Yeah, GR just has no realistic way to actually hit someone. Outside of just randomly tagging jump startup with cr.H you’re stuck going for chip, and GR does not have a strong chip game at all. If you have a life lead, he’s alright. He can make getting to him frustrating enough, and any random hit leads into a full combo, but when you actually need to land a clean hit things are pretty bleak.
Penance Stare is fantastic and basically always leads to a dead character, but it’s not like you’re going to want to guess with 3 bars when you pretty much need to run GR on point and your other two characters could probably make better use of them. Against characters coming in you can actually make cr.M into a really ambiguous crossup, but it loses to coming in pressing buttons, so it’s nothing to write home about. At the end of the day GR’s best mixup is just going for some classic ST cr.L or throw mixups, but his cr.L is pretty assy and all you get off of a throw is a super so it’s not exactly going to convince the other guy to stop pressing buttons.
So long story short I feel that he’s pretty mediocre. He has favorable matchups against a lot of lower tier characters but gets worked over hard by pretty much every top character. He’s a zoning character that gets out zoned, and he has really poor mixup options when he actually needs to force a hit. Tack on the fact that he has basically no options for stopping superjumps besides air to air H which leads to nothing and has mediocre assists and he’s just kind of meh. Not unplayable by any means, but not really worth picking unless you love the character.
I think Ghost has a chance against Mags maybe Wolverine (haven’t really explored the MU much) and Wesker, is even with Spencer. Loses bad to Ammy, Phoenix and Dorum.
BTW, I have Doom on anchor and I gotta say that Beam assist is much better than Missles for Ghost and I thought at one point it was the other way around
Ghost rider’s strength lies in people being impatient. I’ve had more than a few people ask me the best way to beat him and I simply said turtle on him even if you don’t have a turtle character. The character is designed to keep people out and punish openings from most any range but he doesn’t have a lot to make need to come to him. I run ghost rider wolverine sentinel and if I’m facing a ghost rider with wolverine I usually win because I hang back and wait for an opening and the GR player usually gets impatient and provides me with one.
If you look at the matchup the way you’d expect it to be played wolverine matches up horribly with GR. Hellspire keeps him out fairly well. BDC on dive kicks and just throw out random H/d.h/j. S to stop berserker slash mixups. If wolverine hangs back and baits out attacks then he can get in and punish. When a character tries to get to ghost rider is when they have problems. If they stay away they actually do better because GR is more than a bit unsafe on whiff.
That being said I think he’s a great pocket character to have for any tournament player. He matches up really well with certain characters and forces the opponent to make that adjustment from rush down to turtle.
I’ve been trying out Rider/Dorm/Hawkeye with moderate success. I’ve been investigating the Purification assist with Dorm with mixed results. For the most part is functions like a gimped Jam Session, but it is useful for getting a small amount of air control. I use Hawkeye Triple Arrow in conjunction with heartless Spire to try and keep pace with faster projectile character and avoid lame out, the results have been better here. The speed of triple arrow makes it hard to stuff and Hawkeye has a low enough profile that it’s fairly easy to protect him (unlike Sent or even doom who are pretty big and just stay out forever). Has anyone else been putting work in with Ghost Rider lately?
I’ve been playing a lot of Nic Cage lately. I run cage, nemesis and dormamy. cage dormamy are BFF for sure, nemesis I like on 2nd point and since his super OTGs it’s an instant kill on any character if you land a hit and have 3 meters w/ cage (xxx,H,H,you-dare-touch-me,burn,dark-hole,eat-chain,H,H,you dare touch me,burn,nemesis ground-bounce,you dare touch me, THC = 1.1 million and you only neg 1.5 meters) Here are some observations:
If someone is unfamiliar with the GR matchup they get blow out of the water quick, almost perfect-ed
Once they catch on, they have to do one of 2 things: stay full screen and try to out-projectile and out-zone him or 2: teleport like mad.
Against people who are super jump happy and like to teleport on top of you, a naked standing S is a surprisingly good anti-air, and if they are really predictable you can get a free air combo out of it
Against people who rush down brainlessly, push block and punish w/ H,H->combo
Chicken blocking (up+back rather than down+back) is really good w/ ghost rider to avoid mixups. It looks really cheesy and newbish but it is effective. A lot of mixups go to waste if you’re jumping all the time, and if you constantly hit S you have a good chance of tagging the assist that is needed for the mixup to work (i.e. whatever he calls in to cover his teleport behind you).
If you have a beam assist or heatseaking assist instead of dormamy (iron man, strider, doom beam etc) doing instant overhead S or cr.H is a poor man’s mixup, and the beam lets you combo after wards.
