You will only red focus cancel on hit whereas your opp will have to guess right.
I have found some success in what you guys share. I really appreciate it. Now I’m faced with a new task. Defeating a Dhalsim who teleports a lot… And towers a lot. And a Blanks who mashes lightning a lot. What should I do senseis?
I thought of just punishing close teleports with cr
HP, but does it work? As for blanks do I just play super lame?
Again, for the matchup thread, but i’ll give some brief answers:
For Dhalsim, the only teleport you have to worry about is his tiger knee teleport, the other teleports don’t have as nice a recovery, you can O/S them really well and MAY be able to TAP on reaction. If you knock him down and meaty his wakeup he can’t tiger-knee teleport and has to wait for you to make a mistake since his mobility options are very limited out of the air. Yoga tower is successful when you push buttons and he doesn’t, as in your offense is unsuccessful. Don’t quote me, but st.mp should hit him if you walk up and he yoga towers. IF he air teleports in place, you can do walkup cl.hk, it’ll air reset but thats it. To put it simply, if Dhalsim is teleporting all over the place from neutral, not like throwing a fireball then teleporting or something like that, he’s taking advantage of you because you don’t know what you can do to stop him. If you get a chance, post a video in the video thread or give us a more detailed description of what he’s doing with his teleports. This may help a bit:
Blanka has a weird time with Balrog and vice versa. Lightning is really positive, so if he hits you with it, just block, a common block string is lightning, cr.hk. If he does it from neutral and you’re almost outside of sweep or jab range, you can hit him, but its hit or miss since his hitbox is all over the place. Play lame, do a lot of walkup pressure to bait out his ex vertical balls, that’s really the only thing that’s going to eat through your oki and pressure from neutral. Also up close don’t use any heavy attacks (cr.hk, st.hp, cr.mk) because of hop, if he happens to hop through your normal with lag he gets a decent punish. Also be aware of the max distance of his focus attack, he can out range all of your normals but st.hp and cr.hk really easily with it. So yes, play lame if you have the life lead, if you don’t, then you’ll need to pressure him. Also cr.lp, cr.lp, cr.lk xx hp.hb doesn’t work on crouching Blanka. cr.mp does work, but not if you do too many jabs, so cr.lp, cr.mp xx hp.hb is your go to bnb if you can confirm, that should work at MOST distances.
Sorry won’t post matchup stuff here again thanks…
Yeah I agree.
Although right now, I can’t really think of a good way for Balrog to utilise red focus. I guess there’s always putting it in with jab pressure instead of regular focus, like how PR Balrog does the “Marn”. Or off maybe a blocked cr.MP xx Dash straight xx EX red focus and then you’ve got instant level 2 focus pressure afterwards. The only benefit being that you won’t have to hold it down like regular focus to get level 2 blockstun, but you’ll still have no armor.
So far the charge character it seems to have benefited the most is Vega. They can now hit-confirm 2 normals (I think) into EX red focus, then Ultra. Might scale a fair bit, but it’s something they weren’t able to do in AE2012.
The only other ways I’ve seen red focus used, is
- Long range normal cancelled into RFA (Adon cr.HP)
- Bison slide on block cancelled into RFA
- Dragon punch cancelled into RFA for additional pressure
And Balrog doesn’t really fit into those categories.
Delayed wake-up seems like a pain. To apply safe jump-in pressure after a hard knockdown, you’re going to need to have a safe jump for regular and delayed wake-up and be able to guess which wake-up the opponent is going for. I guess at least Akuma matches might be a little less in their favor than they were before.
Red focus is still usable, i just feel that most (any?) new combos he gets off of red focus are too expensive and the damage/stun can probably be done with another combo with more damage using less meter. Red Focus gives everyone the ability to land grounded Ultra. None of Balrog’s long range pokes are super cancellable, so he doesn’t get anything like st.hp red focus U1. He gets stuff like cr.lp, cr.hp xx Red Focus, Grounded U1, stuff like that or obv cr.mp xx hp.ds xx red focus U1. I think it’ll be good to close matches if you only have three bars versus four.
Balrog is +4 on lvl 2 focus, but three bars for what still has bad horizontal range is not worth it IMO. There are a few matches where meter is unnecessary, but still.
And on the topic of delayed wakeup, it’s not as bad for Balrog, he can add a jab to every current setup, and he should be able to maintain all of his meaty setups and possibly SOME safe jumps since the delayed wakeup is delayed by 11f and balrog’s jab is 10f total.
