Very true, I think all of these combos are easy in training, but I must have only landed once or twice in a match out of 1000s of attempts.
imho the jump height combos are specifically for resets. they wont work that much in just neutral game cause chances are that the timing needed for them is earlier than opponents would have attacked alot of times.
seriously IM might be a reset machine… and the reason to go for resets isnt only for more meter but also so that tony can keep initiative. if you hit with proton cannon or pretty much any other super and dont kill you give up initiative… hell, ou give up initiative when killing with a super as well cause supers make the incoming timings vary since the opponent may com out right as you recover from your super… best way to kill in the game is with a normal… good incomong setups like that which is one reason why anchor wesker is a fag… usually kills with normals and then has dumb incoming mixups.
-dime
Anchor Wesker is kinda faggy but the fact that he doesn’t provide a neutral assist pretty much limits his overall anchor abilities. Even the local top Wesker players in my area like Unknown DHC Wesker in 2nd with drones assist because that’s honestly going to kill you faster than XF3 or 4 Wesker. Other top Anchor Wesker players like Masta CJ are doing the same to get more consistent results out of Wesker’s anchor spot. If you can’t tear down a team with XF2 + assist you’re not that good of a Wesker player any way. It’ll get to the point where people are relieved to fight XF3/4 Wesker because I’ve seen with my own eyes that XF2 + assist is a complete other level of danger that XF3/4 will never achieve.
I do agree that it will be interesting to come up with meter saving combo to reset situations with him that can still kill characters. When it comes to welcome mix ups when I had Doom as anchor I was more comfortable with welcome mix ups since Doom could easily foot dive in the corner to ambiguously appear behind the opponent and tri dash under them quickly as they’re coming in and other stuff. SJ ADDF M was great too since in XF3 he can super jump cross you up into TOD from the most BS range.
It’ll be interesting to see what kinda BS stuff I can come up with using Anchor Man. If I feel it’s not as good as the Doom anchor stuff I can always tag him in second with jam session shit and learn to set up stuff off that.
^^^
has absolutely nothing to do with what i was talking about.
i was talking about the nice frame advantage EVERY character gets if they kill from a normal versus if they kill from a super. i just used wesker as an example since when it comes to those kinds of kills i generally seem to see him doing it most so i figure that other people would understand the eample since i assume that they’ve seen it multiple times as well.
another example: dante kills with a normal… has LOTS of frame advantage to work with.
dante kills with million dollars with anything but the last hit… has very little frame advantage so usually his incoming mixup is very weak.
i know zilch about dooms incoming mixups.
though yeah im not really talking about IMs incoming mixups when unassisted. i should probably work on some since i do have a spot for him at anchor on one of my teams.
im not so sure how good anchor IMs incoming mixups could be… he’d have to a left/right a throw option and a high priority air move that he can easily confirm off of… he seems to have all those things except for the easy left right and easy air confirm. this is one place where his 11 frame dash cancel into normals really hurts.
-dime
Well that explains like half the anchors in the game really. Even Iron Man can meterless TOD super fast in XF2/3. I thought you were explaining that Anchor Wesker specifically in general was annoying/faggy etc. If you had said something like “majority of anchors” it would have made more sense. He’s not exclusive in that crap at all and there’s other characters that can do more dumb shit in XF3 on the welcome.
Meterless kills are what people should be doing more in general in this game now that meter is more scarce. Nini Heart in the tier thread is already talking about how his Dante/Wesker/Iron Man team that he just put together is basically a meterless 100 percent inescapable mix up team. Now you don’t even have to spend meter to TOD. Which is funny because a mid tier ass character like Nemesis basically has a somewhat similar meterless TOD technology.
Yeah assisted mix ups are always better but it’s really not that hard to come up with dumb mix ups on incoming people with most any character really. I’m sure if I could come up with stuff for Doom I’ll have stuff with Iron Man also.
I’m already a step ahead on that from playing Doom. Doom can’t cancel his dash into normals at all so if you were to just consider that in a vacuum Doom would be in even more shit for dash left/right mix ups.
