st. MK is punishable on block and b.MP isn’t. That is largely the reason you see people doing it if they are auto-piloting looking for an easy confirm. Also MK and RH tatsu are better on hit from a b.MP->FP then from a MK->RH where they hit awkward or whiff entirely.
Hm I guess the scaling from cr. MP ->TC is generally less damage? Will have to experiment.
i don’t know why people say kens v skill sucks… It’s pretty freaking awesome in my play.
I can do gimmicky shit like cr.mk xx v skill into throw or pressure at the end of round 3 when my opponent is no longer looking for it. Or, against people that like to OS a jab press after blocking a cr.mk I can delay a fireball in their face to make them have respect and then I can set up vskill like that.
Kens fireball game is actually passable now and peop,e that like to try to backup into a reactionary range to jump over my fireballs on reaction can’t run away from me cause I just vskill into pressure at neutral.
Also at neutral at certain ranges I vskill into throw/cr.mk xx fireball mixup. Or from further away I vskill into fireball. I feel like with ken I have GOOD options at every range. V skill is the primary reason for that.
Yes there are matches/opponents where v skill becomes useless more or less. But in those matchups my opponent isn’t playing the game in a lame way so I can just play a regular neutral and bait them to death into my anti airs and counter hit game. V skill is for use against defensive players and I personally love it for that. Other wise the game becomes stagnant when the opponent backs up into the “easy to jump over fireballs on reaction” range. But when I have my v skill I can do it when my opponent t is expecting a fireball, or I can fireball if I think my opponent is expecting a v skill. To me it goes hand in hand with kens fireball game. It’s literally like bread and butter or ham and cheese or fireball>srk
The synergy is that good.
I don’t understand the “not looking for it” part. If it’s not cancelled from S.HP, it’s always punishable with jab on reaction.
It could be that im playing with it online and therefor lag allows me to get away with it. But I’m an sf4 ibuki player and I know how to setup command dashes when people don’t expect them and I also know how to use command dashes at neutral. His directly comes from using ibuki, offline. Since I never played online ibuki. I just took what I knew from ibuki and tranferred it to ken.
As far as always reactable though I will say this:
I don’t find it to be that way currently. I find my opponent has to be looking for it or on the lookout for it. I also find that I get away with lots of stuff for free once my opponent is “looking for it” like I can stop strings early and crossup since they are worrying about v skill… Etc etc.
I’m not saying it’s free or anything. Like a fireball it has it’s good points and it’s bad points and good times to use it and bad times to use it. I just find myself being able to employ a wide variety of mindgames with it, than I would be able to without it.
And yes I get jabbed out of it quite a bit especially against opponents that I’m playing against for the first time. But I adjust and take the direction that they are allowing me, a direction that is usually a direct result of the threat of v skill.
Ken’s V-Skill if you have good fundamentals is awesome. Whiff punishing with sweep gives you free offense, anti-airing with c.HP gives you free offense, etc. The key is to use it like you would Ken’s super from 3S by “confirming the hit” before you press the buttons.
Though I hope they revert the changes to the combo.
I am convinced after messing with him his v-skill has a lot of uses even if they are taking away the more flashy ones, but his fireball game is not ‘passable’. He is -8 on block if done between point blank and sweep range. It is SUPER punishable. Alot of characters can just raw super and he can’t cancel ANY medium normal without most of the cast being able to mash him out of it with jab and mika can cr. MK out of it for free every time. Alot of people just aren’t used to how god awful fireballs are in this game yet and when they see one don’t think ‘oh I should just fierce into combo’. Heck Ken himself can punish his own fireball with a cr. MP->Fireball activation at peak cr. MK range because of the extended hurt box.If you do something like cr. MP (point blank)->b.MP->fireball that is a FIERCE punish for a lot of characters.
From a distance his LP Fireball is pretty good because it is insanely slow and that sets some stuff up. Also his ex fireball is a pretty decent confirm for V-trigger. But his fireball game is not ‘good’ literally he can’t even cr. MK->fireball without risking a full on combo punish because someone can just press cr.jab at any range after blocking cr. MK and it will COUNTERHIT you into a combo. His midrange fireball game is literally non-existant.
I’ve been using his fireball game stellarly, but yeah most of my opponents I would say don’t know how punishable it is on block (me included) but I’ll say this, you of course have to space it. And your opponent in order to punish it with super, has to have a super in the first place which means foregoing ex moves and the like. It also means looking for the punish etc. I’m a good enough player to be able to use people’s over focusing in one area to give me stuff in another area.
