Rush Down vs Keep Away

Classic Fighting Games Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3
41

Having a teleport means nothing. That means after you teleport I push you back out. It means if I have meter and Dante wants to teleport I will round harvest/stalking flare to make him eat a free 300k easily. Teleports are unsafe and they are predictable, people who play against teleport characters expect teleport characters to…teleport. Shit…Dormammu can teleport too. Phoenix can teleport too. Deadpool can teleport too.Theres already anti-teleport character technology, that doesnt put a dent in the keepaway strategy. Teleports dont instill any kind of “oh shit” in this game.

Theres more to it than just keepaway and rushdown. If you try to play JUST keepaway with Trish or Dormammu you might not make it very far, you’re more or less telling your opponent “I’m going to chip you out until you come over here and try to fight me”

Because Trish isnt very good at chipping, shes just good at being a bitch from far away. They work in unison to get a win.

Also. Lol @ Keepaway being slow. Keepaway is not slow and keepaway can be done just as long as rushdown can be done. Maybe this explains why people dont try to switch up their plan and keep trying to plow through teams like Trish/Dormammu/Tron they think they will eventually get in.

How often do you blow up Dormammu when you get in just because he’s supposedly “keepaway” ? Not much I’m willing to bet.

42

exactly about the arthur situation. i recently started playing him and was having fun simply cuz I am a fan of that character thought I was confident enough to use him in a tourny so I went and used him only to get blown up as soon as someone got in on him. though I dropped arthur the past couple weeks and went back to my other zoning characters I am hoping to revisit arthur in ultimate hoping he is improved but atm he’s not tourny worthy… well winning tourny’s anyway. If anyone has a link to a stream archive of an arthur winning the entire tourny I’d like to see it.

Zoning pretty much like you said NEEDS a GTFO assist which atm there are only 2 true ones and a partial 3rd if you include hsein-ko. Word is Ultimate is going to have more of the zoning game. I played it at NYC fight club and the overall feel of the game I got did seem like zoning will be more prevalent. Especially when I was zoning almost full screen with Ghost rider with normals. I didn’t try Hawkeye but I’ve heard he has projectile normals. But anyway soon we will see the rest of the characters and I am praying a couple of them at least have a GTFO assist since tron and haggars are nerfed which I think is total bullshit.

only thing I disagree with is you sayin phoenix beats keep away. I don’t think she beats dormamuu at all. All you gotta do with him is try and get to a corner and drop a flame trap since she can’t teleport behind you and will automatically land in the trap for a kill. and if she jumps up back just purification into his yoga catastrophe ball which doesn’t disappear when she turns into dark phoenix so if you catch her up in the air you have a good chance at chipping her out with xfactor and multiple super fire balls (although that depends on meter).

Anyway yeah time will tell and I hope to God keep away is good in ultimate, not to take anything away from rush down I just hope they are both viable which I think they both will.

43

Dormammu is one of the few character that has the potential on paper to beat Phoenix clean.

44

The problem with keepaway in MvC3 is that some of the changes from 2 to 3 were designed specifically to stop MvC2 style keepaway. No more Storm staying at the top edge to build meter, no more Cable AHVB.

45

I think they tried to give new players a fighting chance, but still make the game ridiculous.

Therefore MvC3 is a contradiction, much like most new fighting games that have comeback mechanics and easy inputs but they seek out top players to playtest them at conventions lol.

46

IMO, it mostly depends on the character. For example, I love Jill, but if I try to play keep-away with her, I won’t stand a chance. Jill’s purely a rush-down character. I have Pringles for my keep-away purposes anyway.

47

unless assists change, projectiles get faster recovery, more damage and the ability to confirm into -real- damage from fullscreen pure keepaway will be bad. the risk vs reward is skewed towards rushdown period, because combos fucking hurt (one touch kill) and the ability to stay on someone unless they have a pressure killer assist (which can be used -both ways-, as the current ‘get off me assist’ also double as absurdly good pressure assists for some reason) is really good.

all of the characters who are designed with mostly keepaway in mind are low tier as fuck in this game, though that’s like two characters anyways so whatever.the common traits between them is that they have poor mobility, poor normals, and an inability to confirm into large damage from fullscreen. also they really suck at building meter because their projectiles don’t build a lot/are too slow/whiffed shit doesn’t build meter so even if they have the ability to confirm into whatever damage they can it doesn’t sync with the general BNB combo building enough meter to either end positive or even by itself.

at the moment ghost rider is looking to be the best ‘keepaway’ character in umvc3 because of that reason entirely. it’s so important to be able to damage off a person trying to get in’s fuck-ups instead of ‘welp i guess i do 300k damage to them, hopefully i can build enough meter to catch them again before they touch me once!!’

