Hey guys. I was looking for some Ultra SFIV matchup help vs Dudley. I usually use DeeJay, but at this point I simply don’t think the match up is winnable. I swear I’ll go into more detail below.
I thought I’d try coming over here and see what you guys think of the matchup as the DJ forums are more angry than informative and it sometimes helps to see a problem from both sides.
So breaking down my experience with this matchup, DeeJay’s mission is to shut down ducking. I feel like if I can consistently punish ducking I can take the round. I usually accomplish this by whiffing cr.MP as any other button gets beaten if the Dudley opted to jump in and I can cancel it if it was hit into some damage. My biggest problems with this are st.HP and its truck of a hitbox. My other problem is I can’t really push with fireballs to maintain space as buffering ducking gives Duds a free in and usually 400 damage while I’m still recovering from throwing my projectile. Probably the most difficult aspect is that once Dudley gets in I HAVE to know that you’ll be standing and I HAVE to know that you’re pressing a button before I can reversal so I have little to no recourse once Dudley begins what he does best; pressure.
Maybe I should correct myself. Dudley’s best aspect isn’t pressure. It’s damage. And that’s my biggest problem. I can’t make up the difference in damage potential. I often feel like I’m playing against a boss character with rounds being lost after near perfect play to a single 80% damage combo series. 40 seconds of perfect reads and spacing only to be hit once and then guess wrong. I block the low and get hit with an overhead for the other 50% of my health. Sometimes I block the mixup only to be thrown into another un-reversal-able series. (i.e. cr.short meaty setup) And if it hits it is death.
I was winning 4-6 whenever I sat down to play vs this Dudley in AE 2012 which, ironically, is what the matchup is considered. And I consider this player and myself to be of pretty equal skill. But with Ultra Dudley got another tool that just destroys DeeJay completely. Ultra 1. Fullscreen punish and I’d swear it clears the full screen during its 8f of startup… I’d hit my breaking point last night when I AA’d him and slid to get a bit closer. He did NOT ukemi, but woke up with U1 and punished the recovery of my slide. I still don’t know how the hell that worked out. I thought it was the dumbest thing he could’ve done and he just threw it out and ended up crossing the screen and punished the end of the standing animation of the slide.
At one point we were generally running 4-6 vs each other but last night we played over 40 games and I won 1. And honestly, I feel like that is the matchup right now…
What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? What am I missing? I’d love to hear everyone’s opinions. I know a lot of people may write this off as a “Don’t use DeeJay loz lolz lolz” but I think some of my problems, no matter how bad the matchup may be for DJ, stem from how I’m approaching Dudley. Which is why I am here.
Do you know how to play Dudley, and are these matches online? (I know you’re the DJ.)
Dudley vs DJ is “at least” 6-4. Dudley wins the match up for many reasons, but here’s some big reasons why.
Ultra 1 goes full screen, does 500 damage, and punishes almost everything Deejay has.
Deejay gets comboed easily. Dudley has a link that does 400 damage without special move canceling on Deejay and can juggle Deejay easier than any other character. Any hit on deejay means he’ll build a bar. If Dudley has one bar, deejay eats no less than 300 damage.
Deejay has no answers on wake up against Dudley at the moment. If deejay is knocked down, its probably over.
All of these matches are offline vs my good friend and roommate. I played Dudley some in 3s and I sat down with him in USFIV to go through his frame data to understand better when I should be trying to create space vs when I’m being baited to but I don’t main or 2nd him as a character. Great example was the st.HP being -4. I was respecting that too much and just letting him continue pressure where it wasn’t as solid as I had thought it was.
“Deejay has no answers on wake up against Dudley at the moment. If deejay is knocked down, its probably over.” - Truth
That sentence combined with how ridiculously effective U1 is sums up why this has been such an uphill battle for me. I played him again yesterday and it ran the usual 6-4 Dudley. When I say that I’m watching the win/loss ratio from vs and seeing what percentage of wins vs losses we have. I take that and compare it to what the matchup should be and see if it’s fitting the bill so to speak. There were several games in that set that were mine with an easy 60% health lead that was killed by U1. Full screen punish of projectile recovery.
