Help with controlling space versus Claw

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
1

I’ve searched everywhere for this info, so please don’t flame me if it’s already posted somewhere, and feel free to direct me to it, but i’m looking for any specific tips people have found useful against claw to lock him down and avoid him getting free space to use stuff like wall dives, slide pokes, and hi priority claw normals.

I know what i’m doing, so i don’t need newbie tips, i’ve been playing SF 18 years, and my win ratio in HDR lobbies is about 7 or 8 out of every 10 matches usually, but versus claw always seems to come down to who controls the space-Give him too much and it’s “wall dive” or “slide beats everything” and you’re under attack, but if you get in close and play rushdown style his normals, claw pokes, and backflips seem to beat everything.He’s my problem match, and after getting beaten 3-0 last night i figured i need some help.

My mains are usually dictator and deejay, with some guile, and honda as alternates.Deejay seems to do better, cause he’s got some nice specials and hi priority normals too, but my dictator style is usually stay out of range, then get in quickly, knockdown, and rushdown on getup with tricky crossups etc.Problem is, on a good vega, this just gives him too much time and space to walldive, and he has a bunch of options to screw me on that.

What i would like to know is, what are peoples strategies to harass claw, and make sure he generally doesn’t have enough time/space to get into his usual BS, and if he does, what are the best counter techniques.

Specifically i’m looking for people’s best strategies on:

Rushing him
Keeping him cornered
Dealing with his dives after he’s gotten into some space.

I’ve read Seth K’s controlling space article, which was excellent, i’d like to get some other players pointers that will hopefully give me some new tricks to try, so i can get out of old habits on this match up.

Any thoughts?

2

Dictator’s j.MP beats claw’s walldive clean, Claw shouldn’t be walldiving randomly at bison.

3

yep, i know, i’m not looking for matchup specific stuff, or i would have posted in the dictator thread, more general strategies for keeping claw under control.

BTW, IMO, claw jumping at bison isn’t all about trying to hit him, claw has a ton of stuff that he can do on that wall dive, fake, close hit, whiff, etc, to set up other stuff.To me this is all claw in control, not bison.If bison jumps he loses his charge and could eat a punish if claw does something other than try to hit him,#

anyway thanks for the post.

4

You CAN’T keep Claw “under control”. That’s like trying to keep Dictator’s aerial shenanigans “under control”. You either do or you don’t. You either put the fear of punishment into your opponent’s head…or you don’t. If you have that much SF experience (I have about 17 myself), you should know the ins and outs of this matchup, or at least how to “control” your opponent.

5

the key to beating vega is getting an early lead and then put him in a position where he can’t wall dive throw you

6

Just pick Blanka and press the win button. When I play vs Claw I simply attack and then attack some more with little fear of trades because Blanka hurts Claw more than Claw hurts Blanka. No need to control space.

7

try harder obviously

8

jump back/jumping roundhouse. constant scissors. If he decides to be ballsy and flip your scissors then bait it. the key is to prevent him from gaining the advantage by constantly pressuring him imo. You don’t have to go all crazy n shit but I mean scissors + s. forward/roundhouse and low forwards to catch him if he walks forward is effective. If you got him in the corner then you have ALOT of options. So lets think of this like a flow chart. So on his wakeup you have the option of tick throwing. If he decides to just magically wake up/anti tick flip then teach him not to use it. Once he is scared then you can tick throw. If he’s good at reversal throws + throw break then you can mix it up with the following: meaty s. short > low forward > scissors. Since he’ll be pressing/mashing throw the low forward will catch him. If he gets smart and blocks then you can do stomp mixups. So basically you can do meaty stomp right? But its really slow so its not hard to react.

However, you can do a fake stomp with devils reverse since it looks exactly the same. Once you land you can get a free combo/throw with added mind fuck. When you get that seed of doubt then you can start stomping. You don’t have to do it in the corner. You’re free to do it midscreen too and you’ll know that he’s not thinking about the fake stomp if they start walking backward on wakeup.

O yeah heres a dope shenanigan. Basically you do just the hop using a devils reverse and you wanna make it land right outside vega’s poke range. Once you land you can do a light scissors which will catch pokes or if you feel like being ballsy you can super. Fierce psycho crusher is also good if you have gdlk reaction time if they wall dive.

btw you really should be asking this in a character specific thread.

9

Damnit, couldn’t you guys have left just ONE Bison that I had a chance against?! :wink:

But seriously Bison, properly done, is sht scary as a Claw player. Blanka doesn’t scare me, he frustrates me. Bison can be fcking terrifying, especially without knockdown wall dive.

So yeah, echoing bits above, what gets me is the scary wakeup mixups, jumping mp and the fact that Claw vs Bison == dizzyfest for Claw. A couple of standing mks and hks and I’m dizzy --> ToD combo.

Oh, and (why the f*ck am I telling you this?!) avoid full screen psycho crusher. I WILL punish you for it with either a back jump + fierce or block it then punish from behind.

10

All very useful stuff, thank you for this and to some of the other constructive posters.I should point out again, that i’m not looking for specific matchup stuff, otherwise i would have posted this in the dictator strategy thread, but some of the bison suggestions posted are really useful, so i will try mixing them into my game.For the record, my current tactics with wall dives using Dictator are jumping medium punch, or PS out of the way.These are OK but what i really want is to make sure claw gets no chance to even do a walldive etc rather than having to react to one, cos i don’t like claw’s multiple options on that move.

If the mods wanna move this thread to the Dictator section i won’t whine.I can see peoples point that it’s a very broad question to ask without character specific matchups.

