I was playing Hsien-Ko yesterday and found her to be a delightful new experience so I’m giving her a whirl for a bit.
Dark force pendulum is so good and I’m really liking her fast and odd-ball looking normals.
What I’m wondering is how should I handle keep-away/zoning. I can get in with teleport, air dash/pendulum, but I’m having trouble getting a handle on how to zone/irritate with item toss. 6H is what I’m trying to work into my game, but the biggest hurdle is my gong usage. Most character can spam their projectile and there seems to be zero time to get the gong out. Does the light stop/reflect with the same intensity as medium and heavy? I.e. is the only version difference the range/duration.
If this is the case then I assume that I should open with A.Gong to give myself breathing room to set up B or C gong. Any advice on this would be helpful. Really want to be able to handle projectile spammers on point…that said hooray to not be able to do anything about Beam supers.
Also I was trying to confirm what I can follow-up with after her command throw? Is it version specific or not? been trying but the timing seems real fiddly to land a Tenrai-Ha after command throw.
Some more combos using extender assists. Used Hsien-ko/Morrigan/Doom for this session. Replace with your teammate of choice and see what works.
Tested on Doom this time so it should be less likely to be character specific.
cr:l: st:m:+:a1: (Soul Fist) cr:h: :dp::l: (soul fist hits) (pendulum hits) j:m: j:h: (1hit) (land) cr:h: st:s:
:u:/:uf: j:m: j:m: (j:h:) j:s:
–360k+ meterless midscreen. Unlike the earlier combo into pendulum with Phoenix assist, this one should work on most/all characters.
–Delay launch before aircombo so you don’t fly under the enemy. Timing on pendulum cancel is suprisingly lax, hardest part for me was just not getting st.H instead of cr.H right at the start.
cr:l: st:m: cr:m:+:a1: (Soul Fist) cr:h: (soul fist hits) st:m: cr:h: st:s:
:u:/:uf: j:m: j:m: (j:h:) j:s:
–Similar damage to the above combo, but probably causes less scaling if you’re going to do a super afterward. However it seems to be more spacing-dependent than the above combo.
cr:l: st:m: cr:m: cr:h: st:s:+:a2: (Hidden Missiles)
:u:/:uf: j:m: j:m: :rdp::l: j:l: :rdp::l: :dp::l: (missiles hit) (pendulum hits) j:m: j:s:
–~410k meterless, super-easy to confirm, not terribly hard to execute compared to some extender combos. And it looks cool.
–~560k with Tenraiha ender in corner.
–Ender sends the opponent miles away unless cornered. Haven’t really experimented with different enders after the pendulum yet but for midscreen it would be great if you could land an air exchange to bring in a character with an air hyper.
–Have to check if you can use this aircombo or something like it after the corner gong loop, or any ground-based extender combo (like, if I could do combo number 4 here, and if enough time passed to allow me to use the second assist…)
–Use M pendulum against a cornered opponent for more damage. You might be able to sneak another j.M between the last gong and the pendulum for more damage, but I’m not sure.
I’m pretty sure it depends on how the spiked balls hit. Occasionally one of them hits really delayed and pops them up a bit. Don’t know why that happens.
I like to jump up, Gong, air dash backwards and as I’m descending before I hit the ground i’ll gong again. From there you can double up on grounded gong and begin your item toss pestering and forward C zoning.
I don’t know about everyone else, but i’ve had a lot of success with the B version of Anki Hon. Gets people who love to jump, jump, jump.
So how are you guys dealing with teleporters as hsienko? Ive finally got the zoning down for the most part, but wesker, dante, and phoenix are still giving me problems. (phoenix not as much, but still, all she has to do is wait for me to gong and BAM.)
I remember earlier someone mentioned haggars lariat, but for those of us without the mayor on our team, its seems a bit hard.
wow, that’s awesome. Now if only I could hit the input consistently enough to beat spammers, I’d be pretty GDLK because that’s the #1 online tactic thus far.
Hmmm I like that she can combo off her regular grab in the corner and her IAD setups aren’t too bad, this is all training mode though so it doesn’t mean much.
Okay, I went back to training mode to see Tenraiha follow ups and found you can link a cr. after it. The timing is so tight and the only consistent way I could get it to work was if the hyper only hits for 7-8 hits. That would mean the weight or not all the balls hit, and you need to input the cr. right after. I managed to follow it up with the loop in the corner, but the hyper scales the hit stun so badly. D:
Might be useful, and I’ll try and get a video fo it.
Hmmm. My Hsien-Ko’s still a little lacking, but I played a buddy of mine about 20 times last night and he’s pretty terrifying with Wesker’s teleport game so I got a lot of practice in. A good get off me assist does help, but I found I could stuff wesker pretty hard sometime’s even without using mine.
