Cannon Spike! The Cammy Thread

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
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I don’t know sirlin personally so I don’t want to spread untrue rumors about him, but I have to admit, both based on the balance changes themselves as well as some of his posts on his site and his forum when I’ve discussed cammy or the cammy vs honda match up, it really does sound like he allowed personal bias to influence this situation. From his posts he clearly has alot of experience with Honda, he plays him and knows his match ups both good and bad. As such it sounds like he has a strong attachment to honda and a strong desire to make him playable on a top competitive level, something I think we can all understand.

HOWEVER, it also sounds like he has very little high level experience playing Cammy, his comments on what SHOULD help Cammy seem based more on vague theory then actual match ups like he provides for his Honda changes. He’s certainly not ignoring Cammy, I don’t think he’s consciously trying to make her bad, but his emotional attachments are with other characters like Honda, not Cammy, and he just doesn’t seem to have the total understanding of what Cammy needs to be good that he does for the characters he’s more personally familiar with or had more high level players who used them to consult with.

The end result was that he wasn’t willing to further nerf honda or buff Cammy to help fix what any Cammy player would have seen as a MUST fix extreme mismatch, but he WAS willing to nerf cammy’s jumping strong to help Dhalsim, another character that as I understand he has alot of high level tournament experience with.

The fact the strong and fierce spinning back fists dont’ seem particularly useful also seems to suggest there wasn’t too much emphasis on making them useful beyond the level of theory (in theory going through fireballs is big upgrade, in practice the moves take so long that by the time you go through the fireball you’ll just get sweeped. More emphasis on testing these moves I’d like to think would have resulted in some subtle changes to make them more useful). As for the safe cannon drill vs safe cannon spike debate, its hard to say, personally I prefered the safe cannon spike, it made sense (she’s back flipping in the cannon spike, in a cannon drill it should take her some time to get back up after that so it makes less sense) and made her unique. I don’t think I’m a high level enough player yet to really have any say on whether or not the safe spike was more useful then the safe drill though.

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I played Cammy a lot during development and I’ve kept her since the game came out. Sirlin also played a bit of Cammy while he was at it. According to Capcom’s web site tracking by-character ranked matches, Sirlin is 15-4 with Cammy while I’m 50-32. That he’s even more successful with Cammy than I am isn’t a great surprise to me, because he’s a more patient player than I am and Cammy’s playing style feeds very well into the mindset of a player who once won an A2 major with Rose’s low strong. But I’ve stuck with Cammy because her kooky playing style of patiently getting in, relentlessly rushing down with pokes and cannon drills once she gets there, and changing up with the hooligan throw once in a while appeals to me a lot. I’ve honestly felt for a while like she’s probably become my best character in this game, and I’ve got a decent Sagat, Guile, and Bison. (Anybody who was around long enough to remember alt.games.sf2 will know how much of a shift it is that Bison is no longer my best character…) However, there are characters that create lots of matchup problems for those three, more so than Honda does for Cammy. (Yes, seriously. Sagat has a much worse matchup now against Honda, Vega, and Blanka than Cammy does against any of those three or anyone else.)

Sirlin and I played some Honda v Cammy. He generally won, simply because he’s a much better player than I am, but neither one of us came out of the games feeling like it was hopeless in the way that it was in ST. ST Honda v Cammy is truly, absolutely hopeless – Honda wins at least 90% of the games, and it’s probably more like 95-98%. In STHD… my gut says he probably only wins about 65%. That might be giving him a little too much; when I play my (remaining) co-workers, they’ve tried Honda on my Cammy and it generally hasn’t worked just because it’s not so hopeless that I can’t still just outplay them. It’s also considerably easier to either cannon spike a headbutt on reaction or jump back without getting hit and combo him when he’s recovering in a local match than it is online. I’m completely convinced that the lag hurts Cammy way more than it does Honda online as a result.

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How can you say HDR Cammy vs Honda is a better matchup for Cammy than the ST version.

Are there undocumented changes or do you think the changes makes it a better matchup for cammy somehow ?

If so could you please tell me how or why ?

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Interesting points.

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Weird thing I noticed when I was playing today… I was getting swept out of LK cannon drills by Ryu and when I was playing against Akuma… he was standing jabbing me out of cannon drills! Never noticed this before…

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Cammy completely shut down Vega’s games in vanilla ST. Her Low Forward, while not infallible, was REALLY good against Vega’s ground pokes. And anytime he went off the back wall, a Roundhouse Cannon Spike basically stopped the Wall Dive cold. There was nothing he could do, really, to avoid it if you took a step and Cannon Spiked.

With the Fake Wall Dive, Vega’s entire off the wall game has come back to life. Now if he goes to the wall and Fakes, Cammy whiffs and dies.

