SSF4 AE v2012 - Official Akuma Changes Discussion

Classic Fighting Games Ultra Street Fighter IV
401

I was actually thinking of writing some personal v2012 matchup expectations, maybe I’ll do that later so we can share some thoughts.

And yeah, I agree with what you wrote. Though I see Seth along with those guys, and same for Yun: the guy’s still strong, just not retarded.

Mmh man it’s not gonna be THAT bad! I mean, there will be something we won’t be able to replace, like the crossup options off a throw, but till we get our hands on the game we can’t really say what’s going to happen.

I think where the nerf hurts us most is against those characters we cannot Tatsu > Sweep since it will be even harder to score KDs, but we still have the vortex (minus the H/L mixup, but whatever) off a sweep and all the DF knockdowns. It’s not like we’ll have to resort to fireball and zoning only - hell, everyone’d drop Akuma if it became like that!

402

The only set up they are truly taking away is empty palm because people will have no reason to block high against a palm.

The throw nerf does not take away setups (with maybe the 4 frame safe jump exception) rather is makes it incredibly annoying to get the same results.

Did they remove unblockables? Hell no, it just became harder to time
Did they remove all safe jumps? Hell no, it just messes with the set up
Did they remove nearly any of the mix ups we have now? Hell no, it just changes how we have to do them.

All in all the only thing the throw nerf accomplishes is to piss of the akuma players and nothing else because we have to go relearn everything just because Capcom wanted to be lazy about unblockables.

As I keep telling people, it was a stupid nerf that does nothing except make our lives harder. It doesn’t help any character who was free to the vortex, they still suck as much as they used to. As a balance change, they failed miserably with this one.

403

I think we may see Seth emerge as more people begin to play him/switch to him. I’ve been messing around with him just because he has a fun vortex/mixup game and plays high risk/reward which I like. Its just hard for me to speculate on him considering he’s relatively unchanged and the only person really exploiting him is poongko. Maybe Seth will move up in ranks as more people jump on his bandwagon and discover new tricks with him. The 5th place I left out because I really couldn’t make up my mind. I haven’t been able to see just how much the nerfs hurt yun in other matchups. Yang might still be up there too despite being smacked with the nerf bat so hard. Of course Evil Ryu is the biggest sleeper since practically no one was playing him in AE and after the buffs he’s a lot better and will get more overall love.

I feel like mostly the Ken and Ryu matchups are gonna be a lot harder for Akuma now, and probably E. Ryu as well. I think Yun and Yang will be a lot easier considering the damage and options nerfs. I didn’t find myself using setups nearly as much on them, despite safe jumps. I predict it becoming a lot closer to a 5-5 matchup. It’s weird because despite the Akuma changes I think he will still end up being pretty good in comparison to the rest of the cast, if he was left the same he probably would have ended up as the best or 2nd best character with Viper in terms of matchups. This leaves me to only echo what Loyal Sol is saying which is that maybe he needed a few changes (or rather other characters did) to fix his unblockables but the way Capcom did things is incredibly lazy. I know for sure there will be new setups found and a lot of blood sweat and tears going into Akuma’s mixup game (by players far better than myself), all I can say is that I hope Capcom doesn’t decide to do another revision and leaves the damn game alone after this.

404

Actually the throw nerf makes it impossible for us to cross up the opponent, at least with same timing that a safe jump will require. That compined with the palm not hitting overheads means that the opponent wont have to fear overheads (ok there is DF throw but…).

That or i miss sth ^^

405

I’ve asked you this before and didn’t get a reply, excluding corner setups and safejumping with DF palm/dive kick which can be blocked low and is a very weak mixup.

Can you please tell me how can now Akuma get in a position to go for j.hk safejump or cross-up tatsu? We might be able to safejump with j.hk from like it’s max range distance and that doesn’t give us any ability to crossup (i.e forward throw> 1 dash> tiny step j.hk).

Vs characters with normal wakeup time, we have to dash twice to get in the position for j.hk/x-up, that only safejumps 5f reversals at best, add 2 recovery frames and I don’t see how you’d worry about 4f reversals when in theory we won’t be able to safejump 6f and faster reversals!!

406

Exactly this.

The worst thing is that the palm the throw nerfs combined seem to hurt a lot our mixups stemming off a forward throw. I mean the opponent just has to block low (no more palm whiff in low mixup), and we shouldn’t be able to be to crossup him effectively. I mean, before the nerf the opponent had to guess/react between

  1. Crossup (Tatsu)
  2. Block High (DF Palm)
  3. Block Low (DF Palm whiff into cr.LK/cr.MK; Divekick)
  4. DF Throw

Now 1) seems to be gone since with more recovery they opponent will have already recovered, and the mixup between 2) and 3) became worthless - and divekick are easily blocked, being HL.