with the dynamics of assists changing and the removal of dhc glitch hopefully the umvc3 system will lean towards the keepaway game stronger, though i severely doubt that it will actually be significantly strong enough to warrant a true pure keepaway team instead of the hyrbid “keepaway until you can call your rushdown assist” thing that rules the entirety of marvel 3’s game.

another reason for projectiles being bad is because of magneto being able to piss on like almost every character with a projectile is dumb as hell but whatever. i don’t understand why on earth they decided to make him more ‘keepaway’ instead of just nerfing the fuck out of distruptor while maintaining his turbo speed

seriously one of the reasons people choose doom beam over rocks is because it’s one of the few projectile assists that actually beats magneto distruptor

48

Too many moves in this game give you hard and soft knockdown. Thats the problem IMO.
This makes continueing combos easier and maintaining momentum during keepaway harder. Haggar and tron would be fair GTFO assists if they knocked you clear across screen a la commando but as it is now, they have evolved to favor rushdown characters with self OTGs which just isnt right.

Because a lot of moves do hard or soft knockdown, it arbitrarily slows down the pace of the game at fullscreen. A large part of zoning and keepaway is frustrating your opponent by constantly denying their attempts to get in. As people point out as well, chip damage in this game is too low and will only allow decent keepaway characters to be “annoying” at best because its too hard to wear a character out like that whereas a good rushdown character only needs one opportunity to kill you.

One other big issue is metergain which blatantly prefers rushdown. There is an unscaled amount of metergain for the damage you deal out while keepaway only get a tiny amount from chip. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Now all of these points are just reasons why keepaway is hard but its certainly not impossible. I just hope ultimate fixes the following things:

-Higher damage but more aggressive scaling. This would help out zoners who only get a couple of hits, while still allowing combos to do the same amount of damage but the nature of scaling would maybe encourage more resets (especially now with DHC glitch gone).

-More aggressive scaling on meterbuilding. It makes no sense for almost the entire cast to recycle their own meter or even create a surplus (ie taskmaster doing a combo that requires 2 bars but he builds them during the combo anyway. This might encourage better meter management and less autopiloting. It will also make it fairer for keepaway characters who dont get a chance to do a lot of combos. Also use of level 3s would be more important decisions because they SHOULD be the only high damage moves in the game and if you earnt them you might have to think if it will impact the flow of the rest of the game for you if you have no meter.

-Hard tags should not be overheads. Seriously. I don’t mind them having decent recovery on top of them being incredibly fast but overheads? Whoever thought that was a good idea should be shot.

I have a few other things i would like to see changed like throws (1 frame and you can combo off the fully? Either damage scaling needs to be mire aggressive or some hitstun scaling should be introduced as well IMO) but theyre not really a priority compared to what I just mentioned.

49

Having a teleport means nothing? You’ve to be kidding me. You won’t be pushing anyone out after they kill you in one combo. Do you simply push Wolvie back out after he zerker slashes? After Phoenix L/M teleports? Getting blown up by naked teleports is one thing, but decent players will cover them with assists so I don’t follow your “unsafe” logic. I’d bet the bank that 99% of players cannot react to a simple front/back teleport mixup. Against characters like Phoenix, I sure as hell can’t.
And using Dante’s teleport as an example is a joke. Dante using teleport as an approach died about 1 week after release. We all know his is unsafe.

This isn’t to say keepaway can’t work. It simply has holes in the current metagame that prevent it from being a more dominant threat.

50

I prefer rush, but my team is organized to do either or depending on the situation.

51

keep away wesker w haggar lariat

52

On the point that this game has low chip, I beg to differ.
No, I’m not going to point at Dorm with LVL3 Xfactor and 5 bars waiting. Taskmasters Arrows fully charged along with at least one Drone from Sentinel’s A assist does great chip, especially to the low health beasts. I almost killed a Logan with just arrows, sheild bashing, and some drones. Taskmaster with Sentinel can’t go right into their runaway game ASAP though… I usually get a knockdown first, or I use Leigon Arrow on the opponents block. Then, I can get my tactics going. This team has a big problem tho… all three arrows and a Drone can get beaten out by Disruptors, Plasma Beams, Uni Beams, and Whirlwinds. So, I can easily get opened up unless I have Haggar/Hulk/Tron assist.

53

That didnt make much sense. Especially since you assume you’re going to land a hit once you get in.

We’ve already established that the best “keepaway” characters in the game are just as well suited up close.

54

I’m not sure what you’re talking about so we’ll have to agree to disagree. There’s nothing confusing about how Wolverine’s zerker slash opens people up, etc. In real games, i.e. not in theory land, people get hit by ambiguous setups. Jwong does, Viscant does, everybody does. That’s not an assumption; it is a proven tendency (in fact, an assumption in some ways implies that we’re talking about a single event here, which is arbitrary - there is no point in discussing whether a mixup will land in 1 situation for obvious logistical reasons).

