I’ve been playing a lot and thinking about Laura matchups so I’ll just go down some posts that stuck out.
No one really addressed this. I haven’t been able to fight that many Birdies (the shoto squad is strong with my connection apparently), but 5HK is your friend for this matchup. A lot of the stuff he does can be interrupted by it, and if you get even one CC from it you can do huge damage and then you’re close to him with a knockdown - ideal Laura situation.
Try to wait him out, Birdies have to get close to you to apply real pressure, their chain approaches are SUPER (I mean over -20) unsafe, and I see a lot of Birdies spamming that, thinking it’s free. Don’t let them do that, and use your MP bolt charge after blocking given how hugely on - they are. At that point I’ve seen they resort to jumping a lot, and Laura has great AA tools.
I agree, especially against Boom-spammy Nashes. Try to slowly get in just close enough to block them such that LP elbow will hit, or if they move forward, 5HK will hit. A lot of Nash’s moves have huge startup, especially his command normals, and when they follow up a Sonic Boom with one of them you can almost always crush counter 5HK. If they try another sonic boom, LP elbow or walk up a bit 2MK -> elbow will work. Be patient, there will either be openings in the attack string or you’ll push him back into the corner, and watch for his VT.
Honestly I feel like Laura’s mixup game post-knockdown is solid against almost everyone (so long as you know how to read DPs!), the real question is getting in, and I hope that I’ve helped people get in against Birdie and Nash some.
I’m still having trouble with Ryu since the speed of his fireballs makes him a lot harder to get into than Nash, but I’ll keep trying.
My mate has the most defensive Nash and it drives me nuts. Can’t get in… gotta walk and block like you don’t have a choice.
One thing you have to note is that any calculated chance you can take to get in you take it and just go ham and apply total disrespect… dude doesn’t have a dp… thank god.
Any f.hp is a lp bolt… thats immediate advantage and you are ready to smash! Just make sure you don’t forget where Nash crumbles which is in the corner. Do anything you can to get him in the corner… also don’t forget about dash forward grab… that shit makes me cry
So claw bodies laura from seemingly everywhere on the screen.
Fireballs? Braindead sweep from like 3/4 screen.
3f st lk into pressure for your troubles after blocked lp bolt charge.
Walk speed says no to jab or mp pressure. He just holds back and lk or st lp.
Relatively easy for him to anti air with v trigger or st hk or just get out of jail free card if you actually do land sunset wheel or a forward throw to reset the neutral he wont stay cornered.
On the defense side his jump arc is extremely difficult to AA and fast. He has 6f command grab just like laura and gets free meaty cr mk into whatever he wants on knockdowns. And his shimmy game exploits the hell out of lauras bad walkspeed. I feel like this matchup is lauras worst imo and makes chun feel fair by comparison.
I actually have little to no problems against Claw. His slide is good but that only means that you shouldn’t be throwing claps at him, at least not at a range or timing where he can react. LP Bolt should always leave Laura at disadvantage, I don’t understand what’s different about his 3f 5LK compared to anyone else’s 3f normal - hell, it doesn’t even matter if they had a 4f normal, Laura will still lose to it after a blocked LP Bolt.
I’m not sure when you’re applying jab or MP pressure but he should not be able to simply back out of it. If he’s really insisting on just holding back, go with 2MK and you’ll catch him walking back and you can cancel into LP Bolt. Eventually, he’ll learn to stop doing it, not that he should be doing it anyway.
I feel like Claw’s anti air is lacking, if you jump in with HP, he’ll have a hard time dealing with it from my experience. V trigger does get him out but considering that Claw doesn’t have a wake up and you can just abuse him on knockdown, I don’t find it to be a problem. Claw’s jump is pretty fast but it’s nothing that Laura’s 5MP can’t handle unless it crosses up. Claw is definitely probably one of the easier match ups for Laura in my opinion.
How do you handle his walk speed and neutral buttons? 5mp 2mk 5lp? He literally walks me toward the corner with buttons and i get CH to death or confirmed into big damage.