Helps to play Doom first so Iron Man’s movement seems less confusing. The thing is both Iron Man and Doom have first frame jump cancellable dashes so that’s where the room for the left/rights come in. If the jump cancel dash stuff I used to do with Doom I can put together with Iron Man also…I think it should work out.
hmmm… that makes alot of sense actually. sweet.
-dime
Thanks for this, I manage to hit with j.H all the time as anti-air but never get any real damage off it. Using this I could probably convert it into real damage!
Hello
There seems to be a disconnect between the technology being developed with this character and the way players are approaching him, strategically. I think many of us still desperately want to find a way to get in with Iron Man (I know I do), and apply in-your-face pressure with Iron Man; despite knowing that his strengths lie at the midrange, utilizing zoning tools. A different kind of pressure.
ADD mixups sound endearing on paper. ADDF/ADF sounds endearing on paper. Fuzzy Guard setups sound endearing on paper. Outside Welcome situations, these tactics just aren’t practical as a general offensive strategy due to Iron Man’s inability to be variable with this approach.
I think I played the best Iron Man I’ve seen yet at the last ZP/Option-Select gathering last Monday. His name is Steve. Never seen him before, but I don’t think he goes by any particular handle other than his name. Played a textbook, point, Iron Man, in the sense that; his entire gameplan revolved around keeping me away unless Drones were on the screen. Krispy Kreme variation confirms at midrange with cr. M and some unique confirms off Drones. Once his drones were out, he went in, and if he didn’t land his mixup, he dropped the ego, pushed me away with Repulser Blast and went back to zoning with Unibeam and Repulser. His zoning with these two moves were extremely measured - Unibeam anytime he read I was trying to figure my way in, Repulser the moment he read I was ready to make my move (read: Air Dash or Teleport etc.). It was very irritating but eye opening. It made me realize that trying to conform Iron Man to my ideals might be absolutely futile, and it also highlighted how weak I am to zoning in fighting games.
The only caveat: Drones. The Assist tends to amplify a character’s strengths. But even when Iron Man was solo, he still gave me problems.
His technology with the character is weak relative to me - it’s clear I’ve spent much more lab time with the character than he. I had more variable confirms/combos, resets etc - but none of that mattered. His Iron Man was just much better due to being true to the character’s strengths. I wanted to record some matches, but my iPhone literally went bunk that day. Maybe I can get him to play on stream next week.
edit
He also had a dope Spider Man, which was the real reason why he railed me often. His team is Iron Man (Repulser)/Spidey(Web Ball)/Sent (Drones). Spidey is slept on. Character is dumb in this game.
I think I pointed this out ages ago. I have always said IM is a keep away character, he is only able to get close with something like drones on the screen or if your opponent made a mistake and let you hit them.
one of the biggest problems with keepaway IM is that other characters just do it better ie they have much better 45 degree angle fireballs and/or faster/higher durability projectiles.
but yeah IM is supposed to be played with an eye towards defense.
you might want to check those couple of games from danke. he used a defensive IM that superjumped straight up then came down with D+H when he thought his opponent would go on the offensive… it worked really well. it might be the biggest piece of IM defensive tech in awhile or the best piece of IM tech in general.
it will give people a reason not to rush in on IM and give them something to fear… slides have been a bane for my IM for awhile and this pattern seems to eat them up as well as dash ins and tridash ins. so those are some of the biggest offensive options in the game and IM and storm are the only tridash characters that have super quick normals that cover the space in front and below them in a very far range.
so thats something to explore for IM… imagine turning your opponents offense into your combo… something IM hard a hard time with before but ths gives him something solid to work with.
anywho im still in the lab working on new defensive technology… everything looks promising for now.
oh and spidermans a fag. fucker is hard as shit to get a clean hit on.
-dime
I entirely agree with you that IM’s strengths are in defensive play and space control. Unfortunately that’s out of sync with where most people play Iron Man on their teams. Most people play him at anchor (or at least second) to take advantage of his great assists. That means that sometimes when IM comes into the match, he’s going to have to make a comeback. Maybe it’s 1v2, 1v3 or 2v3, maybe he’ll have X-Factor or meter loaded, but he’s going to have to go in and open some people up.
So while his weak/weird approaches and good spacing moves mean he’s strongest when hanging out and chilling, playing him later on a team means that he won’t always have the luxury of doing that.
