This forum kind of had me freaking out. I was thinking Elena was good, then I read her frame data and saw peoples’ opinions on here and it had me second-guessing myself. I’ve won 9 out of the 10 ranked matches I’ve played with her (granted the people I fought were pretty bad) and played a good deal of versus/endless and I thought she was pretty strong.
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s starting to come around. Kind of gives me hope for Elena
just as I thought, in the corner you can abuse her cmd OH’s and c.hk all day and the opponent can’t do shit about it if you space it properly
supposedly meaty slide is +1 as well
I don’t even wanna know how positive on block meaty fwd + mp and meaty fwd + mk are. Especially considering fwd + mk is already comboable(1 frame link) without being meaty.
The problem is that Elena is just not a good charc on paper at all in general, and i think you’re right we might be looking in the wrong areas to see where Elena should be good. At the point where we get all the 1f links down yea Elena will be a threat like Chris G said the damage of a AA juggle is huge, but she still has a lot of terrible matchups, and she has quite a few 7-3 match ups like Yun, but i see your point that Elena can be strong in other areas but when we hit someone who knows the frame data and the match up then its gonna be really rough. I’m gonna stick with Elena all the way through (I’m actually an Abel main but i love Elena as a character). Just remember as a lot of us has said before if you with Elena thats you who won not the charc, the game is giving us nothing and if we win we won because we outsmarted our opponents and we should take pride in that.
I knew about the cr.hk spacing and the overhead but the slide is new for me which is a great thing against grapplers and charc like Yun and with a great backdash like Elena i think we got some tech that can help turn 6-4 MU to 5-5 now.
He’s been on http://www.twitch.tv/leveluplive all night, and will be coming up more since he’s still in winners bracket. ChrisG has also been playing her and is in losers thanks to Justin.
Justin was also at the FGTV house (their twitch is FGTVLive) last night, so you might search through their stream archives. I think he was playing a lot of different characters there, though.
Are we playing the same version of the game? Elena is fucking scary in this game. She ain’t no 3S Elena, but that’s a good thing. She has low and high options. She’s not messing around.
How well Justin does with her doesn’t change any of the facts regarding her special moves whiffing at certain ranges and dropping characters out when that shouldn’t be happening. Being able to win with an incomplete character doesn’t make them NOT incomplete. It simply makes you a good player, which we already know Justin is, so his success doesn’t say much about her character concept other than a small part of her works.
I share the sentiment that generally speaking Elena is ass. If you have good execution you can take decent advantage of her high/low mix-up game (hence why Justin and Chris G are having some success). I’m getting the hang of her and can pull wins but there are still loads of her that don’t work as they should to the point where it’s rendered almost useless. Most Elena wins amount to players being unfamiliar with her and her tools since the game is still new. Give it time and more Elena players are going to get blown up as more and more people get used to her and aware of her glaring weaknesses. So just enjoy the success while it lasts.
But they’re all so slow making it so obvious that you’re gonna overhead and they can block it easy and LT whiffs to much and is way to inconsistent and is also pretty bad on block and the Start up on anything but Light. Also most her normals are all negative on block, its like i’ve been saying she is terrible on paper period. But if someone learn there opp and gets in their head then its more than easy to destroy your opponent and thats what Jwong doing right now in WNF and it helps alot that he has a Wong factor people think he plays really well and perfect and respect him way to much and because of that he gets away with so much as Elena. Twisting words form Juicebox if you’re good as Elena you are good at street fighter.
I can’t make heads or tails of her just yet. I have to get a better grasp on her normals first. She’s a wonky character to say the least. There’s clearly issues with her though.
I can’t make heads or tails of her just yet. I have to get a better grasp on her normals first. She’s a wonky character to say the least. There’s clearly issues with her though.
Let’s be real, Ultra David and James Chen are fantastic commentators, but have fallen off. I love the guys, not hating, just speaking the truth. They do not have the skills to back up what they are saying anymore and I have begun to notice they do not understand nuances in gameplay for characters that are not regularly played. I main a 4k PP Oni and have heard them, at least James, say some of the most ignorant shit around. Same goes for several other top players saying that Oni’s footsies are good or even better, when they are actually some of the worst in the game. Why do you think Wao presses s.lk and f.lk like it was Oni’s only button? He can’t combo from anything worthwhile past s.mp range which is a very bad poke. I could go more into it, but that’s not the point. The point is you can’t trust top players/commentators opinions when it comes to newer characters. Remember when Justin Wong adamantly claimed Adon was a garbage character?
