Sagat still has a slight frame advantage over Ryu if you just compare their fireballs side by side I believe.
So if you’re playing some scrub Ryu that just sits full screen and tries to chuck plasma at you…then yea Sagat will win that.
An actual “fireball war” is mostly fought at mid range and involves more than just simply fireballs.
Ryu has a jump roundhouse that hits from like half screen away.
He has a better ex fireball than Sagat so focus dash forward is a risk and more often than not if a Ryu has bar a shakanetsu is coming. His ex controls midrange better than ex shot.
His crouching mk can stuff tiger shots easily especially when he uses his superior walkspeed to push Sagat to the corner where a lot of the match will be played. Sagat really doesn’t have an good answer for that button. Crouching mk to hadouken is now a true block string at almost every range with the heavy fireball buff.
He has Tatsu, super, and ultra all being dangerous and all things Sagat has to worry about at certain ranges.
The slower and faster speeds on his fireball now enable him to either keep up with Sagat at full range or have more screen control inside of that with the slower one.
Cr.mk is your longest hit confirm from a fireball cancel. It’s only mediocre because of its slow start up. Watch bonchan - cr.mk xx fireball FADC cr.mk xx TU is where he scores a lot of mid range damage ( something we lack).
He uses it in almost every match if he has meter. Fwd lk is one of his strongest buttons to again score counter hits at the mid range.
Hit the nail on the head with that one. Also forward lk is tricky for many opponents to deal with because sagat moves forward yet kicks low without crouching. Not to mention if you can reliably link cr lp then it leads into your fireball fadc combo of choice.
used to be the the recovery of HP tigershot was faster… this was in AE… but sagat was obviously “too good at controlling space” and since capcom created characters as fat as hugo and with jumps as retarded as elenas, guess who has to get nerfed to accommodate them? If you answered (Sagat) then that would make you a smart cookie!
So yeah, right now there is no difference in recovery. HP tigershot starts up faster for what it’s worth though… but it’s more prone to getting hit from half screen away with a jumping roundhouse.
U can dive under a fireball and uppercut their hands with a high kick kara uppercut. no need for ex. Lk can work too but it would be more of luck than anything as the lk kara takes longer to come out and the fireball would either hit you or the character would have recovered by the time your uppercut comes out.
Oh and im still reeling at the fact that xiao hai managed to 7- 0 Snake eyes. Ryan hart got bodied badly by snake eyes recently and sanford lost to him in the fall classic. Both sagat specialists…then along comes xiao hai and just 7-0’s snake? something aint right with this picture. still havent seen the match…waiting patiently for it to become available on youtube.
U2 will always connect after FADC backdash, U1 is character/spacing dependent (now that they nerfed the forward travel distance, sometimes it will miss completely or the first part will hit then they will fall out).
trying to lk kara DP on reaction to beat fireballs is going to be pretty much impossible. You’ll have a better chance (although doing it actually on reaction is still very, very difficult… more like prediction) with HK kara uppercut. the HK doesn’t have quite as much forward travel distance, but it is much, much faster in startup.
IMO, footsie OS’ing with tiger knee seems pretty risky (if it whiffs, or just hits not quite ideally, you could be punished). why not just do it with fireballs instead?
If you perform the o/s properly, it shouldn’t whiff, it shouldn’t even come out!
Just trying to see footsies from Zangief’s perspective. Where you use the finesse of the lights to beat the medium and heavies.
Say, you use your light pokes as defence against the opponent’s heavy pokes. A predicted o/s cr.LP or cr.LK xx HK Knee, would be a valuable lead in, to Red Focus.
Plus, an o/s into Tiger Knee has got to do more damage than a fireball, unless, your too far, and get ONE hit. I don’t know, any experts care to add.
It seems like Sagat’s cr.LP is godly, and would make for a great counter poke defence.
Plus, would tiger knee knockdown, give you all kinds of cool setups?
@Krimzn - What I’m expecting from the Snake Eyes/Xiao Hai match is that Snake’s plan is to do what he does against those hardcore 5 year Sagat veterans and Xiao just plays it very differently.
Also it could be that Snake Eyes is trying to adjust to the new Gief adjustments in a tournament setting.
Tiger knee sucks balls. The only option select worth doing is cr.lk xx TK on wake up to catch tech/focus/backdash ( but not against the Russian)
Even then get it wrong against gief and you are eating Lp SPD into death. There’s no reason to get fancy with gief. The only thing critical is that you use the right AA ( since gief has good jump in options) and you observe his meter situation.
Single TK ( last hit) would be the only time I’d use it to break focus advance ( nobody uses HK tiger knee apart from in combos , it has literally no use apart from setting up safe jumps after throw) , even then you might get low profiled into SPD - death. Even though it’s a tough match for gief , I’ve always thought he’s got a great chance if he gets Sagat to the corner.
watched the snake vs xiao hai vid. I gotta say, xiao’s footsies against gief are just out of this world. He almost punished every mistake snake made. I mean the guy made Sagat look good… which i havent been able to say in a while. that was a masterful performance.
The problem with using tiger knee in the way you’re talking about is if you hit someone with the tip of a limb and get the cancel into it, it is going to be too far and/or too long a startup time for the first hit to connect. It will not actually connect and combo as Gief’s green hand would. Instead they would just recover and block the knee and, unless the spacing just happens to be perfect (not likely in this scenario), punish you.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying and you’re talking about using it in some other way entirely.
OK, has anyone here faced being put in a situation where you cant throw tigershots?
What I mean is that since we have to input quarter circle punch or kick to do a TS, whereas all the opponent has to do is press up forward in reaction. I find myself on the receiving end of jump ins all the time.
I know that we would have to try to fake with jabs and cr jabs before throwing a TS, but sometimes you get hit with a fireball or a poke while faking a shot. And even when i dont get hit, its like my opponent doesnt jump unless I commit to the shot…the fakes dont make him flinch. There must be a tell, but i dont know what it is…i tried looking at myself but i cant see it.
There’s basically a spot just outside cr mk range where people can just dance in and out and theres nothing i can do. They are waiting for me to TS because thats the only way i can reach them, yet i cant because if i do i get jumped in on. I try the forward step kick, but there isnt much offence that comes from that after its blocked.
very frustrating because then people just walk you down and cr mk into fb or cr jab into tick throw and there isnt much you can do in way of fighting back.
Sagat is supposed to be a zoner. Tigershots are integral. How do i make mine unpredictable? i realize theres no easy answer, but if any of you have something that helped you improve upon it, i’d appreciate it.
Thats where your high tigers come into play, high tigers will catch the jump frames and also recover a (shitty) bit faster. Some matches believe it or not Shots are better used as a footsie supplement rather than a full on zoning tool. Like for example Ryu I’ll zone out, or Rufus say, but a character like Viper I’ll just do away with the shots and use my mobility to screw with their own spacing.
Also try crouching a lot, it will shrink your hurt box - giving you more frames to Dp.
Hi, I just wanted to share the Xiao Hai vs Snake Eyez set before the uploader’s channel gets deleted. There’s a lot going on in all the matches, so I’d like that all of us here analyse it and spot the key elements that made the difference between Xiao’s Gat compared to the countless Sagats that Snake has bodied before. Here it is