So basically, while she could hold him down before and force him into a ground game that she had a slight advantage on, now she can’t. So she has a whole new set of troubles to deal with, and Vega’s Wall Dive is a POWERFUL game. If you could keep him from doing it, it took away 50% of his game. With it back, it becomes that much harder for Cammy to have to deal with the ground game AND the wall game.

It’s still safe on most characters when you block it at max distance. But when Cammy does it while literally next to the opponent, EVERYONE can punish it, even Gief can walk up Sweep it. However, some characters, like Ryu, can hit it back with Fierce Fireballs almost everytime now, whereas he couldn’t before. And even at proper distances, Ryu couldn’t Super Fireball it back on block. But now he can pretty much 100% of the time. It’s not only just that, but the frame advantage lost due to landing hurts her. I mean, for reference, see Blanka… the Blanka Ball was safe against Gief in Vanilla ST, but still didn’t feel broken. Just because of that slight increase in recovery, now it feels realllllly bad because he recovers sooner, giving Zangief less time to approach). Cammy got the opposite effect. Now everytime a Cannon Spike is blocked, I feel scared and on the defensive, because I know I am recovering later than I did before.

While that IS true, good Blankas won’t Blanka Ball for no reason. They’ll do it at times they feel you aren’t ready, or always do it from a buffered Low Forward. Jumping Straight Up and Down is annoying enough already, but now having to worry about Blanka Balls over your Low Forward or safe on BLock Combos is that much more frustrating for a character like Cammy, who has so little to begin with, to deal with.

  • James
287

The Cannon Drill was never a high priority move, which is why I mentioned to Sirlin taht improving the Cannon Drill only wasn’t gonna be good enough. Case in point? In vanilla ST, if Balrog just did Low Jab the whole fight, it was actually REALLY hard for Cammy to win. It beat all of her Drills. And if she came close, he could Headbutt and be safe. The Cannon Drill has always had bad priority, and keep in mind that in Remix, Sirlin made it WORSE because he was scared it was too good.

  • James
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The problem really does come down to the fact that Sirlin is just a better player than most. Having him able to defeat Hondas with Cammy means little. Whenever I told him I thought something was too good, his challenge would always be for me to beat him with it. I would try my best, but let’s face it: I’m not an elite player. So while I could try my best to open his eyes, I certainly couldn’t prove my point as well as I wanted.

Take a look at another situation. He gave Gief the low-invincible Lariat and Graham Wolfe said it would be too good. So Graham then went and PROVED it by beating Sirlin with the Low Invincible Lariat pretty badly (this is all from Sirlin’s blog).

But Graham Wolfe is Graham Wolfe. I mean, there are VERY FEW players in the country who are better, equal to, or even close to as good as Graham Wolfe. He’s famous for winning matches that shouldn’t be winnable. Frankly, I think if enough was done with the Low Invincible Kick Lariat, it would have been perfectly fine to have in HD Remix (limit it’s mobility, keep the different sound effect when he does it, try to mimic the fast spin of HF so it was immediately obvious he did a different one, etc.). The whole concept of “proving” moves are too good by beating Sirlin with it was flawed, IMO. You needed to have a whole pool of people trying to abuse it and a whole pool of people trying to fight it. That gives you a MUCH better insight into the quality of the move.

In the end, you and Sirlin sitting down with Cammy Vs. Honda means nothing. In a different thread, I mentioned how Valle owns my soul in Fighting Games. He would destroy my Honda with his Cammy. That proves nothing.

So unfortunately, you DO have to approach the game from a very scientific point to study the matchups. It’s theory fighter, but it’s very careful and scrub-free theory fighter. The fact is when you sit down and analyze Cammy vs. Honda, there is very little that was done to improve the match up. It’s pretty well known that Honda doesn’t have a HUGELY difficult time stopping Cannon Drills from the front, and the reward for Cammy for getting one in is Chip Damage and the reward for Honda stopping it is Headbutt damage. No,w statistically speaking, Cammy will get more Cannon Drills blocked than Cannon Drills stuffed, but does the damage balance out? I would say that Cammy can probably get 3 Drill blocked for every one stuffed. That ratio is still in favor of Honda.

On the flip side, nothing was done to Honda to weaken his turtle capabilities. His Hand Slaps were made weaker, yes, which helped a TON and I’m thankful for that change. BUT, that’s still Honda’s offense. If he chooses to never do the hands unless they are Meaty, it doesn’t help in the turtle aspect of Honda’s game. Even with Cammy’s footspeed, it is IMPOSSIBLE to walk up and throw Honda because of Stored Oicho. So already on paper, it feels flawed.