Kens fireball game sucks when you don’t use v skill, I agree with that. And lots of characters have ways around fireballs, I agree with that, but so far I’ve been having an amazing time baiting lots of preemptive anti fireball stuff into a punish, or reactive anti fireball stuff with a vskill mixup. I feel like the world is my oyster with this character in many ways.
I can see why the fireballs are toned down though. In a game where the entire cast has lackluster range that is safe, the move that has infinite range and is relatively safe, becomes pretty broken.
As it is right now you can fireball people in their faces just outside of poke range and counter hit their pokes for near free, at least in my games.
I’ll re evaluate once people start to counter me on block, till then, I’m good.
I remember someone saying in the Ryu thread that you have to use fireballs more like pokes in SFV. Is that how you feel also @Dime_x ?
Yeah dj that’s exactly how I use them, I don’t just throw them out willy nilly. I try to hit my opponents pokes with them as well as zone with them from certain close ranges. I still throw them out at fullscreen and stuff, but it generally to stop my opponents ground movement or to bait out a reckless advance. The fireballs aren’t great from traditional fireball ranges, but they are great in another sense.
I’ve been using fireballs as pokes since I read Jeff Schaefer say he used them like that on A2. Specifically he said he used fierce fireballs from very close, near in his opponents face range and that it worked wonders against footsies guys like Valle and watts. But wasn’t effective against defensive players, at which point I can’t remember what he said he did but I think he used slow fireballs against them to take up space for longer periods of time and use as an approach option.
Daigo uses fireballs this way on sf4. Right in your face. And in that game you have focus to blow that up… In this game you don’t.
I haven’t had a problem with Ken’s fireball… in fact I prefer this much over SFIV’s style due to focus attack.
Though that’s probably due to all the other cool things Ken can use for advantage along with on the side neat tools. Fireball and predict opponent jump? V-Skill so awesome… meanwhile, trying with Ryu, it sucks. Would go as far as saying just because of V-Skill that zoning feels more better with Ken… on top of feeling more fun, having better whiff punish options for pressure and damage than Ryu, more ways to think when applying momentum-based pressure compared to thinking linearly with Ryu… idk.
I don’t see the point of using Ryu over Ken. Ken was just way more rewarding in Beta Phase 2, and judging by recent changes, it really doesn’t seem bad at all and it still feels like the kind of fun that’s still adaptable despite the changes, since it’s nothing too drastic to make him linear like how Ryu is now.
I pretty much only use fireball for hit confirms into CA\v-trigger. Outside of combos I would usually only throw them if I predicted a backroll just so they would have to block on wake up. Then I would run>overhead\cr.lk x2 hit confirm to keep up the pressure. Very rarely would I use it as a poke. And even then it was to hit confirm into v-trigger.
I think everyone is overreacting to Ken losing run combos outside of v-trigger. Compared to the whole cast he was lucky to even be able to use his v-skill in combos to that degree. To me it makes sense that he should only be able to do them during v-trigger as it becomes another perk of using v-trigger. Even though Ken in v-trigger is already pretty godlike,this is just another reason to use it. But if he was able to do run combos regularly again I wouldn’t complain…
My general feeling with Ken is that his st.mk is really good. Use it in footsies where they won’t be able to punish you and you can hit confirm it fairly easily. Up close his real buttons are his lights and his cr.mp.
Basically you poke with st.mk and cr.mp. Whiff punish with sweep xx run for oki. Pressure with lights and cr.mp once you’re in combined with tick throws. If possible end combos on a tatsu for better oki. Meter outside of VT is for punishing with EX SRK, fishing for VTCs with cr.mk xx EX Hadoken, and the occasional buffer into EX Tatsu in neutral or EX Tatsu divekick but not too often. In VT your air tatsus are pretty damn nifty and you can juggle mp SRK into hp SRK off a punch TC (not sure on kick TC). Run up on them with your vskill once you have them scared to press buttons but it’s pretty high risk.
Ok, I’m going to tell you guys how to throw fireballs right here. Some of you might know this, some might not. It took me a long time to figure out personally, but once you figure it out it is super simple:
How to throw fireballs… “WELL”
First thing you have to realize is the concept of “first fireball” first fireballs are the hardest fireballs to throw. They are the fireballs that you throw at neutral that your opponent can just jump over and combo you for doing, ON REACTION.
Once a first fireball has been throw though, a second fireball and third fireball and basically infinite fireballs can now be thrown in a much more safe manner. This is because there is no longer a crouch tell to the fireball animation. You just throw one fireball and then another comes out before you can crouch. There a myriad of reasons for this but I won’t go into them. Just understand the concept of “first fireball”
When I tried to apply first fireball concepts into my games at first I was horribly unsuccessful. People invariably jumped over my damn fireballs everytime… I had to throw out a million fakes or be obviously out of jump attack range before I could start my fireball zoning pattern.
