I have exactly zero combos in my head. Do I want to fill my head with combos, or learn combo theory such that I can combo on the fly? What is the most recommended method of transitioning from a total noob like me, to a player with a few combos for a few different situations?
Where I’m at: I am a fairly defensive player by necessity (playing Akuma mostly) and rely on punishing mistakes for damage. In the near term I’d like to capitalize more on opportunities with explosive combos. In the long term I’d like to create opportunities.
The Akuma Vortex concept appeals to me, but it appears to be a bird’s-eye view strategy, and I lack the low-level details of safe blockstrings and punishing combos and so on.
The thing about trials: some of them are really impractical combos that really just demo some of the things that is possible to combo, even though you’d never want to spend the bar to do so. It’s definitely worth going through them for practice, but you should really check the sticky thread in the Akuma forum for his bread and butter combos.
That pretty much goes for any character. Most of the character specific sub forums here have a sticky for bread and butter combos.
Don’t use the combo trials, trying to pick and choose which of them are actually useful as a noob is not very easy. Go to your character’s forum on this site and go to the combo thread. They will have various combos listed and figuring out which are used for which situation is easy (i.e. a combo that starts with a jumping attack generally suggests it’s a jump in combo, of course with most of these they can be adapted to the ground by simply starting with the second move, or using a ground attack that can link into the second instead of the jumping).
It’s a good idea to learn what moves combo into what on your character anyways though, so that you can mix up your combos on the fly and shorten them or lengthen them as needed. Trying to memorize even just 2 or 3 combos and then being able to use them without thinking takes months on end to learn properly, as when you start you’ll have to think as the combos comes out exactly what you want to hit, it won’t just be instinct.