The only times you know you’ll be guaranteed to play up those strengths are when you’re either playing him on point, or something weird like if you have Phoenix behind him so they can’t just let you chill out and build up to 5 bars + Phoenix. That’s less of an issue nowadays anyway.
Focusing on his mix-ups and pressure options isn’t really focusing on his strengths here - it’s more like trying to smooth over his weaknesses. And it’s a more relevant discussion for most people who play him primarily for his value as an assist.
2nd Test + Danke footage now in OP. All important thread notes are now in OP.
Is there a reason to use d/h rather than s, other than it doubles up as a option select throw (which IM can’t follow up because he already used his air dash). J.s, I feel is one of the few move IM has thats got the combination of speed, active frames and retarded hit box. I think it is a much better move for this purpose.
I find s.h is underused as a defensive move. It has a good hit box and IM leans back while doing it, so he is away from danger. If you cancel it into fly and it hit anti-air, you can go into the jump loop combo.
I find doing this plus drones and cancel into fly is great for both offence and defence, because it has a more reliable hix box than Replusor, safe on block, and it is reasonably fast for IM.
Not to mention that it chains into cr.H, which means you can do some cool buffered series of moves.
Yeah forgot about that. But c.h doesn’t hit air borne opponent very well though:( Although on the ground you can get a massive combo off it.
Dime: There are characters with better Beams, but with the exception of Hawkeye, I don’t think any other character has the tools for keepaway that Iron Man does when played right, imo.
Kjunk: Yeah, all good points. I’m gonna start messing with Iron Man on point more, now. I used to put him second.
Also, I think this kid shows how much conditioned biases can influence people when taking certain approaches and making decisions in the future. Steve said he never even played Vanilla MvC3. When Ultimate came out he immediately started playing Iron Man and that’s essentially how he’s played him since. It’s quite clear why he has no problems conforming to Iron Man’s strengths in this game: he never had the misfortune of being influenced by Iron Man’s Vanilla playstyle.
Herro.
I think the better idea is to use a combination of super jump ADD j.H and super jump ADD d+H. Cancelling your super jump early with ADD into regular j.H is a great tool for stopping most poking and rushdown attempts from the mid range. It’s an 11 frame normal you can more or less just throw out there and most of the cast can’t really challenge it from that range. You’re not going to get much confirm off of it because of the push back on hit but if you land 2 or 3 of these it starts to add up where you only need to hit the opponent with a hit confirm at closer range into a very basic combo and they will die from the poke damage they took beforehand. Like if you hit Zero with 2 or 3 super jump ADD j.H’s you can pretty much ABCS BBCS him and guarantee he dies (not that that’s a safe string to do with Iron Man but for example any way).
The super jump ADD d+H I feel is for when you are farther away and backed up with an assist so you can rain sword normals down on them while jam session, drones or missiles is locking them down. Once you get a lockdown going or they generally get pushed towards the corner that’s when you can swoop in while the assist is locking them down or you generally just feel comfortable enough in your spacing to go in.
I was running super jump ADD H pressure for the majority of time I was playing Iron Man in my match against Skisonic at the monthly tourney because I didn’t wanna be anywhere near his Hulk. Plus it allowed me to punish things of Hulk in situations where he himself said no other character without blasting a super at him was able to do. Like swooping in with the ADDF to punish gamma waves (which i believe forced him to to knee jerk react with gamma crush supers to try and counter).
I feel pretty similarly to him. I only picked up Iron Man because I was tired of how difficult it was to hit confirm off Doom’s beam although I liked the properties of it (pretty much clears up drones assist from the opposing team unless the point character is putting a mindfield of shit on the screen which only a few characters can really do). I then started to put shit together where I realized that the fact that it doesn’t knock down on hit means I can simply set up mix ups into unscaled damage after it hits instead of always hit confirming off of it for scaled damage. Which means I get the same situation to set up unscaled damage from an assist that basically locks off a good bit of the horizontal screen for about 25 frames. With X-23 and Dante who are both really dependent on the left/right for mix ups it really works well and I get more on hit situations than the sloppy knockdown from Doom’s beam. I can basically just set up frame traps or mix ups off the beam instead of scrambling if I don’t hit confirm.