PS-to all the flamers that want to tell me what i SHOULD know based on how long i’ve been playing, or who are into writing BS comments like “try harder”-Stop being f*cking jackasses.Is your game perfect in every way??Probably not.I’m a good player, well above average, but yes there are some small gaps in my strategy that i would like to fix, and i’m asking politely for help to improve and make me a better player.I’m willing to help anyone however i can with learning new stuff on SF, if you just want to take an “i’m better than everyone so i’ll flame people all day” attitude then go find another online board to fuck up and stop cluttering up SRK.

Thanks to ilikemacaroni, and martynpie for their posts especially.If there’s any more useful stuff anyone has i’d appreciate hearing it.

11

you know you can say fucking on this website right?

the try harder shit was something sirlin told hawk players to do against horribly unfavorable match ups (guile and honda). it was a joke. calm the nerd rage down.

fuck fuck fuck fuck

12

The beauty of ST/HD is that few tactics are guaranteed. Your j.MP and j.HK may or may not get beaten out depending on what and when claw does his aerials and you’ll have to live with that and learn to predict better. I can confirm that dictator can’t go even with wall dives; if it were just based on air games, the matchup would probably be 7-3 in claw’s favor (although if the claw player can’t do wall dives well, it’s more like 8-2 in dictator’s favor).

However, dictator has numerous combos/pressure sequences on the ground and shenanigans in the corner to help you make up for that and turn it back to an even fight (that requires a lot of hard work on the dictator player’s part and a lot of good timing on the claw player’s end). From what I’ve seen playing against him as claw, if you learn to block wall dives accurately enough to go >=50%, read every post from his thread in the original ST forum (mastering the crossup combos is essential), and watch Giga-MSX’s shenanigans video, that should help you develop your own anti-claw tactics.

13

Don’t know if it already has been said and if it works against really good Vegas but with Deejay I try to get a quick lead and then jump in the corner since he cant “crossup”-walldive you there. I think this works with every character but I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to put yourself into the corner vs a good Claw.

14

Yeah, Mack, don’t sweat it. Gridman is just poking fun at Sirlin, not trying to flame you. Here is the direct quote from Sirlin’s blog, in his discussion on how he decided to help T.hawk fight Honda and Guile:

Given that Gridman is a Hawk player, you can imagine his “appreciation” of Sirlin’s efforts to try and make Hawk better against Guile and Honda. “Try Harder” was his solution rather than giving Hawk anything to actually help in those fights. So it’s kinda become an inside joke amongst posters in this Forum. “Try harder.” :slight_smile:

  • James
15

James always takes what I say and puts it so eloquent haha

16

Well there isn’t knock down on it connecting anyway so it really shouldn’t matter. But yeah like I said, constant scissors. If they don’t know what they’re doing with claw and like to wall dive off the near wall then its free psycho crusher. Most of the time if you don’t close the distance fast enough they’re gonna wall dive anyway but I mean if you can react and stop it mid air it still doesn’t matter cuz they’ll get scared to wall dive. When you get deeper in the match up you’ll find that wall dive isn’t the problem but claw’s walk speed combined with his pokes and fast jump in imo. You’ll see what I mean if you face a good claw player.

17

If Claw ever slides at you, scissor kick. Claw should NEVER be sliding at Bison though.

And good Claw’s aren’t gonna randomly wall dive, and if they ever do wall dive odds are they’re going to be going off Bison’s wall to make him lose his charge/confuse/cross up.

You should NOT be losing up close to Claw, Bison beats the fuck outta Claw when he’s close. That’s why Claw is always gonna be running from Bison, you gotta make him scared to walldive, and then you gotta make him scared to poke. These are all things doable as Bison.

18

I star it out sometimes because it looks funnier.

but just for you, fuck.

:smiley:

19

Rant withdrawn, red-facecly.:wgrin: Thanks for the clarification james.
I think i had a bit of an itchy trigger finger after reading a lot of the eletist posts on the board that bring SRK’s coolness level down a bit sometimes IMO.If i could “apology +1 rep” gridman i would.:rofl:

By the way, for anyone who’se interested, this thread is getting results for me, i’ve trained myself out of a couple of bad habits against claw.Using fierce crusher on reaction was one i was working on across the board already anyways cos of the lack of safety on block, and getting closer than i’m used to and using pokes and scissors better and more is working a treat.Scissors is totally owning the slide as well as getting lots of random middle distance damage.My “scary wakeup mixup” is probably the strongest aspect of my bison game so that’s OK, and i’ve started to throw out a lot more headstomps to kill down charge which seems to be cutting down on the number of wall dives i deal with as well as using it to get in which is it’s main use for me as well as punishing obvious fireballs.(ok NOW this thread should be moved to the Dictator strategy section)

Anti-air backflip is still causing me trouble sometimes, but i’ve just put vega in the “don’t ever jump in on him” box along with the usual suspects.I may work on this but my versus claw game is definitely coming on, so thanks all.

20

This is a pretty hard question to answer, I dunno.

My most general advice would be:

  1. Stay just out of the range of his C.Mp.

  2. Know a move or two that beats slides clean.

  3. Know one or two ways of reliably AA’ing Claw’s jump-ins.

  4. Learn the answer for his wall-dives. A good Claw player will mix shit up, so know lots of different things to do.

So, here’s an example for Chun-Li, a character that I use:

  • Moves that beat slide clean: Lightning Legs, max range C.Mk

  • Anti-Air: Short Upkicks at close range, Neutral J.Hp/Neutral J.Hk at longer ranges

  • Wall-dives:

J.Mk, Neutral J.Hp, Neutral J.Hk (for when Claw just tries to attack you with normal wall-dives)

Fireball (for fake outs and punch wall-dives).

–

If you want to close the gap on him, my best advice is to stay as close as you can, and try to set up any cross-up you can. If you can get another knockdown off of your cross-up, even better.