I do agree that a lot of the top characters can play effective keepaway though (Mag, Phoe, Ammy, etc).

55

My first team was all in your face Wesker/Akuma/Sentinel, then I diverted to Akuma/Hsien-Ko/Sentinel and now, I finally settled on (for now) Hulk(AA)/Akuma(Tatsu)/Sentinel(drones) and I start off each match playing Hulk keepaway using gamma wave and sent drones, does decent chip and depending when the drones hit, you can keep them in blockstun for ages. Not to mention if they call an assist and I catch them with gamma wave, I can repeat it until the assist dies, which normally forces some semi-reckless attempt to hit me, which more often then not, I meet with standing H > combo.
With drones timed right, this team can even win the distance war against Mags or Deadpool.

LA!

Anyway, I still need Akuma to RTSD as keepaway Hulk is not best in every situation, but it has been working wonders for me.

56

Keep away to me is to keep distance and pepper your opponent with projectiles, create frustration and have them rush in and make a mistake, then you punish them with a combo. Rinse lather repeat. Keep away isn’t meant to kill your opponent from full screen although sometimes you come across someone who can’t get in.

Everybody gets what rush down is, get in, apply pressure and punish. I love Spidey’s rush down game

57

There’s really 2 kinds of keepaway. There’s “keep you moving>wait to rush in>then punish”, which Deadpool, Dormammu, and Storm can do better. Then you have death by chip keepaway, which Chris, Arthur, Modok, and Trish do better.

Pick your poison. (No, not that kind! That goes in the SFxT forums.:rofl:)

58

Keep away isn’t viable in this game. People act like keep away ruled the world in MVC2, but in honestly it didn’t. Keep away was viable in the first few years of the game’s lifespan, then Magneto tech started being developed. What keep away characters who weren’t rendered obsolete by Sentinel were pretty much raped by Magneto. Honestly since 2005, there hasn’t be a really good keep away team in top 8 Evo MVC.2. You have teams that are more defensive in nature like Santhrax, but Santhrax was viable because of it’s crazy lockdown ability along with Storms rush. It was a versatile team, but had it just been a pure keep away tea, it would have went the way Team Wats, and Spiral/Cable. Yes you can beat a new to intermediate player with a keep away style, but at higher levels keep away is really hard. Aside from Sanford and MAYBE Duc, Cable was pretty much obsolete in Marvel for years.

Keep away in MVC3 doesn’t work for several reasons:

GTFO assist - Basically what made what keep away that was in MVC2 good were assist like Capcom, and Cyclops. So approaching the point character was dangerous. these assist either had fast startup or invincibility. Such assist don’t exist here.

Smaller screens - Some people said this helped keep away in the beginning, but it doesn’t. The smaller stages make it much easier for characters to close the distance. Sure you probably can’t jump projectiles as easily now, but it’s way easier to push your opponent to the corner.

Punishment - you’re better off going bat shit and flailing at buttions hoping for a random hit than keeping away. A lot of times when you check a character trying to get in, it’s hardly worth the damage, and you waste meter.

Meter - This is the biggest thing. You gain no meter from keeping away! You gain pixels of meter just chipping way at your opponent, while they can do stuff like tag assist and get way more meter than you do. A lot of keep away characters are only damaging when they do have meter. There is nothing to be scared of when you have a meterless Arthur, Trish or Dorm.

Keep away was deliberately nerfed in this game. You can only perform maybe 3 air actions, when in MVC2 you had pretty much unlimited air actions. Screens are smaller, so there is far less manuverability. Sure you can run away but where the fuck are you going to run to? There is zero to no threat from a keep away character unless you are willing to spend tons of meter. A lot of keep away teams have battery, but that’s impossible to do at full screen since you only build meter by touching your opponent. Unless they address the meter management issue, and the stupid system of building meter as a whole, keep away teams are never going to be great in this game.

59

MODOK IS the “Keepaway until you see an opening and then punish and pressure” character.

60

Converting into big damage during zoning is much harder than converting into the same damage during rush down. Without meter, you need assists that work really well with your chosen point character to pull that off during zoning. Say, Ammy Ice assist with Dorm to give you time to give him a chance to power up, or Spencer horizontal grapple wire assist + any zoning character with a long range poke (beam, limb, etc) to convert into a combo. Rush down is pretty much just get inside behind the cover of an assist, get a hit or grab off, convert into combo. So much easier, so why bother going through the work involved with strong zoning when you can just take some chip/damage, get in once and kill a character faster?