Then I decided to check out what people actually thought about him and of course people were super down in the dumps about him cuz this and that and the other. Though after reading all of his stuff in the guide I was way too intrigued by his play style (very unique for this type of game) where I decided I wanted to go in with him and figure out the new Tony. I’m excited to just learn new stuff about him and it’s way more interesting than j.Sing on people all day with Doom now. Plus he controls horizontal space in the air much better than Doom did which is one of Doom’s big weaknesses and he provides a full screen DHC super for Dante so no matter how many times Dante switches sides on the screen he still will always get a guaranteed DHC. Dante has strong options to get Iron Man in safely with raw tags so the fact that he doesn’t provide a safe on block DHC is not too much an issue for me. Especially once I learn some TAC combos and make more use of the 1 frame whiff punish DHC.
I feel the buffs to his hit boxes and learning to settle him around strong lockdown/neutral assists will allow people to play him in a fashion where he can shut out a lot of shit and then transition into rushdown once he has limited the opponent’s options to safely poke at him. Which I really would like to put into practice. He has a lot of slept on ways to bully people trying to rush him down. Some very solid and some more risky but the options are all there.
It’s also good to know you have a strong Spidey in your area because the Spidey player in my area considers himself the best Spidey in the US so it’ll be interesting to see how your Spidey guy does if he goes out to more tournaments.
When I made the thread I pretty much intended to be pressure from all ranges mid to far range, close range…it’s just whatever range you want to do it from. Full on keepaway even whatever. ** The idea of the thread is to come up with ways so that all Iron man players can know how to play him effectively and get him to do something meaningful from any range on the screen with the correct knowledge of spacing from mid to far range, assist usage and mix ups at close range. **
Even in the first test video I made the end of it pretty much has me trying to put together basic stuff that I eventually want to do from a longer ranges with Iron Man to transition into offense as they get pushed towards the corner. I hardly made the thread as a “ADD in their face all day thread”.
Hopefully once I can learn some strong TAC options and more about Iron Man’s pressure game with jam session assist I can kill someone off with Dante and then transition into Iron Man on point with Dante anchor. That way I can take advantage of both point and assist play from Iron Man in transition despite the way they were originally ordered on the team. I feel this is the best way to have a team composition where you can just switch around the order of the team on the fly and it’s still dangerous and worth worrying about.
Since it seems some people are confident with playing Iron Man first on point (I guess even Dante can just mash air dash backwards H start of round although I hate Dante being near corners without much meter)…I can use that to practice Iron Man being up first. In case he gets snapped in I can learn ways to make him scary with 23 second and Dante anchor. 23 in the second spot now has an invincible crossover counter that can transition into combos so if Iron Man gets put in a sticky block/pressure situation I can CC into X-23 and possibly even get a combo.
If anything Iron Man is teaching me to be a lot more creative with my team and I like that a lot.
Bunny hopping back and forth with j.s (and cover with assist calls) is great for pressure and defensive play, I do it a lot especially when drones are on the screen. It hit really far and easy to confirm into a combo from both normal jump height and ground(think of it as Wesker’s j.h). It will stop most frontal attacks because it out range most characters and hit the deep downward area that j.d/h cannot hit. It is only 2 frames slower than h but it has 4 more active frames, making it much easier to use.
As long as you don’t do it too close, you can’t get air thrown. I find normal jumping is better than SJ ADD stuff most of the time, unless your opponent is already lock down by an assist, because once you used the air dash, it is a lot harder the turn random hit and throws into real combos. With normal jump attacks, you can OS them into ADD, ADF, ADDF or fly into more mix up opportunity and beat AG with assists (something you can’t do while super jumping).
I lost my Ultimate guide (hopefully I can find it somewhere) but in the Vanilla guide it says j.H and j.S are both active for 6 frames. Was there a buff to the active frames on j.S? Not that it matters too much because I know it has a big hit box. I just personally like the super jump ADD j.H a lot any way any ways because it allows you to put a ton of pokes on the screen really fast and when you cancel the super jump ADD really low to the ground pretty much nobody other than maybe 3 or 4 characters can crouch under it.
I’ll definitely mess around with the bunny hop stuff with assist and see what mileage I get out of that.