I’ve asked this question before and I didn’t get any definitive responses so I’m asking again on a new thread:
How easy is it to respond to a projectile by jumping in safely against Ken/Ryu/Sagat?
I ask because it seems that from close distances against LK tiger shots, everyone jumps in free. With 41 frames of recovery, shouldn’t every jump in be punishable if they didn’t anticipate the tiger shot? I don’t know if it’s my lack of skill or timing, but their jump in happens so quickly that it always catches me off guard and most of the time I just don’t try anything. Against characters like Guile I can see it coming a lot more quickly, maybe past conditioning of what to expect, but against gief, cammy, blanka, etc they’re so difficult to handle.
You can test it. Just try to block the jump in. If your character blocks the attack, so you had the time to uppercut them. If not, so the jump in was quick enough to hit you on recovery. I’m pretty sure that Blanka can punish Sagat’s low tiger on reaction.
good players hide their fireball intentions, this might entail only throwing fireballs after watching you commit to a move position.
bad players will throw predictable fireballs i.e. jump back fierce fireball habit
the better players will react faster because they’re prepared for a predictable fireball, and a bad player will throw predictable fireballs for good players to react to faster.
there’s an article some where on the internet about tunnel vision which touches on this concept.
let’s say blanka and ryu are doing footsies at sweep range. here it is much harder to react to a fireball, because I’m looking for ryu to press a button. likewise, if I press a button, ryu can red fireball it and there’s basically nothing I can do but get knocked down. Similarly, if ryu is looking for me to press low roundhouse or slide or dash or low fierce, and preparing himself for low blocking or red fireballing or sweeping one of my options, it becomes much much harder for him to dp my jump.
reaction time is pretty blurry, it’s very situation and player specific.
It depends on the character’s jump speed. Claw can easily punish projectiles on reaction. Dhalsim has a very slow jump speed, but he can cancel them with his drills. Dictator, on the other had, has issues trying to punish projectiles on reaction but by using his head stomp move. If one is getting hit a bit too often by jump ins, he is probably being predictable. The solution is feinting more and not taking the same decisions all the time.
There are many situations when throwing a projectile is a good idea, but they can still be punished. The key is to mix things up so the enemy never knows for sure what your actions will be, but when he is unable to counter, anyway. For example: Ryu can deal with Guile by using his hadouken and rush punch to get in perfect position for a SRK. The best strategy is to rush when Ryu is not in position and Guile does not have a charge, and throw another hadouken after that, to try and score a hit, push him into the corner or force a late jump. But if you always throw a hadouken right after the rush punch he can always punish accordingly (flash kick, jump in -> combo -> peace out, backfist, etc). So you gotta often tap down + strong or jab, fake hadouken, wait, or maybe not rush. Depending on what he does, he can eat a SRK or a combo. Or throw a sonic boom that you may have to block. Ryu should just accept the damage move on.
EDIT: DAMN, I write slowly. Khiempossible beat me by 20 minutes, wtf.
It depends on a lot more than jump speed. Limb length is another thing, along with attack speed. Also jump distance. For example, Dee Jay’s jump speed isn’t the greatest in the world, but his j.rh speed and distance make up for it by far. He can nail a fireballing Ryu in the face with a j.rh from nearly full screen if timed properly.
As Honda, it’s often practically impossible to jump towards over a fast projectile on reaction - his fat body trips over fireballs way too easily. So Honda jumps in on anticipation, or does a buttslam or vertical jump on reaction. There are some cases where it’s possible, i.e. fullscreen against a Sonic Boom, Yoga Fire, or Kikoken will work, but trying to react to a fast Ryu / Sagat fireball by jumping towards is pointless.
Sagat will get nailed every time if Honda jumps over one of his projectiles on anticipation, though. Sagat vs Honda is all about guesswork ahead of time, reaction time isn’t that useful in that matchup, on both sides.
Thanks for the tips. Apparently jumping in is a lot safer than I thought it would be.
I guess it’s just predictability and spacing. I spam tiger shots a lot, apparently too much so from close distances, so once they get in close they wait because I’m not one to use many normals and my only other primary move is the tiger knee.