If you ever get in the unfortunate scenario of GHost Rider being last, kara-LookIntoMyEyes w/ standing M is GDLK, you can do it from 2.5 character lengths away. The motion is super easy if you do it like this: forward>M>down-forward>down>down-back>back>AA
Nic Cage biggest struggle is against players that have high priority aerials and teleports. Zero for example is a nightmare, his air spinning green sword move whatever that is, covers all angles as he is coming down, and out-prioritizes everything. You either need S-Tier assist to cover your ass or be godlike at blocking
Bottom line is this: Nic Cage needs to be played first and on point, you must be surgical w/ your combos so that any H, Cr.H or assist that lands = 700K or more damage, because hits are few and far between. He needs an assist that is very good to help him control space and convert hits into combos. Teleporters are the only real people that give GR a lot of trouble. Other supposedly good “zoners” like hawkeye actually struggle because eventually you get them in the corner, then all it takes is one poor assist call and it’s happy birthday.
I’ll start recording and uploading my online forays but they are not that great.
I like your post Bruce, everything you said is I’ve found true, I run a similar team (Ghost/Nemmy/Doom) and I’ve been pondering about learning Dormammu to switch out for Nemmy but I never got the hang of the dude.
Also I’d like to point out is that Ghost can kara everything off of his mediums, I find using this with Judgement Strike (projectile special move) gives the move more range. For you beam users you can kara chain of rebuttal full screen to make sure it hits.
I want to post videos as well, but man online is so ass lol
Dorm is too easy, great assist w/ dark hole lets you combo off of any random chainswing basically, and he is a good anchor for the following reasons:
Teleport that goes right on top of or right behind them in the air, and since the throwing and teching system in this game is currently broken just mash H for an easy and safe option select.
His blackheart-like beam me up move (don’t know what it’s called) is great to get that last pixel of health
Great for burning built up super, if your opponent burned X-Factor just activate and do all the big fireballs you can and you win
Level 3 that OTGs easily after any throw or air combo. Any hit should lead to death basically if you have enough supers.
One observation I forgot to add: one of the really annoying things for NIc Cage is people that super jump up and do downwards projectiles (wesker gun, doom chiken fingers, taskmaster arrows, storm lightning spheres etc). To counter this, super jump up and do Air+H. It’s just one hit w/ no combo potential after, but the range is wicked and after you stuff that aerials bullshit once or twice it encourages them to stay on the ground (where you’d rather have them).
I did some online today too but you’re right, the easiest of combos get dropped, it’s low level matches for sure, basically people just sit and mash Cr.L L L L L L L until they land a random laggy hit and then do day 1 vanilla air combos. Meanwhile I have to do everything 2 seconds in advance or face eating shit. Too bad I live pretty much in isolation LOL, no good local comp to speak of.
Hmm, maybe I should run GR on point. My team is nemesis/GR/Doom, but I think your order sounds better, esp since I use nemesis assist to extend GR’s combos.
The team can go both ways, I find that GR sets the tempo better than Nemesis and Ghost gets more from Nemesis assist than Nemesis gets from Ghost Rider. But Nemesis DHC into Ghost Rider does really good damage better than the other way around.
I watched a bit of the first vid a few days ago. I agree with a lot of the things you mentioned. Ghost Rider is low tier, but wins in a few common match ups like Spencer/Wolverine/Magneto and he can beat a lot of the lower tiers if you run into them a lot.
I find that people don’t use enough of his tools, namely Heartless Spire and Spirit of Vengeance, and sweep and his backwards wave dash. Also due to his likeness to Dhalsim, people think they need to keep away with Ghost and fill the screen with stuff. I find that the best way to play Ghost is to be offensively lame, slowly moving forward cutting off the place where people want to be and make them run into limbs (or in my case Doom’s beam assist) which leads to high damage combos or resets.
Where Ghost fails the most is when he can’t catch the people, in which case Doom missles would work.
If they ever patch characters in the game again, Ghost would need a few things.
An actual forward wave dash.
Heartless Spire should reach the top of the screen (not top of the stage like Jam Session, but where the life bars are.)
MORE durability on Heartless Spire. No projectile should get through it.
better hit boxes on chain of rebuttal so they can hit most crouching characters.
on the subject of chain of rebuttal, it’d be nice if it wall bounce was more consistent.
-Heartless Spire to be jump cancellable on hit or whiff.
-Heartless Spire to have loads of durability (like Gustaff Fire) or nullify projectiles (like Shield Skills).
I’m not sure what you mean by using SoV. That’s the bike super right? Do you mean just using the hyper armor frames to blow through stuff?
As for buffing GR, I would agree on more mobility cause I feel like that seems to be GR’s biggest weakness. I don’t think spire and chain really needs buffs. Spire is already really good and making it have a bigger hitbox and nullifying more projectiles would just make it kind of brain dead imo.