But then I learned something obvious:
First fireballs are RIDICULOUSLY BAD at reaction jump range. The thing is though, reaction jump range is somewhat small. If you MOVE FORWARD you can step inside reaction jump range and at this point your fireball becomes an uber poke of doom. AND it sets up second fireball onward patterns. See the thing is, first fireballs are easier to react to so are bad at reactionary range (until mindgames are established) but second and on fireballs are still pretty good at reaction range because the opponent has very little animation to react to. Still though they are dangerous at that range.
Point being this:
Inside reaction range is where you throw your “first fireball” this then sets up the rest of your fireball game till your opponent decides to guess, or move backwards.
If they guess:
They usually do it on the second or third fireball. Take the combo and then bait them on which ever fireball they like to jump over from that point on. I can’t stress how easy this is to do… It sounds complicated but it isn’t.
If they don’t guess but instead play lame and try to back away to reaction range:
If you are ryu you have to move forward via dash or walking now…
Because you need to do another first fireball. It’s to unsafe to continue throwing fireballs from such an easy to react to range so you have to get back into the non reaction range and since that is fairly close, and your opponent moved backwards, you now have to move forward. Which is where actual skill now comes in cause the opponent t now has counterplay like walking forward when you walk forward or they can use a torpedo move like cannon drill etc etc mindgames you don’t want to go up against in general.
But if you are ken… You can just vskill towards your opponent and since vskill doesn’t have a forward input you never have to worry about an srk coming out directly after you move forward.
So what if they just bulldog and don’t guess nor move backwards?
This is actually one of the best scenarios:
At that point you can simply just throw basically an infinite amount of fireballs end on end. You will have to move forwards and backwards a bit to maintain proper “can’t reactively jump over this fireball, but also can’t outpoke the fireball” range, but in general this is basically fireball food territory.
You will get your fireballs jumped over, you will get combod or have them preemptively gone through. But it will be in your favor in general if you play it smartly.
If you have any questions just ask. But I’ll leave this daigo vid as a very accurate description of what I do. Only it’s daigo so he’s a million times better at it then me:
Also note that this is streetfighter 4 where first fireballs are much more unsafe because of focus fishing in general.
Ok it seems I lost people with what exactly a first fireball is. Well that’s what I’m told anyways. So pardon the pedanticness but this is what a first fireball is:
Any fireball that comes after any kind of “significant” delay in a fireball pattern. So if you wait around for 10 seconds and then throw a fireball, that’s a first fireball. If you do a fireball then a very noticeable delay into another fireball, those are both first fireballs.
The best rule of thumb I have is if there was enough time for the fireballer to fully crouch between fireballs, then both fireballs can be considered first fireballs.
A second, third and so on fireball denotes little to no timing gap between fireballs.
In the video posted daigo rarely goes further than second fireballs in the later rounds. This is because snake eyes always uses his breakout move on the second fireball.
Things snake eyes did on the second fireball:
Jumped it
Ex green handed through it,
Lariated through it.
Snake eyes consistently did this on the second fireball and he got daigo the first few times, but then daigo adjusted and started to do first fireball>st.lk and the first time daigo did this, snake eyes bit hard and jumped toward the st.lk and daigo srk’d him.
After that daigo got very wary of doing second fireballs and instead concentrated on doing lots of first fireball into immediate st.lk fake. If the st.lk fake didn’t work daigo would approach or let snake eyes approach him, and do another first fireball at close range, to close to react to.
It’s a “how to throw fireballs” clinic, basically.
Yeah it’s simple stuff but most players haven’t mastered these concepts, myself included, so that’s why I post them. Kens fireball isn’t weak in this game from the games I’ve played. It’s just that you have to use it differently than other traditional fireballs. It’s much more used the way daigo uses his fireballs in that gief matchup imho.
Once again, feel free to ask any questions.
omitting the moveswap mod, two new audio for Ken: ShinRyuken and Shippu Jinraikyaku
Maybe future CA…
Probably leftovers from what they wanted to call his EX DP and EX Tatsumaki
I wish he had shinryu in there somewhere, it would look sick in this game. or even jinraiykaku. not a fan of his current CA at all.
recording vocal work and developing the game are very separate processes, it’s possible they just had the voice actor record literally every special move they could think of just in case they decided to add it in later.
Same how they have some voice samples used in Omega SF4