Also any character in this game that requires 1-frames to do damage will not succeed. All the top characters have good fundamentals, shenanigans, and damage, outputting half life bar combos that requires virtually no skill at varying effective ranges. Elena’s shenanigans will die out once people realize her lows are worse than trash and cannot be reliably verified unless you do 1-frames, and she may, possibly, have good normals, but they have limited effective range to go into combos.
Man, I keep flip flopping about my thoughts on this character haha. After using her again today I’m back to thinking that eventually when people learn how to play the matchup she’ll be considered bottom tier. Whenever I watch Justin play her though, my mind changes because I begin thinking, “she can’t really be that bad, look at Justin dominate!”. If capcom can just change the frame adv on her normals to make it that she doesn’t have to solely rely on jab 1 framers to get the most out of her damage and fix her specials constantly whiffing, she’ll be good.
I play Oni as well and have heard that argument, even though any person that plays oni knows his normals are ass. They just look like they’re good.
She’s going to need to be grinder to say the least. I think a strong footsies game goes a long way for her. I’m liking her though but the struggle is real.
A 27 Frame overhead isn’t going to land on anyone. Her 20 frame overhead is pushing it since the range where you want to use it is outside of Ryu’s cr.mk range and her 12 frame overhead is the one you want to use within Ryu’s cr.MK range and that requires a CH and does 50 damage by itself otherwise. And I already went over her effective tools in the frame data thread. The problem with Elena isn’t that she’s weak it’s that people fall out of every one of her damn moves she has no reliable AA and you can just mash cr.mp to blow up all of her moves outside of her st.hk range.
But Elena is ass dude. I played Rose who was mostly 1 frame links it’s not just getting the links down its the fact that she doesn’t have a proper frame trap tool and she requires so much effort to be good it’s too much effort. In fact, every newcomer I believe can combo off of an overhead especially Poison and Decapre. I see where capcom wanted to take Elena and it’s honestly not a good character mode if she doesn’t have the hitboxes to play that role.
Alright and this is another thing I put up the frame data and no one uses it.
Slide is -10 on block and has 10 active frames. Even if you didn’t know how to interpret that you’d get 0 on block, but at best meaty slide is -1 on block. =|
And F.mk requires a ch or meaty to be comboable. F.mp does not but is a 1 frame link.
Cr.lp x3 (only +2 so not a true blockstring and not chainable so it loses to reversals)
meaty cr.lk, cr.lp, cr.lk (not a true blockstring and not chainable so it loses to reversals)
cr.lp x2 cr.mp Which can’t be used against grapplers since it’s -2 on block and trades with 3 frame moves and loses to shoryus.
I’m not even kidding that’s about it. She has 1 move that is + on block and cr.lk is even. Check out the frame data thread though.
Pretty much this. I don’t really agree with the 1 frame link part, but the heart of the issue for Elena is the fact that people fall out of your shit. You have no way to frame trap, her slide was nerfed to hell, her EX RH sucks as a focus break, and above all else her game plan only revolves around 3 buttons since her frame trap game is nonexistent. In xT she had moves that were - but she also had a 2 hit SP cancelable mp that gave her a tool to get reward off of landing the second part, and she had a cr.mp that was +3 which gave her a true blockstring. But now she’s got none of the advantages she doesn’t even have a DP that is bare minimum strike invincible. If I played a character with 1000 or more health I’d just jump in and take the trades until I eventually beat out her unreliable AAs at moves I may take 50 if not 60 sometimes 100 but I’m always dishing out 100 anyways.
Elena slide isnt that bad at all, you make it seem like its the end of all her tech, I use slide a lot and it helps in so many MU and battles. Slide helps me punish poison Fireball, sometime ryus, and it helps me get a hard knockdown. I tested the meaty slide and didnt get +1 at all, but i did find something cool about it, if i take Justin advice and do slide on the last animation of them getting up then the meaty slide will beat all wake up options period. Tested Ryu DP, Ultra 2, Fireball, Super, cr.MP after blocking slide, it just clean beats all the options. What it doesnt beat is a block into dp or crouching jabs after block. Which is why Slide has to be use sparingly in order to condition the opponent to look out for it. It loses to focus attacks bad tho but when they focus just EX RH it catch that and Back dashes. Its at least what i do