Far standing mk is super cancelable, is that considered a long range poke?
I’d personally say that it’s mid-ranged. It does reach far enough but the hurtbox comes along with it, plus it is very situational to use.
But don’t quote me on that. It simply isn’t a poke you flat out use regularly for footsies.
I’ve actually been using it for footsie/pokes and it actually isn’t that bad. It only does 20 damage less than st.hk, it recovers 8 frames faster than it, super cancelable, but it reaches just a tad less than it.
Just keep in mind that a max distance st.mk won’t combo into red focus attack for a crumple. That’s probably most important. That EVEN if Balrog has st.hp into focus crumple, at max distance it wouldn’t be close enough for his focus attack to hit since it’s so horizontally challenged. So although you CAN go st.mk xx Red Focus, would you wager 3 bars for “maybe” getting the crumple? fierce dash straight is much easier to confirm and generally always in range if it hits, if you’re going for a red focus off of a confirm, shimmy cr.mp xx hp.ds xx Red Focus will probably become the go-to combo versus st.mk xx red focus, it’s also VERY likely that st.mk doesn’t have enough recovery/hitstun to cover a red focus, but i don’t know the frame data on it. If its the same ,it’s probably not, afaik, st.mk xx lvl 1 focus attack never combos since the normal doesn’t have a significant amount of recovery.
Are cr.mk and cr.mp good pokes or are there better ones? Also, does anyone know how to juggle headbutt into Violent Buffalo with a controller pad (not an arcade stick) like this one?
Whenever I try it, I can only get the headbutt the come out, the ultra usually doesn’t happen.
All his buttons are good pokes, depends on what you want to use them for. cr.mk is a very good low poke that’s positive on block. It doesn’t have as much horizontal range as cr.mp but is safer in block and gives you more room to press buttons. cr.mp is really good for catching throw techs or as a general bait and punish attack. The shimmy is almost 100% possible only because of cr.mp. Shimmy is when you walk forward like you’re going to throw, then you walk back and cr.mp into dash straight/dash straight super/ex rush upper.
The input is the same whether its on a pad or a stick; when you do the headbutt, go from down+back to up+back which keeps your back-charge for Ultra. Then when you land go from up back, to forward, back, then forward and 3K/3P.
For c.lp to c.mp I can do it, but it requires you to hit c.mp three or four times depending on the range. Is there a timing factor involved like with c.mk/c.lk to c.lp? I play pad if that matters.
It doesn’t matter. You should definitely be plinking to make those one framers more consistent. As far as “general” timing goes, cr.mk to cr.mp is pretty immediate, cr.lp to cr.mp has a noticeable delay. The only rhythm based timing i feel that’s really good for learning the timing for cr.lp, cr.mp is “cr.lp, cr.lp, cr.mp” using link timing for ALL of the links, the timing is pretty much the same for linking cr.lp’s really late.
Plinking tutorial:
let me know if this doesn’t help as much as it should.
What I do to practice timing is turn of game sound and hit it 15 times without the sound in game, but hearing my buttons.
Thanks for the reply, guys! 3nigmat1c, would you mind explaining what plinking is? I’d really appreciate it.
Well, he did post a link to a video tutorial. 
To further explain: Plinking is basically a technique that lets you register two button inputs for the same attack such that the game registers them on consecutive frames. When used properly it gives you a larger margin for error when performing link combos.
Hope that helps.
@rainscape, pretty much said what i’d say. You should just go into training mode and attempt to hit st.lp into cr.hk with plinking and without. You should immediately notice the difference in success rate. When you do plinking correctly you should see the following button inputs (for cr.hk):
HK
MK+HK
But there should only be two button presses (not three).
Links that are much easier when plinked: (1) st.lp, cr.hk (2) cr.lp, cr.mp (3) ex.ru, cr.lk (4) cr.mk, cr.mp (5) cl.hk, cr.mp
You can plink jab with select (i’ll leave you to google that on your own), but you can’t plink jab “normally”, but the only jab good for plinking is after hp.ds FADC, ex.ru, cr.lp is a 2f link so not that hard (imo).
Wow lol. Yeah, I did not mean to type that, I meant “how to plink” kind of =/ I’ll just hit up fighter101.net and watch the input displays and learn from there. I’m sorry for the confusion. I really appreciate your help and patience guys (especially you 3nigmat1c).