After my last post in the general forums, The Tier List Project, i realized what the general forums are actually for, so for this post i will adhere more towards that audience in a more acceptable thread.
In the Doom forums I gave the definition of Rush down and Keep away which i feel most people don’t truly know the meaning. So here i will reprint it and pose a hypothesis.
Rush Down: A Strategy in which the main goal is to eliminate space in between you and your opponent. By applying constant pressure the general goal is to limit your opponents time to think and stop your approach which remaining as safe as possible.
Keep Away: Another Strategy in which the main goal is to keep as much distance from your opponent as possible. Because of the nature of this strategy it is important to use safe moves that will still do damage whether it be chip or on hit it doesn’t matter the damage is still done. As long as the opposing character stay at a safe distance the strat will be successful.
By these definitions i think both can work in marvel although i have already admitted that Rush down is easier accomplished. I hear many people saying Keep Away is impossible. However, i think most of those people have keep away elements in their game and don’t even know it due to the lack of knowledge of what keep away is. I think Keep away is just a second tier strategy but just like character tiers it can be successful it just requires more skill and focus.
I hope to hear peoples ideas on both keep away and rush down strategies and hopefully educate some who are ignorant to its definition.
I personally prefer Rush Down over Keep Away. In a Rush Down, you are constantly harassing and anticipating your opponent making a slight misjudgement or miscalculation due to the pressure and you capitalize on it. Plus with Rush Downs, you can open yourself up with a lot of different varieties of combos.
As for Keep Away, I used to mess with it here and there in MvC2 (spiral,sent/com), but not really my style of playing.
Rush down is the natural mindset. Keep away is always going against the grain. Even in slower fighting games, Marvel being very fast and rush down oriented, rush down is still the natural disposition. Since most damage comes from directly hitting the opponent, a lot of keep away strategies can lose the lead VERY EASILY if they are reached or there set up is compromised. That being said, keep away takes more focus and adherence to a plan. Less improvisation flexibility and less reward for success makes it an up hill battle.
-Dies to Phoenix teams
-Best keepaway assist aren’t keepaway characters
-Meter building
You won’t be able to play pure keepaway for long. Forget the concept of maintaining maximum distance and run a chip team where the opponent eats chip creating anxiety and feels the need to rush in where you take advantage of them with more chip and big damage on hit. It’s keepaway without the running away part.
I’m going to ignore the idiot above me because i have already addressed him in the Doom Forums.
I definitely agree with you that rush down is a more natural mindset. Its almost instinctive for people to want to attack with normals up close and personal when first playing a fighting game, then to sit back and methodically wear the opponent down. However, you shouldn’t undermine sub-strategies in keep away. Most of the best keep away players use initial keep away strats to lure the opponent in and then capitalize on mistakes the opponent makes trying to force their way in. It definitely requires a high degree of focus and experience.
I still think it can be viable in Marvel though. Actually due to severity of damage, projectiles alone can be enough to kill a whole team, and then x factor can allow you to zone better and gain life back as you do it. I feel like keep away right now is still untapped because the game is young but even for some characters like phoenix is already kind of intuitive. Jump back, tracking fire ball is so simple yet effective with a whole strategy built around it, it could become as if not more effective against some of the most popular teams right now. I feel like rush down characters like wolverine and Ammy might be found out to be less effective when people start tapping the potential of keep away.
Just to throw it out there here are some characters who i believe are broken if not extremely annoying when an effective keep away tactic is applied: Trish - possibly the best keep away character in the game.
Dormammu
Morrigan
Phoenix
Doom
Sentinel
Arthur
Modok
Chris
Deadpool
Taskmaster
I feel that keep away is very much viable but far less so than in many other games. In most SF games Dhalsim can compete very well with the rest of the cast by keeping them away and poking them to death. Sim pays a high price for his mistakes but good players can often still escape bad situations and come back to win the match. The same thing doesn’t really apply here because any mistake can and will lead to a dead character and a crippled team. And no, one character isn’t just 33% of your life. I also think that most keepaway characters are even more dependant on assists than other characters, so losing a character is even worse than usual.