Another thing I noticed is the perception of the move. If I use the LK tiger shot, they’re more likely to jump in than against a FK tiger shot because the FK moves a lot faster and will more likely put them on the defensive.
Time to perfect the c.MK XX tiger shot (or Knee). I can do it well in training but in a game I tend to mess it up a lot.
I will work on mixing up my game better and try to feature something other than tiger shots, knees, and uppercuts because this game plan is so limited and there are a lot of good players out there who pick my game plan apart, especially once they get in close or corner me.
I find that, when I play Vega, I don’t need to predict when shotos will throw fireballs; if I’m close enough, I can hop a fireball on reaction every time and punish.
With other characters, I have to predict (guess) when the fireball is coming if I want to punish it with a jump in.
not really. I play players who do this all the time. the recovery on the fireball is the same every time. it’s just timing. some players will even piano the uppercut just to make sure they get it (since they’ll only do it after identifying the jump which is hella easy usually)
Good shotos mask fireballs well enough with other moves that when I play claw, I normally anticipate them and can’t react in time to everything shotos might pull out. Esp. in STHD where Ryu has a fake fireball, you’re just asking to be dp’ed.
The claw-shoto matches aren’t blow-outs at all, esp. not in STHD. Almost everyone, myself included, already had them around 6-4 in normal ST. If claw was so much easier than the other characters (and I’ll admit that he is among the easier characters to play) at high levels, people wouldn’t need much experience to win with him at high levels. Yet I don’t see random people new to ST winning tourneys with claw.
From what I’ve experienced, it still takes thousands of hours of practice with claw to reach a comfortable level of play. It may be a couple hundred less than with Ryu, but at that point, the difference is fairly negligible. Everybody who’s been to Japan mentions how More Balrog/Sky High Claw played so cheaply well with claw yet not as many take home the point that he was always at More leveling up his game (I remember NKI posting that it almost seemed he lived there).
Would you agree that keeping Honda the way he was against non-projectile chars would have been a good idea in hdr? Its the same brainless shit, different style.
I’m not disrespecting Ganelon’s game, because he obviously knows the intricacies of the character, even if ambiguous walldives in Vanilla are bs :annoy:
The kind of things you’re pointing out though about Claw that make him so braindead, aren’t even that broken though. There are a number of characters that make you have to throw fireballs with extreme caution like Dictator, for Guile its Blanka, etc but obviously these things aren’t game breaking for those matchups. And the crossup walldive stuff is bad more cause of aesthetic reasons than anything. It really only a little better than a 50-50, and there are plenty of those types of mixups in this game. It just feels terrible when you get unlucky and lose all your life to it that 1 time out of 10 or something.
His pokes are really what make him so damn good against most characters especially against shotos he can just shut them down if he knows what hes doing, and I definitely wouldn’t call that aspect of his game “braindead”.
Sounds like you’ve had one too many Vega sticking a claw into a dark place.
I’ll still posit that Vega is neither retarded nor easy mode, though. If a Ryu throws a fireball when I’m only half a screen away, he’s doing it wrong. As a Vega main, I’ve seen that there’s still plenty a good Ryu can do in a fight. It’s certainly not just a walk in the park. Claw’s got great pokes, but you can’t spam them, since jab DP beats low strong quite cleanly. If I don’t predict a fireball from full screen correctly, there are a ton of things that beat wall dive.
Vega’s very good, but I feel he’s been properly balanced in HDR. I don’t think there’s a single character that I get a free win against (like I did against Guile in ST).
Vega is almost never under pressure in this fight. From full screen, he can just turtle all day, from half screen, he can jump fbs and pressure with superior limbs to push towards the corner… Once he gets Ryu knocked down in the corner, its practically game over, because you can just spam max-range slide and st. forward with practical impunity. Throw in some cr. strong and you’re gravy. The tips of those normals are not encompassed in the vulnerable blue box so they’re invincible.
Obviously you have to know spacing of moves with Vega, but not having to worry about fireballs is something 90% of the cast can only dream about
I’ve gotten my low strong and my slide dragon punched before, but I’ll have to take Vega into practice mode and check out the hitboxes on those moves; maybe, like you say, I’m doing it wrong.