how much bar is enough bar?
From the beginning of the round, your main goal on ssd is to fight as well as attack properly to build bar. This includes zoning and the like. Now being fully loaded is what you should aim for but this isn’t always a possibility. So how much bar is enough bar to start off? the answer is depended upon how much you understand about building bar with strider as well as attacking and maintaining trap. The patterns I know of do 80% per trap rep. This means I only need 20% of meter building outside of trapping to get a bar so for me, I only need 2.5 bars to actually get started with strider and maintain pressure constantly so my sentinel is only looking to build 1.5 bars. By gaining the minimal amount of bar I need immediately or carefully, everything else is a bonus because I’m able of turning so little into a lot so this type of strategy is a bit more steady mentally. You don’t need sentinel to build 3 or 4 bars to be truly effective. Some games, just sent building 1 bar is enough to come in with if you’re really careful and are able to recognize free and not free mini trap reps outside of dumping bar.
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screen freeze activation tricks:**
This is something I’ve been working on for the better part of a year. Whenever you activate, the screen pauses for the super flash aka screen freeze. When you put projectiles in the proper spaces near the opponent, these screen freezes cause unblockable projectiles to hit. Really devastating with the bomb and screen freezes animals can save your life.
Now using his point play to get some things to happen works but there are a few other layers to this. You can also screen freeze activate for your assists to essentially do the same thing. However, it seems like this screen freeze vs certain angles of attack give doom extra priority or something is speeding up instantly in the doom rocks giving you a an angle doom wouldn’t usually win @ for a free pin + options.
Another layer to this trick is to use your screen freeze to change your trap timing. It creates weird guard cancel holes for free easy relayer patterns but the trick to using this properly is to break down guard cancel attempts and see how your assists and how your screen freeze activation is interacting w\ the point’s options. You can usually notice when it works because it looks wrong but you maintained a tight trap rep.
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more to trap than just trapping:**
The core of this team is to force pressure by using strider’s orbs some way. When you pair strider with doom, your offensive pressure is chip damage. So you got your trap going on but there are multiple ways of trapping someone. You can activate and chip early which creates different ending options. You can activate and chip late allowing for a reactivation into another trap rep repeatedly and so on.
So is there a wrong way to trap? and the answer is yes. By using your pressure the wrong way, you don’t maximize every trap rep to its potential. Simply dumping bar to trap someone won’t kill them based on chip damage alone. Think about it. Every trap rep mid screen only does 10-15% chip or a little more depending on what you know. So add that up and consistently speaking its around 10 bars midscreen to kill 1 character. So chipping someone to death won’t exactly kill them if they block everything and just take the chip.
Essentially, there are only 2 types of traps with strider. 1, trap and trap again ala clockw0rk style. 2, gapped setups. Gapped setups is a very deep strategy that is very hard to break down if you know when and where to try these. When you do traps back to back and you’re successful @ this, you’ll realize that the opponent is hitting the assist button a lot. They want you to stop what you’re doing so they can move. So what you want to do is combine 2 of these strategies to form 1 strategy. By trapping someone repeatedly, you force them eventually call there assists @ the end of your trap patterns are where your retrap series begins. When you have this instilled into your opponent, this is where the 2nd strategy, gapped setups, come into play. By trapping someone 2 times, you can pretty much assume that they will try a 3rd time to get out because they’ve lose 30% blocking. No one is going to deal with that because its stupid. So on that 3rd time, go for a gapped setup and take a shot @ the helper. It doesn’t have to be the 3rd time, it can be the 2nd or fourth or 5th. Whenever you feel like your opponent is respecting your traps.
When you go for gapped setups, you can position yourself properly to allow the assist to pop out but not hit strider so this gives him a gapped setup but not enough time to get away from him.
Another + to combining these 2 strategies is that it creates 2 very different guard cancel trees. If you take early orb for chip, you create a much different hole than if you do late doom calls for repeated trap reps. The one down side to this anti guard cancel strategy is that if you take an early doom chip, your reposition string goes into many, many options. So picking the right one or figuring out the all the options can take a while but imo, its really worth learning.
Its tricky and it can back fire but if you break strider\doom down a piece of paper, having more than 30 bars is never an option which is the amount of bar strider needs to take out a whole team. There has to be a substitute strategy for when you don’t have bar and it needs to be effective.
Also maximizing 50\50 trap prevents strider from having to build so much bar. Trap, 50\50 during trap, if it hits, 50\50 reactivation pattern.