Please don’t use the word ‘broken’ to describe these characters (except for Phoenix :P).
From your list, I’d replace Sentinel with Taskmaster. Sentinel has his beams and drones but he can’t do much to anyone who approaches him from the air. Also, Super Skrull isn’t really a keepaway character. It’s possible to zone with him but I don’t think that’s his strong point. No love for Deadpool?
Deadpool and Iron Man can be pretty effective at keepaway, especailly IM, that with the air mobility and long ranged normals and all. There is no reason to immediately assume that keep away means you want to fight at the farthest possible distance, IM for example is much better at mid-ranged keep away than full screen as he can make use of his smartbombs, repulsor blasts and air H, but none of them is fast enough to enable you to endlessly be on the offensive, unlike characters like Zero.
Like above, Taskmaster is far ahead of most of the cast in keepaway, since his arrows can be directed and do high block damage. Wesker can be pretty effective at it, back teleport creates a ton of space and gives him a lot of air time. Magneto is also good with his superior air mobility, fast dash, L disruptor, and shockwave. Similarly, Akuma has a lot of safe options too, and the constant threat of an air hyper beam is also a giant deterrent.
It comes down to a few things, does a character have good escape option? Can a character quickly punish a mistake? How is the character’s air mobility? Does said character have invincible hyper? How good/fast are his ground to air, air to air, and air to ground options?
So, considering those factors, you can see that characters like Magneto and Phoenix are extremely good at all the aspects, while sentinel and dormammu are good at some but terrible at others.
I feel like rushdown is the primary strategy in this game, imo. keepaway is still something that you should be able to use effectively with your team, since, really trying to rushdown someone like wolverine is just gonna get you blown up 9 out of 10 times or something to that effect. learning both strategies is pretty much essential to be an effective player, and it comes hand in hand with knowing your opponent and the characters he uses as well.
personally, my natural mindset is to RTSD but I will adapt if I know the opponent has a character that is going to be a problem up close. don’t take unnecessary risks in a game like marvel. cater to the tools your characters have and use them well. adapt accordingly to situations mid-match. did he whiff an unsafe normal or special move? go in and punish. is your keepaway strategy compromised? pushblock, get him off you, and try not to mess up next time.
Keep away and rushdown are simply opposing ends of the “controlling space” spectrum. Both work very well in this game and while it looks like rushdown is predominant, keepaway is a very viable tactic, especially with assists like Haggar preventing anyone from getting in and invading your space and potentially punishing them with death for doing so.
I still maintain the thing that makes a pure keepaway game very difficult to play in this game (along with the stuff Mr. X said, that was kind of a harsh reaction to decent points, no?) is the cooldown period of assists. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but having to wait for that critical assist can lead to really uncomfortable situations. And then you have to have the dicipline not to mash the assist once it IS available and may no longer be as appropriate as it was 3 seconds ago.
I hope you guys aren’t thinking that keepaway means killing someone with chip damage only or something. When Magneto is full screen away, chucking disruptars and hoping you jumpin and press buttons so he can Jab>Launcher your ass, he’s playing keep away.
Keepaway is less effective than rushdown, but there are still tons of viable keepaway tactics, and good players transition between both depending on the situation and the match up. Most of the good characters in this game are skilled at both, making this an easy task.
Check the Doom forum to see why he 's mad. It mostly boils down to “thoughts that don’t match my own will receive hate” and he’ll say you didn’t his post.
We’re going by the definition of keepaway in the first post.
And this is rushdown vs keepaway, most should know applying both in a match and being able to switch from them is most beneficial, but the topic at hand seems to be a comparison of the 2 tactics.
