Do you guys want to talk about Hwoarang for a while? I feel like he still has a lot of potential in this game. He has good anti-airs, a DP with pretty decent invincibility on start-up, good pokes, a command dive kick which you can control. Players are still trying to figure out what to do with Flamingo Stance though. To be frank, I don’t own this game, I only borrowed it from a redbox for a week and I don’t have any money to buy it. But from my week experience, he is pretty good against close range characters, as long as they don’t have a dive kick, zoners and grappler characters were a mix for me. I don’t have a lot of experience against zoning or grappler characters. Grappler characters in general as well since I don’t know anything about Hugo, King or Marduk. Zangief though, I feel like it’s in Hwoarang’s favor slightly. Gief beats Hwoarang up-close, but I feel like Hwoarang can poke him to death. Can’t really go into further discussion since I don’t have the game, but it’s from my personal experience.
High tier char.
Has everything you want and need BUT…his pokes are kind bleh.
He’s like…a Tae Kwon Do version of Dudley actually but with a way better DP and a stance.
is she potentially a hard counter to guile? i just got absolutely destroyed by one and i couldn’t figure out what i could punish whatsoever. is that overhead safe? i don’t know the match up.
Overhead is +3. So yeah, pretty safe with potential to counterhit afterwards as well. I don’t play either characters so IDK about the match up. Seems like if Guile could keep her out he would win quite easily.
The bitch is MEAN up close.
i disagree with this in a way. i wouldn’t say he has a lack of anti airs at all. the part of your point i would agree with is that they aren’t exactly on the same level as someone like guile with his cr.hp. none of them are 100% reliable. imo his best anti air is actually his standing back medium kick. it wins clean sometimes, trades a lot, but it doesn’t outright lose much either. in this game, i’d consider that a good anti air. then add the fact that it knocks your opponent into a juggle state for a free follow up (super if you’ve got the meter). then you have his air ninja stars, air hk causing a ground bounce, st.mk and st.hk. i think some of the tekken cast would kill to have his anti air options.
she didn’t seem particularly easy to keep out, lol. but like i said, i didn’t know the match at all, so maybe i was letting them in too easy. but even then, her ex divekick seemed ridiculously fast to me, fast enough to punish sonic booms (unless i was just mind fucked at this point). they had her on point, teamed with asuka. so it was basically - block xiayou divekick, in my face, 50/50 mixup, stance cancel cr.hk, wakeup, same thing all over again, tag cancel asuka, damage, dead.
the minute i started to read the overhead, they’d just start going low, the minute i blocked low, back to the overhead. i think you have enough time to react to the overhead from a crouching position, rather than just a straight read, but it’s not easy when you’ve never really seen it before.
asuka is a totally different matter because i’ve played a ton of them. i think guile deals with her fairly easily (as far as i can tell at this early stage). the main mistakes i made against her were that i forgot to repeatedly alpha counter that long ass string combo she does, and i ate a couple of her mashed counter grabs.
so yea, this is the second character to mind fuck me. the first was ogre on like day 3.
Raven c.mp is a pretty good aa
Heihachi pressure hurts 
As a Xiayou and Guile main, no way in blue help xiayou beats Guile. She has like no way in, and Guile bosses her around at.mid range. xiayou has no footsies and limited/gimmicky ways in. Figure out how to bait out her slow ass divekicks and back layouts and you got q bitch who isn’t getting in.
Still love her but she struggle ij the neutral game
seeing that he has a dive kick, an invincible dive kick, real high low mixups, a dp and an anti fireball dash, giving him better pokes would be an overkill.
and i’m sure he has better pokes than most of the tekken cast.
Hwoarang is legit, top tier material, but some facts need to be set straight.
- His divekick is terrible. +2 on hit, +6 on block (if that makes sense), ridiculous startup, anybody with matchup experience will jump back or worse neutral jump and tag you. Best uses are escaping corner and instant air dive kick, because that hits as an overhead (as if he needed another lol) and you can combo off it.
- His weak point is footsies and damage is pretty average. If you have bar you can challenge cr.mk like moves with cr.lk/lp with buffered hunting hawk, but other than that do not press buttons in footsies. L Hunting Hawk is somewhat safe (-4) so you can use that to close the distance. Also s.hp with buffered launcher is legit.
His strenghts are mixing up the roll game because his combos end in hardknockdowns and he can corpse hop. Also he has probably the safest pressure in the game that’s not jab jab jab derp, Yang level of pressure.
i was hoping you were going to post because i knew you mained both.
like i said, this was the first time i’d ever played against one (and i haven’t tried picking her either), so all the gimmicky shit was clearly working on me. whoever i was playing definitely wasn’t just some random scrub though. easily one of the best players i’ve played online at this game so far.
i’ll take it into training mode and work out how to deal with it all. that overhead is still fucking good regardless.
The overhead is good. I would say its her best mid range footsy tool. But its slow and can be interrupted. It’s best for whiff punishing Kaggy lows like sweeps. She has limited ways around fireballs. She can Phoenix stance and duck under booms but she can’t advance too much because cr.mk will stop anything she tries to do in that stance. Her back turn stance is better for fireballs but she can only do back layout to close the distance. Ex tracks of course but it can be blocked. You can just alpha counter it push her back. Back fiat, cr.mk, st.hk all own her at max ranges. Her air to air game is amongst the worst in the game. You can also rush her down because she can do nothing about it. She doesn’t have the buttons to retaliate meaning she’s free to lockdowns. Find your best pressure strings with Guile and she takes it face down.
She’s awesome up close with jab, high low mixups and her stance changes. But characters like Guile is the main reason she should never be player on point. She can’t get in airlift wasting meter and even she she does its not reliable. Leave some baits out for her, destroy her air to air, and you have one of the freest matchups in the game.
If and when I drop Kazuya before Lars comes out officially it would prolly be for Hwoarang.
Or Raven.
Mission accepted bitches.
Hwoarang doesn’t go well with sagat imo, because he doesn’t dish enough damage coming in. Good for other teams though, he has the offense needed for this game.
Though since i just found out sagat builds meter with fake kick i might put him back in.
Lili = High Tier. GDLK mixups, pressure, counter, frame traps, anti air. Only thing she lacks is crazy damage(doesn’t matter because she can open you up so many times) and good footsies.
What makes Sagat very good is that he is a battery that can take damage, can deliver good damage(not amazing due to lack of chain combos) and has a ‘get off me’ move with tons of invincibility.
His normals are very good, his st.lk into cr.mp is very quick in your face pressure situation, completely safe.
Reaction jumps to high TS do not work, they are instant uppercut, which can also lead into f.hk into another TU…and if you have Heihachi on deck another 200+ added.
He builds meter of fake kick which is a great tool, only problem is some dick was abusing it with turbo online LOL
Sagat’s weakness is that Akuma can still whoop his ass into next year
Well yeah head over to the asuka boards and everyone short of me will say guile is one of her worst catchups shes a secondary character because her neutral game is so bad, now put her against a char that keeps her out and yeah its not fun for her.
with all that being said I’ve yet to have problems with guile but that may just be my comp shrugs
Man the thing that boggles me with sagat is his walkspeed. I’ve been trying to move away from slow characters because of sf4, but other than that he’s top notch stuff. Specially considering the strongest characters right now are fuckers like rufus and grapplers.