Now, granted, I played a lot of this match vs. Sirlin’s Honda during development. And it never felt really horrible. I felt like I had a slight chance with Cammy, and the damage nerf to Honda’s Hand SLaps helped a LOT. And I felt like the match was a bit better. But what was more telling was when I used Honda vs. his Cammy. I didn’t feel like I was that threatened nor scared when I was Honda and, I think, both of us were trying HARDER to prove our points. Sirlin would win a lot of those fights, yes, but again, I think it’s because he is a better player than I.

So basically what I’m trying to get at is that you using Cammy vs. his Honda doesn’t quite feel like it’s gonna be as educational as it should be. And Sirlin being 15-4 with Cammy, right now, doesn’t mean much to me either: 1) He’s damn good at this game. 2) He’s been playing this version forever, so of course he’s learned how to use everyone fairly effectively.

It really needed to be more scientifically anaylyzed AND a larger pool of players needed to play these matches to really see how they were.

  • James
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How can I say that? Simple. ST Cammy, for all realistic and practical purposes, NEVER won against ST Honda. Why? None of Cammy’s cannon drills were consistently safe on block, which means she had almost no safe way to apply pressure on him. The hooligan roll was borderline dangerously difficult to actually execute with the near-SPD motion it takes to get it out, and without a safe cannon drill you couldn’t really pressure him into a situation where you can easily land it even if you did pull it off. The spinning backfist, although it’s not really all that good against Honda anyway, had a lot less reach and is also more difficult to execute. Honda’s hundred hand slaps were pretty much only stoppable by her cannon spike. And let’s also not forget that he still had the ochio throw loop.

In short, just about all of Honda’s nerfs that went into STHD help Cammy (and every other non-fireball character), and none of his serious buffs for dealing with fireball characters really hurt her. Meanwhile, Cammy’s buffs actually give her a real offense now, and open up a lot of other yomi possibilities while we’re at it. It’s still advantage-Honda, yes… but it’s neither the worst matchup in the entire game (among non-fireball characters against Honda, Fei Long’s is probably worse, and then there’s Akuma or Dhalsim against Zangief to think about) nor is it nearly as bad as it was before (in that Cammy actually does have a semi-realistic way to win).

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Try j.RH instead of j.Strong. You can (must) jump in from further away, so whether you hit or she blocks, you can’t be punished afterward.

?? Standing jab, my friend. Shuts down the Blanka ball spam.

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I was under the impression that Sirlin wanted to preserve the classic Super Turbo tiers as he compressed them. (I seem to recall his saying that in a video interview.)

i.e. Cammy is still the worst character, she just doesn’t lose as badly as she did before.

In this, I think that Sirlin succeeded rather well. I’m winning 3 out of four matches with Remix Cammy (as of this post, my win:lose ratio is 210:70), where I was roughly 40/60 in classic ST.

I can’t complain. Sure, she’s still bad, but she’s a little better and more fun to play (mostly because she no longer has the ridiculous special motions), and I’m OK with that.

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how do you access this?

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streetfighter.com has a section for HD Remix where you can pull up the gamercards for different players and see how everybody’s done with them all. Another thing that’s being tracked by the game, just that the game’s own leaderboards aren’t showing it. (And they’re not affected by the scoring glitch.)

I disagree that Cammy is still the worst character in the game. I personally am worst with Fei Long, but Sirlin does very well with him too, so I can’t really argue why other than that people haven’t figured him out yet (me included). However, like Fei Long, there was a point in development where Cammy was considered the best in the game, and the j. strong, short cannon drill, and the bounce back on the cannon spike when blocked were both nerfed a little to bring her back down. (I shoulda sandbagged a little on Cole’s Dhalsim… :confused: ) However, I don’t think this hammer hit Cammy nearly as hard as it did Fei. She’s still probably my own best character, to a point that I rarely use anyone else in ranked matches… which is kind of weird, because I was always known as a Bison player in the early 90s and Sagat and Guile were my main backups. My Cammy is quite a bit more effective than any of those now, and frankly I feel a lot better fighting Honda with Cammy than I do with, say… Sagat.

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seems like its xbox only!!! (?)

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So far, yes. The stats are there for both, this is probably their first effort at it.

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I think the gamercards might be XBL only unless I’m doing something wrong cuz I can’t access it.

Edit: Guess I was a little slow with that post lol…

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oh cool

i wonder what my real stats are in ranked

because right now it’s like 500 something and 100 something but i know i got dc’d a ton

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Is there anyway to see the leaderboards for specific characters or can you only look up gamertags? It says I’m 71/16 with Cammy and I want to know where that ranks but the ranking doesn’t seem to work as it says all my characters are ranked 4th, even characters I only used once.

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fuck the tiers, Cammy>all :lovin:

:sad:

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That’s most likely your overall rank. The game doesn’t keep seperate ranking scores for characters, it keeps the overall score and tracks how people have done with each character in wins and losses and some other stats.