I usually just jump at him, enough to get him scared to press buttons at neutral anyway. The thing is with Claw’s 2MK and 5MP, if he’s just throwing it out haphazardly, it leaves him open for jump ins. Even if Claw blocks the jump in, it leaves you close enough for Laura’s frame traps and he’ll have to get out - in other words, he’s in a bad spot. Claw’s anti airs are actually pretty poor for the most part so Laura can take advantage of that with a high priority 9HP if you’re expecting an anti air, otherwise, 9MK does the job just fine.
When he gets a little less button-happy, then Laura can start attempting go with with raw LP bolts to get in because it covers a lot of distance and she gets her mix up on hit. Essentially, this will stop him from just throwing out buttons and give him something to worry about.
I wouldn’t really attempt to whiff punish Claw’s 5MP though, it’s too fast and too far to punish with Laura. Claw’s 2MK is whiff punishable if you want to play that game with him but he’ll most likely stick to 5MP if he’s trying to play footsies.
On paper, I think Claw has an advantage but in actual play, I feel like it leans in Laura’s favor. Think of the match up like Dhalsim - once you get in, you try and stay in and they’ll fall apart. At least that’s how I go about the match up, if someone else goes about it differently, then feel free to chime in.
hp. bolt upclose against gief players who are too happy with their knee hammer game. tried this on some giefs, also breaks the morale and puts them back in their places lol.
lolwut that’s amazing. Need to try that out. HP bolt in general breaks gief players, antiair them with it once and they’re terrified of you for the rest of the match.
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The second game was brilliant. You cracked the turtle, man.
I think it works against all of the normals with airborne frames. Tried against some overheads. but its easier to land it against gief, cos he is bigger and some gief players like that move too much.
I think some of you guys are playing Laura wrong. Just got to gold with Laura today after picking her up just a few days ago, and what I learned is she’s not a rush down character. She’s a setup 50/50 character, and she’s particularly awesome at 50/50 air resets set up using her fireball in neutral. She’s the only fireball character I’ve ever seen with such a deadly mix up game, and you can only really unlock her power if you her treat her as a fireball character first.
Here’s how. you use her HP fireball in neutral you can force your opponent to do one of two things: jump at your or back into the corner. Even if they go to the corner they will jump at yo eventually. When they jump, most of the time s.MP is your best AA, it’s an AMAZING anti air in a lot of situations, AND it puts them into a 50/50 air reset. So I HP fireball, back them down a bit until they get ansy and jump, then air reset them with s.MP and the mix ups begin. It’s very common I kill someone off one s.MP into reset knockdown into mixup and then into stun into death. You just have to be patient and use HP fireball at a safe range and rhythm where you can force them to jump when you want them to jump, then it’s death for them. Once I have meter also I burn through it like kindling for those EX fireballs in NEUTRAL, because they are sooo good at setting up this 50/50 air reset I can’t believe I don’t see anyone else doing it.
For fireball characters I just go into a fireball war until they crack, they always do, because Laura and can charge and go through two of their fireballs and slowly back them to the corner (see above) or get into sneaky jump MK range. And then once you build meter you have EX bolt too (which I’ll tend to save up for instead of using EX fireball for fireball heavy matches, like Ryu).
I’m telling you guys, maybe this is my Ryu background speaking but you really got to learn a patient fireball game. But instead of setting up a pretty weak DP like Ryu does, your setting up a killer s.MP air reset 50/50 mix up, or at other ranges a HP bolt into a knockdown/meaty setup. Burn that meter for EX fireballs in neutral! Her super is worthless anyway IMO.
The secret to winning more matchups with Laura IMO is really learning how to use her fireball in neutral without getting blown up, first, and then second patiently using it to make your opponent jump at you a range you can s.MP it.
So I just got beat pretty badly by a Karin player; not that I didn’t feel like that it was a bad match up for Laura as it is. She got away several times with random high-lows but she didn’t get too much from them. My opponent was really good at shimmying and abused Karin’s 5LK a lot. Karin’s 5MK pretty much kept me from doing anything inside of effective range. I didn’t feel like there was anything I could do against her. My claps were easily punished by rassenhas, jumping in was hardly an option (she almost always had meter to EX ressenha), any pressure I was able to mount, she would V reversal or simply do an EX ressenha. My opponent was smart enough not to EX ressenha between strings all the time, just occasionally, enough for me to stop my pressure when I tried to bait and would get me more often than not when I was expecting her not to do it (is this how it feels to play against Kazunoko???). I was at a complete lost as to what to do, more often than not, Karin would win the round with >50% health, that’s how badly I was losing.