Basically if you get throw by Akuma you either get DF Thrown, or you just stay put in down back. That seems way easier than the above, considering Akuma cannot risk a throw half of the time.

407

One option i loved doing so much after a forward throw is jump forward + hp fireball which would force them to block on wakeup once you land hk Demonflip grab the timming for this is very easy cuz the block stun animation ends as you hit Df grab i fear this little gimmick will no longer work for me and my rushdown game as i like to use it when i condition my opponent into thinking ill used palm. :sad: Sad Face
Sf3 sounds better and better atleast Akuma is a beast on that game then this which imo makes no sense. It seemed as if Akuma was at his strongest in sf3 with all his SA’s then sf4 oh well… 3 weeks till i come home from job corps…

408

Pay close attention to the location test footage of Tokido playing.

The point I made some pages back regarding the palm no longer being an overhead doesn’t appear to have impacted the opponent psychology behind aerial attacks. Namely, they still block high. If I come at you from the air, you’re gonna block high - they all did this. As such, Tokido palm whiffed to change sides and slugged them with c.lk, c.lp, c.lp, lk tatsu blah blah mixups and setups as usual. Check out the Makoto and Guy matches for example.

On top of this, palm whiff setups also occur so fast that a LOT of the time opponents don’t so much defend high or low incorrectly, they actually block in the wrong direction, period. High or low has no impact here - the fact is that they are holding the wrong way. Not always, but a LOT.

This isn’t to say the palm nerf isn’t significant (it is) its just that whiff mixups are still effective insofar as player response is concerned and Tokido certainly demonstrated this numerous times.

Time will tell however. Players are gonna start simply blocking low once they see Akuma flip which means we’re gonna have to come up with new ways to mix-upthis response. (short palm shiff > j.hk perhaps, or a simply flip grab).

The forward throw is a massive kick in the balls because not only did it offer a safejump setup, but it also offered a potential cross-up tatsu AND a potential selectable fake cross-up via palm whiff or very late dive kick. Then of course the corner setups.

I think the main point a lot of you guys are still missing is the overall design intention behind these nerfs - namely removing Akuma’s ability to repeat iterations of mix-up setups. From a forward throw you crack open some serious 50/50 shit. They wanted to tame that stuff and nerfing forward throw + palm overhead achieves this. Fixating on the unblockables issue I think is secondary - its a (beneficial) side effect of their design decision to prevent setup loops as per what they stated on the developer blog.

Is there a better way to prevent unblockables? Perhaps, but this doesn’t change the fact that that they STILL want to cut down Akuma’s setup loops which they will do regardless. Its pretty clear what Capcom are trying to do here in terms of design and character balance.*

  • This doesn’t mean I’m cool with these changes, they make me sadface, but I still understand why they are choosing to implement them.
409

If some of you remember I said before that I prefer not to use normals to time my safe jumps. As it stands you can actually get in range to safe jump from walking and be able to jump too early. So from my set ups I can see it will still be possible to do many of the same set ups. So I think all of said options will still work, but again it just became a lot harder to time them.

410

Speaking of which, did someone post that here because I didn’t see it

411

I hope you’re right, I do not always go for the the x2 dashes setup myself, I use dashing once then walk and manually safejump quite a lot (Eita uses this setup very often too). It’s just that I do not see us being able to go to the range of x-up tatsu and still be able to safejump reversals with the added recovery frames.

Time will tell I guess and hope I’m wrong.

412

Just wondering if you guys would be fine with the nerfs if we got a sweep similar to ryus, as in a 5 framer where we can combo into it from cr.mp and cr.lp. And recovery stays the same.

413

Yeah, I did with time indexes. Its buried among all the bullshit you guys got fixated on.

Copypasta for you:

414

I’ve been hesitant to give my own thoughts on this, namely because I’m not a pro player and as an amateur I don’t feel qualified for any bitching, but I do have thoughts on this that I feel aren’t being addressed, as well as some lingering opinions about what’s been said so far.