His chain of rebuttal hitbox not hitting crouching opponents can be annoying but since GR is usually backed up by assists, I don’t necessarily find it to be too much of an issue other than maybe buffing him up as an assist. Since GR’s :qcb::h:or:l: moves have a much larger hitbox than chain of rebuttal, I just use those on crouching opponents instead. (Dunno if someone else already mentioned this)
Assists like sent drones or doom missiles are pretty much perfect for GR. He can do :h:, missiles, :h:, :qcb::h:. If that hits, the doom missiles will OTG and allow GR to then do his standard :h:,:h:, :dp::l:combo and if they blocked, you have the missiles covering you.
Similarly with drones you can do :h:, drones,:h:, :qcb::l: and the drones will juggle the opponent if this connects and you can continue with :h:, :dp:, into the rest of his combo. The drone will cover GR on block.
Alot of assists seem to work for GR combos. So there’s other ones that can be use to combo from too but drones and missiles are just so good. I think single hit ground bounce assists like centurion rush or launcher slam end up getting the most damaging combos to convert from :h:,:h:, assist, :qcb::l: but they’re not as useful as missiles and drones on block and the timing can be trickier.
Spire’s increased hitbox would indicate where it should actually hit in the move. If you look at the move graphically it actually hits the top where the lifebars are, but the hitbox doesn’t go there, it’s top is a bit lower. Chain needs to be buffed so that wecan hit Wolv/Zero/etc with our standard bread and butter, L.Chaos Bringer would end our combo without doing the most damage we could. Plus, it’s kinda stupid that it misses crouching characters even if it’s hit confirmed from s.H,H and yes I know c.H works.
Hidden Missles is a good assist if you already have a ground assist helping Ghost, I’ve found that against rushdown with a beam assist, hidden missles sucks against keep away it’s not bad. I stopped using Sentinel, but I’m sure he’s good with Ghost, but he’s a huge liability since he has a lot of bad match ups.
Good stuff, Good stuff. Thanks for the shout out i think i heard in there? haha. You’ve more or less covered everything that a player would need to know before picking up Ghost Rider. I’ve actually had all the info I needed/recordings done for a while now. I just havent had the time to do any actual editing, but I might find the time this upcoming week hint hint (hopefully). The plan is to make this a continuous, but organized, Ghost Rider guide. The guide will be focusing on 3 major points. The basics (normals, specials, assist moves, hypers, etc.) The advanced (application of basics, meter management, screen control, etc.) and lastly, the larger portion of the guide… The specifics (Synergy, Matchups, Q+A , Anti-Ghost Rider, etc.)
Keep an eye out for more from Lvl5LazerBuddha including:
“working title” a bi-weekly play by play breakdown of my online matches from beginning of my journey to learning a new team.
“Online Buddha” Mr Whelan and myself take on the online world with new teams, new friends, and of course… new enemies.
Also… whatever secret projects MrWhelan hides. I don’t do combo videos so i’ll leave that to his creative mind =)
If you like what you see/will be seeing. You know the deal comment/subscribe. Youtube is in the Siggy =)
Now on the topic of Ghost Rider buffs. The goal isn’t to make him broken, the goal is make up his for weaknesses to make him less assist reliant. Make useless moves useful and slight tweaks to better is overall playIn other words Heartless Spire is fine. (you’ll see examples of its usefulness in my guide).
What Ghost Rider needs is:
Hell’s Embrace should be tapable (like hulk’s command grab) for a slight damage boost. I say this because Hell’s Embrace is GR’s only combo ender that effects that specific angle/area. After the hard knockdown the extra taps/hits shouldn’t effect scaling because if used as a combo ender, one would either continue with a hyper or use the opportunity for wake-up pressure.
Hellfire M should have a slightly further reaching hit-box. Lets face it… GR’s chip-game is weak. Having a close/mid-range (distance pending) safe-ish chip move wouldn’t hurt. I’m not asking for plasma beam/distruptor here. Just a little poking tool.
Hellfire H should have a slightly hightened angle and a shortened startup time. Mostly for anti-air options on GR’s weakspot.
Spirit of vengeance L and H should leave the motorcylce in a projectile state after release. (like she-hulk’s level 3). Situational i know, but there have been times where i’ll be beating up on an assist and a dante lets say, would teleport behind me. Plus i’m sure many uses could come out of the idea…
Lastly… GR needs a legitimate unblockable hand to hand command grab. Something to make him scarier upclose… once again I’m not asking for something like wesker’s 1 frame command grab or to make it Air Ok or even easy followup, but maybe something like hulk’s command grab. Making it comboable by hyper only or something. Just as another option thats all.
And thats pretty much it… all the other options such as jump cancellable Heartless Spire, increased durability, altered chain hitboxes, and better wavedashing can be accomodated for with, assists, altered BnBs, lots of lab time and watching our soon to be released guide. =)
, into the rest of his combo. The drone will cover GR on block.