I find that he (the player, not Dudley specifically) tends to be very dependent on being in my face doing blockstrings or mixups though. He tends to be like that in general though. He comes from a Virtua Fighter background and he tends to be much more comfortable with blockstring pressure than playing a more traditional footsie style SF game. i.e. He simply doesn’t know how to effectively whiff punish. Because of that I tend to control the neutral and that’s where I usually get my health leads from though DeeJay’s mini pseudo-vortex is pretty decent vs Duds cause you can perform a kneeshot that’ll whiff DP. I just know from what I know of SF and how that neutral game should actually go that if he ever starts doing like I tell him he should be fishing for vs certain characters and hitting those whiff punishes w/ st.HK that neutral may end up going a different way.
Okay. Complete side note. Holy shit, Thirtyfour. We’re both huge fans of you!
Totally didn’t read who had replied to me; just read the comment. Thanks so much for your time! <3
In terms of dealing with the pressure from Duds I have a couple different things I alternate through to create space. These are all hard read scenarios so it’s hardly an answer and this is just considering times I choose not to block, but I tend to on wakeup do a lot of focus backdashing. He’s started taking advantage of how far he can push me to the corner by cancelling a button into LP MGB and catching my backdash(which sucks) but as we played I just started using it more sparingly. I also, especially in corner, might just do a quick focus and backdash on hit or block to push him away and create a little space between us. He hasn’t really figured out what to do here and likes to use st.HP to get back in my face, but it’s beaten by DJ’s slide and from that distance the slide seems really hard to punish on block. I know doing this is extremely risky, but there is so little DJ can do in that position when Dudley is close up that by risking and creating that space it give DJ a few more options. Correction. I was doing this but I’m not going to anymore because I just realized that on hit Dudley could U1 me. . . I’m making a great case for learning frame data at the moment… Yeah, if DJ is in the corner he’s probably completely dead and there’s little outside of the hardest of reads that will get him out.
Random question. Does Dudley’s U1 travel fullscreen within the first 8f of the move? How much time does it take to cross the screen? I feel like the buff to U1 has made this match even more disadvantageous to DeeJay. The 2nd half of most matches where I’m in the lead just boil down to Dudley threatening with buffering ultra and me pacing and playing footsies. I win when I get him to walk into buttons and I lose when I attempt anything else. Matches where he gets the first hit are over as soon as they begin half the time. He gets one hit into a mixup and I have 10% health left and I tend to just hold forward to get to the next round as there’s no point trying to do anything else from there. It’s so disheartening too when he is guessing wrong so much and eating what I think are foolish hits for being overly aggressive, then he gets one hit, I guess wrong once and I lose the round I was winning by a huge margin… Bleh…
You’re right about how to approach Dudley somewhat though. Just try to stay at the edge of his LK/MK duck range and you’ll be golden. Too far away and he’ll be able to react to fireballs easier. Too close and you’ll probably get clipped by a s.HP, c.HK or something.
Actually at your max range sweep is almost fine. Set the pace of the match with lp fireball , s.MK. if he tries to duck under it it’ll get caught by a 3 hit combo or, close MK into a sweep or something. It’s a good whiff to do to not lose any stage since its almost not possible to react to it with ducking.
The DJ Vortex vs Dudley is great. Jump MK is extremely ambigous on Dudley, and makes his DP whiff no matter which side you’re on if you set it up right.
Try this midscreen, forward throw > whiff c.MK, jump MK if you delay the jump you land on the other side.
Go into either c.LP c.LP xx HP MachineGun Upper or link into sweep to set up the vortex again. Never give him too much space, but be aware if he blocks j.MK he can DP since anything after it (unless it’s deep) isn’t a true blockstring.
Dudley’s ultra is 1+7 or something like that. During the 7 frames he travels more than half the screen. (the first part of the start up is just the cutscene.
Also do things like whiff jab, s.LK, and s.MP to feint fireball.
If you cant do dash ultra 2 after EX MachineUpper then use ultra 1 for the super xx Ultra chip. You shouldn’t need to spend that much meter against Dudley really. IMO the main times I see Deejays use meter is if they’re cornered and land a hit. They either go into EX Upper > EX Dread, or a HK/MK Dread FADC Combo into sweep or HP Upper.
Lol. Always looking to help man. I hope DJ gets buffed or at least his LK dread beating lows back. in that patch next week. GL brah. Tut
Yeah, I’ve got EX MGU to U2 on lock. I’ll definitely try whiffing the c.MK. Normally I whiff c.HP but frankly, I’ve never been a strong set play type. It’s something I’m working on now due to how strong it is in Ultra. Both to strengthen my set play and be more knowledgeable about defending vs it.