Also, the more I play, the more I feel like that the smart opponents would quick rise from knockdown and just block and there wasn’t too much Laura could do about it. I mean, sure, Laura can do meaty set ups but none of them are meaty enough for her to be at advantage so I would just be negative after the meaty and it would just be their turn. I feel like that if Laura’s whole game is to make them guess, going with the meaty option probably requires the least guessing for the opponent. Granted, going with EX command grab if they quick rise is an option but it’s not like Laura has excess meter to be burning to be doing that all the time. Outside of EX command grab, I don’t think Laura can go for a grab option if the opponent quick rises, can she?
Well technically just dashing in and going for a throw is always an option, its just not necessarily a meaty option, and is better or worse depending on the knock down, but if your opponent is always blocking on wake up, its worth at least testing their reflexes. Obviously the problem is that they can react to the dash in by hitting their fastest button, off a sunset wheel you’ve got, what, +14, and forward dash is 17 frames, then SSW is 6, so your already -3 after the dash, plus your adding +6 more frames to the SSW connecting, so just about any button will beat you, but if they’re instinctively always blocking on wake up, none of that matters, it just matters how many frames it takes for them to realize you didn’t hit a button and do something else. Off a back throw you’re, what, +20 (I’m going off the frame data in the laura combo thread), here dash forward into SSW actually makes more sense as an option because 23 frame from dash to SSW means you’ll throw them out of even a 3 frame jab, they basically have to do an invincible move or jump and you might consider mixing in a normal throw to hp.bolt if they do jump. Mp bolt with a kick ender gives +18, so now we’re back to losing to quick rise jabs, even 4 framers, but you will beat out anything slower, and they’re going to need to mash out that jab pretty quick, and if there doing that, well now you’re back to using meaty normals as an option.
So yes, ex SSW is nice because at 19 frames it can get there 4 frames faster, but other then the extra damage, thats largely what its giving you, 4 frames less for your opponent to react, but if your opponent can’t react to ex, there’s a chance they still might not be able to react to normal dash in throw, so I do try for it on occasion.
I think you’re mostly right. I’ve won a lot of my matches not by rushing down and using my good close-up tools (3f jab, 5/2MP, mixup into LK sunset because the range on that is huge, etc.) but by hanging back and waiting for my opponent, and playing a scary fireball game, and then after getting a single knockdown by HP bolt charge or 5HP/HK CC reads, making the opponent guess over and over and over again. I think more than a fireball character first, you can treat her as a mixup character first - once you get your opponent in the Laura Lightning Lock, you can keep it going and do a ton of damage.
That said, I think the attitude of “don’t think about rushdown first” doesn’t apply for some matchups. If you’re fighting Chun Li, for example, you can definitely rush and blow her up since her main reversal option, EX SBK, can be really predictable.
Good work on the air reset setups lol, I keep being too predictable on those and end up back at neutral. I need to work on my air reset game…
If your opponent tries some meaty setups on your wakeup and you have full meter, go for it. The CA seems to go through anything and if you’ve conditioned them not to jump it can pay off. It’s a bit of a shenanigan though, kinda like wakeup Corkscrew Cross through a meaty.
Off of the Sunset Wheel, it’s pretty easy to use ‘OS’ to beat either meaty or dash up grab. All anyone would have to do is hold back for a frame to block the meaty and press a button and it’ll beat out either grabs. So they don’t have to react to anything, it covers both of Laura’s potential options. It almost feels like Sunset Wheel puts her in more of a disadvantage situation. I guess it’s a viable option if the opponent doesn’t know this ‘OS’ but we can’t really count on that to win.
MP Bolt + K with dash up grab is actually really good, it’s difficult to beat even when I put it on the test dummy. The problem now I guess is that if I get a forward throw, what can I do to put them into the meaty-or-throw mix up? I’m pretty sure she can meaty fine with 6HP but I don’t think she has a throw option here. I guess I can always opt to go with back throw because her options are much better; with what little I tested, both regular throw and Sunset Wheel beats 3f normals so they either have to tech, jump or backdash and Sunset Wheel beats a throw tech.