Lack of invincible AA assist in this game, weakened runaway and the bunch of offensive teleports make keepaway weak as well. No one is getting their MvC2 Cable or Storm on up in here.
But people is getting their Disruptars(+Drone), Traps, “Shot, Shot, Shot”, “Hadangeki,Hadangeki, Hadangeki” on.
Rushdown dominates in general, but with certain setups from certain characters, there is not much you can do besides eat the chip damage. It’s a less popular strategy but it can work and is anti-meta, so I think people will get some decent keepaway techs soon enough.
well i like this topic. i however form a distinction between “keepaway” and “runaway”. basically runaway tries to put distance between opposition by means of there own movement whereas keepaway tries to hold its own ground and push the opposition backwards…
obviously keepaway is better. but its for that exact reason that there really is no true forms of keepaway in this and most other newer fighting games… keepaway is straight broken. runaway on the other hand means that you will be seeing a corner sometime soon in your future.
in this game rushdown isnt more effective than runaway. its just that longer periods of rushdown are seen and of course rushdown does more damage over a shorter time period…
however, excluding wolverine, some form of runaway needs to be in a characters game in order to balance them out. lots of mags die 'cause of overzealousness in the form of constant rushdown. the best mag players balance play between both styles… ie some disruptor zoning followed by some neutral game fly turtling and then some rushdown right when the opposing player adapts to trying to play against runaway. basically its hard to be offensive when thats all your doing, and its also hard to be defensive when thats all your doing. you have to mix it up and catch your opponent off guard with either style.
in its simplest form this can easily be seen with characters like taskmaster and deadpool:
runaway doing charged m air arrows for tasky or air m guns for deadpool. when the opponent starts trying to combat this by dashing in… meet them with your own dash in and beat them to the punch with your own combo taking advantage of there dash in and inability to block a low attack.
^^^ in one form or another and varying in both tactics and complexity is how this game REALLY works.
rushdown isnt viable at a high level without some forms of stalling tactics.
The reason keepaway teams are generally considered weaker is because very few people do it right. Keepaway doesn’t consist of “x character + Doom Missiles”. It takes creativity and a lot of familiarity with the characters on your team.
With each character, you have to know how to counter teleporters, tri-jumpers, zoning, Wolverine, and Phoenix. You have to learn how to counter every angle of approach. Stopping super-jumps preemptively, countering projectiles, having assists to cover your point character’s blindspots, or using assists to generate low-risk offense; all of this goes into making an effective keepaway team.
Though the concept of keepaway is to chip them and keep them out as long as possible, the other concept is to frustrate your opponent into making mistakes and capitalizing on them, just like a rushdown team would. Characters such as Deadpool, Doom, Chris, and MODOK can hit hard when they get a combo in, and Trish can even set up an unblockable.
If you want an example of keepaway done right, take a look at Dios X who got Top 8 at RevLAtions.
Everyone whos’ posts i liked understands what i was trying to get at. Keep away right now is often misinterpreted for being mindlessly spamming projectiles which isn’t the case. Just like how just down has specific successful setups so does keep away however many people tend to like rush down better because its more natural.
I feel that keep away is underdeveloped in the game right now due to this but with a few smart players i think we will see the rise of keep away soon.
In this thread i would also like to develop or more well written definition of both rush down and keep away, lets try as a group to define them well, i think my definitions are only a good start.
Keep away ain’t about just running away nonstop, especially in marvel 3. If you get opportunities to pressure you take them. I play doom/storm/sentinel in marvel 3, i keep away and rush down.
I need to comment on this horrible accusation, Sentinel has the longest ranged normals in the game. Even Rocket punch hits at full (not expanded) screen range. Mid-unfly mid covers almost all the air space directly in front of sentinel. S is also somewhat useful for anti-air because if its block its not easily punished, on if whiffed. Sentinel also has hard drive which can deter anyone in the game from throwing out laggy special moves or even hypers. This combined with sentinels beams and drones make him one of the best keep away characters in the game.