Wait, wait, wait! You mean to tell me that she was supposed to be a female Rock Lee?! :o
In all honesty, I don’t like her personality but I can appreciate the variety of personalities in the game. I tend to like characters who have a silent, serious personality, e.g. Guy. So Laura is definitely a change for me. I can probably say that as much as I enjoy Laura’s similarities between Laura’s gameplay and Guy’s gameplay and Laura having just about everything I wanted Guy to have in SF4, I feel like she still needs to be better. I’m not saying that she’s not viable but her whole game is guessing - either making others guess or guessing herself and I really don’t like that. I mean SF5 is based on the whole guess game but hers is to the extreme but I guess all grapplers in this game are that way and I’m not sure if anything can be done about it. By the way, I can’t stand her English voice, it irritates the hell out of me.
We discussed shimmying in one of the other threads (or maybe earlier in this thread, I can’t remember), but the gist as I recall was that laura’s slow walk speed and short range on her normals doesn’t really lend itself well to shimmying. Not that you should necessarily just stand in place in neutral, but shimmying tends to benefit characters with high or moderately high walk speed the most, neither of which describe Laura’s walk speed. In fact, she’s kind of the type of character most likely to have shimmying used againt her, once again do to her combination of mediocre walk speed and extremely below average range. I’d recommend you do a search on the forum for the conversation if you’d like to see others thoughts as well, but I feel like that was the gist of the consensus.
As for her personality, like all SF characters, she’s not well developed thus far, but from her minimal dialogue, story mode, and animations, particularly her intro dance, she strikes me as very confident, as some one who likes to fight, who is very proud of her fighting style and her body, and as some one who has more then a little bit of an exhibitionist streak. I mean, seriously, that intro animation. If she had come out in 2010, there’d probably be a video of her online by now to the tune of “I’m sexy and I know it” as that seems to encapsulate her personality quite well. This is different then, say, Cammy and Chun-li who are all business in their intro, target aquired, I’ll show you my kung-fu, I’m not here to show off, I’m here to accomplish my goals. Could Cammy be an exhibitionist too, we certainly don’t have enough evidence to say definitely no, but nothing about what we do know about her suggests why she’d wear a thong, let alone one with out pants. But Laura aint’ wiggling her booty in her intro because she’s got ants in her pants, she seems to think she looks good and seems to want to make sure you notice.
Cammy’s refusal to wear pants pisses me off tbh, given her character is suppose to be all business. I always subbed her in the SF games because I like the way she plays, but some elements about her design always irked me and it only gotten more ridiculous as the years went on with her alt costumes. But it is what it is. At the end of the day, it’s just fiction.
I agree with you 100% on this. An easy example being every dark skin Laura color thus far comes with some jarring lipstick color. It’s annoying. There is only 1 dark skin Laura color I’ve seen that I actually like and we don’t have access to it yet. It’s JP exclusive.
Oh the subject of walk speed and throw baiting, Nash’s walk speed is pretty slow too. If he can do it with that walk speed, I’d imagine Laura could to some degree. She’s not like Bison with the Makoto walk speed.
I’ve come to the realization that by playing bad players you’ll learn to play a bad Laura. None of her stuff will work against players who mindlessly press buttons so you’ll be conditioned to play an extremely dry and basic frame trap game which doesn’t utilize most of her tools.
I’ve recently been trying to be a lot less conservative when playing good players, and it works, IF you’re smart about it. But by having mostly played against bad players there’s this seed that has been planted, that everything she has is a gimmick, and it’s not actually true.
You could argue that this is universal, that by playing bad players you’ll only learn how to play a poor, limited version of whatever character you’re playing, but I think it applies to Laura much more than anyone else.
Actually saw a great example of Laura shimmy from DaFeetLee during NYU Spring Fest. He used st.hp mainly I believe, which makes sense because it moves Laura forward… I’ve also seen st.mp & st.mk used. So my conclusion is I think it’s very viable to shimmy with Laura.
Sometimes I feel I don’t play cheesy enough. I’m constantly told I’m “solid”, and probably 2nd best Laura… but eh, I don’t go for mixups/resets a lot. I think I should be… Other than, st.mp, ex fb, st.mk xx dash, or st.hk off of a juggle then dash. I don’t really do anything else.
New to SF so ,can anyone explain why Mika is considered the best grappler character universally? What puts her over Laura , Alex or Zangief. Also why is Laura considered a grappler when Birdie and Necalli are not?
Mika has amazing tools for the grappler archtype she has amazing oki, legit 50/50 mixups and a crazy strong offense.
To me the grappler Archtype uses its 50/50 mix-ups which typically revolve around a command grab OR a normal attack.
I personally would class Birdie as a grappler as he reminds me of SFIV gief BUT i think he is overlooked as a grappler due to his amazing zoning abilities which makes people see him as a footsie type character, just as necalli is a rush down frame trap type.
Lauras whole gameplan revolves around her command grab its possibly as important as the SPD is to gief
I’m going to disagree with this. Laura’s command grab is a useful tool to catch people sleeping or people who just want to block all day, but I don’t consider it as important to her gameplan as it is to Gief’s or even Mika’s. Normal throws and her Bolt Charge enders are far more important to her play IMHO as far as her grappling moves are concerned. Her EX Fireball is also very very important. I feel Laura is more comparable to Necalli than Gief or Mika in how her command grab compliments of her other tools as a character.
I can’t figure out laura neutral. I feel like she can kind of whiff punish some stuff ok with crmp and sthp, but my poke don’t feel very threatening, especially with her kind of slow walk speed. And because they aren’t afraid of my pokes, I can’t get them scared so I can dash in for pressure.
First off, your best poke depends on the matchup. I’ve found 5HP works best against Alex and Rashid, but 5HK is best against Karin and Birdie, try to find the poke that works best against the people you’re fighting if you’ll be playing that game.
You should also try not to stay too much in the neutral game and remember that 2MK can cancel into LP bolt, and that both of these are safe. You tend to win against other characters if you’re up close and pressuring. LP bolt covers a lot of distance and stuffs a lot of moves, so you can use that to approach and even if you get blocked, you’re only -2. Once you’re up in their face, you have lots of safe moves and mixups that you can use to build off your reads.
I started fucking with Laura all yesterday. I played a bunch of casual matches. I don’t have the meaty setups memorized and I don’t know how to reset. I don’t know how to effectively use her fireballs or how to use her dashes to mix up my opponent’s spacing.
I thought I could just pick up and go with her like Abel but man this is rough. I mix myself up trying to go for mixups sometimes.
Man I love this character but I’m getting a little bored/burnt out… Would like to train up another char to cover her bad match ups, or just for fun… I dropped Mika a while back, I can’t go random enough lol. I dipped my feet into trying out Ken a while back but it wasn’t really clicking at that time. I use Ryu as my side character right now, he’s so fun. But I want someone else… Maybe Chun, Vega or Necalli… FANG also seems really fun…
I’m at that point too. It’s starting to get stale so I started playing a little Karin and Cammy. Idk which one I like more for a secondary. I can’t juggle three characters