Usually you wana start off with a little bit of standard zoning. If you do a few gongs right off the bat it’ll prevent teleports to your front side, and you can test the waters a little bit. Then cautiously continue zoning with 6H and Anki Hou. If you’re careful and not spammy I’m pretty sure you can anticipate any teleports that would otherwise punish you hard. But really, I only used initial zoning to annoy him and egg him on into more aggressive teleporting. Once things get going for real I managed to figure out a few things. First of all, remember that some of Hsien-Ko’s normal’s have big hitbox’s and a decent amount of active frames. I found that if you’re savvy, a lot of times you can bait teleports and immediately go on the offensive with j.H. It’s like playing her pseudo rush down game, except I usually just neutral jumped since he was clearing the space for me. If it hit confirms I’d try and go into BnB. If not I’d usually continue pressure for a little bit, and then slowly back off into more zoning and wait for the next teleport.
Another trick that works wonders is the occasional light or medium senpu bu. Try it on the air or slightly off the ground, either way alot of times he teleported right into it, and on a few occasion’s depending on the positioning, I was able to cancel into falling H, or M, M, to go to the ground for follow up BnB.
Also, if you just wana confuse the shit out of a teleporter, try dashing when you expect a teleport. Since her dash is essentially a teleport it gets pretty crazy. I don’t know how viable this is as a real strategy, but I tried it out one match and it threw off his game hard. It was pretty hilarious. I think he forgot how her dash works, because he’d teleport in, and all of the sudden I’d be behind him, and I’d her something like “what the hell?”.
Dante’s a little trickier I think, mostly because he has a more balanced moveset, and I have only played a few good one’s online so I don’t know how well this stuff carries over for him. And I’ve yet to play a good pheonix, so I duno about that matchup either.
I wonder why they changed gong’s input from Darkstalkers. It used to be qcb+A, now it’s reverse dp. The super that replaced that input used to be hcf+A.
I was messing around with items, didn’t find out much:
-Doesn’t seem like there’s a set pattern like in VS, which sucks.
-There like a 70% chance you’ll get a normal item(dagger, axe, etc), 20% you’ll get a dizzy(star, bonsai), 10% you’ll get a bomb.
-Bombs thrown from H have a higher timer than thrown from L or M(H bombs are 9 sec, M are usually 5-6 sec, L are sometimes 3-2 sec but can be 5-6)
L command grab has more range than the other two but does alot less damage.
I don’t have the book so I don’t know if that was covered or not.
I don’t have the book either but people have posted or told me saying that it’s based on frames. And it is ‘technically’ possible to get the same item every time if you are able to execute the command on the same frame each time. Not sure what the frame cycle is though, like 1 through however many objects she can throw?
I dont really think there’s a pattern with the items in MvC3, I spent 1 match literally just throwing shit while defending with AA assist and I couldnt identify any kind of pattern (I also won lol)
btw, has anyone noticed her items do really nice dmg on hit?
Been playing with Hsien Ko since day 1. Using Hsien Ko/ Ammy / Akuma
I find Hsien Ko not bad at starting the match with zoning and let people come to you. Her wake up game mix up is quite strong. J.M is best to hit cross up, J.H seems to be no hit box btw the claw and her body, so it misses sometimes, J.S is very ambigious if you air dash right on top of the character. I use her like Dhalsim zoning with Ammy assist. Her M has such a good reach that you can get combo off mid screen. Only problem is keep away characters, in that case, I’ll super armor Hsien ko and call in Ammy. With 3 + meters, i tag in akuma and play keep away, any unsafe move will result in akuma’s lvl 3
Hsien Ko has one of the best ways to run away from X Factor’d characters with her air dashes + Senpuu Bu. You can kill quite a bit of time up there in the air.
My Hsien-Ko is routinely getting slaughtered by rushdown characters. And i’m not that bad.
She only really does ok against projectile characters b/c of gong (Chris, Arthur, Deadpool), but certain ones still blow her up (modok’s beam goes over gong, sent lasers).
Her assist is GDLK, but i’m having to go into every match with some kind of gameplan to get her out effectively without getting killed for it. Two meters is also a lot to waste.
I think the best method would be to Dark Force her during a Triple DHC. Something like Hyper Sent Force-> Dark Force-> Hail Storm.
Also, Dark Force Pendulum gets absolutely destroyed by Hyper Sentinel Force. Because the drones come out no matter what, DFP will not interrupt him, and she’ll get hit for full unscaled damage. Does like 70% to her w/o Xfactor or anything.
after it. The timing is so tight and the only consistent way I could get it to work was if the hyper only hits for 7-8 hits. That would mean the weight or not all the balls hit, and you need to input the cr. 