So let me get this straight - if I’m understanding this nerf correctly, and my knowledge of Akuma’s safejump setups is correct, then we suffer from these issues:

a) Losing the safejumps from the exploding heart technique on
Adon
Blanka (when he has meter)
Cammy
Chun (when she has meter)
DJ
Fei
Gen (gekirou light v. has 5 frame startup, the rest have 7)
Ibuki (when she has meter)
Makoto (when she has ultra 1)
Sagat
Seth
Fuerte? though we might avoid his leg grab anyway, would perhaps require testing
Rose? when she has meter, again not sure if we just avoid the air grab like fuerte
T Hawk? when he has meter, i think only his EX is invincible correct me if i’m wrong
Yun
Yang

Out of this list, I think it will only really affect Adon, Blanka, Cammy, DJ, Fei, Gen, Sagat, Seth, Yun and Yang. The rest are either dependent on meter, or they’re characters we otherwise dominate anyway. The good news is that we still have safejump setups with tatsu -> sweep against all of those characters with the exception of Blanka/Yun/Yang. I particularly feel that Blanka will be much more annoying to fight, given the fact that he can safely be more reliant on his charge due to palm no longer being an overhead + losing this setup.

b) Losing safejump option selects after a f.throw against the same characters listed above, due to not being able to get in position for them in time. Perhaps a single dash -> delay -> HK DF palm can still recover in time to sweep some characters, but I’m not sure.

c) All crossups after an f. throw are now easier to autocorrect by delaying reversal, since the only way to get into ambiguous crossup range is to use the exploding heart technique

d) Other option selects may suffer from this. Will probably require either testing post-patch or someone’s ridiculously vast knowledge of frame data, especially for the faster backdashes

So it’s a slight nerf that will affect some matchups, about half of which were 5-5 (Adon, Blanka, Cammy, Yun, Yang, right? Sagat may be 5-5 too, but it’s harder to justify). Overall I think this will affect the matchup agaisnt Blanka much more than the other characters, although it will REALLY suck losing this specific tool against those other 4.

The relieving thing about this nerf is that it ONLY affects certain situations which are in our control, and the only thing we lose is an advantage we used to have. With the exception of Blanka. Without being able to use this setup to bait out EX, he will end up holding onto EX meter much more easily, which prevents us from zoning him out from beyond his slide range. This matchup was already annoying as fuck, and this nerf just gives Akuma players even more incentive to RTSD, play more aggressive footsies and put Blanka into the corner even faster. Also will become much more important to look for counter hit crMP into sweep as the primary means to get a safejump setup in which we can bait out his meter. Below that matchup, I think this nerf hits us the hardest against Yun/Yang, mainly because they are very commonly used and we will have to deal without a safejump after throw more often.

There is one thing I’m not hearing anything about here though, and that’s the hidden nerf to Akuma’s counterhit setups from this - in all of the matchups where Akuma suffers from this nerf, his throw is no longer feared to the point where we can get these characters to mash OS tech up close. Meaning our counterhit setups will materialize much less often. This is EXTREMELY problematic for all of us who are just going to choose to look for throws less often as a result of losing our safejumps - in all actuality we should be trying to use our throws MORE now because people will fear them less and mash OS tech less - but even when we score the throws we lose our setups after them so the throw is not very useful to us. In essence, we exchange the damage from our counter hit combos (especially CH crMP into stHK BnB), as well as the safejump followups that come from those combos into sweep, with the paltry damage of a throw, with no opportunity for any reliable okizeme afterward. I strongly feel like this is where Akuma is going to suffer the most, especially at high level play.

If anyone thinks I’m spouting nonsense let me know, heh.

415

Danke good sir.

416

IMO sweep is just fine as it is. Between counter hits and combos and other things like that I get enough sweeps as it is. You can always get the knockdown if you truly want it in most cases.

417

Yes, shoot…lol…I’d take it. Keep the throw nerf and palm nerf in if Akuma can combo into his sweep off a c.lp with no counter hit. Wow.

Maybe I’d still want the palm nerf back, but they can definitely keep the throw nerf if they put that in. Won’t happen though, and that throw nerf would still be terrrrrrribbblleeee.

Maybe I change my mind now HAHA

418

Akuma being able to cr.lp/cr.mp into sweep is way too good, that’s way better than being able to tatsu > everybody because we’ll be able to sweep people even if they’re crouching!

A more reasonable buff IMO would be if they increased far standing jab’s hitbox to be similar to Ryu’s or Ken’s, that shit whiffs vs many characters.

419

The only thing in my opinion Tokido demonstrated is that the opponents he got there didn’t care at all about Akuma’s nerf or simply had not adjusted. For example, I still tend to block H against Guy when he flips, even knowing how stupid of me that is. With more games under my belt though I’m starting to stay in D/B more and don’t get grabbed for free.

I think the same happened there, they block H because they’ve blocked H (and then L) for more than 2 years, that is since vanilla arcade. There’s no point for the opponent not to be in down back, that’s just a mistake on their part.

420

I’m sorry that I dont know the exact details but ive heard from a lot of people/japanese players who were at the location test, that Tokido already found the new version of Tokido-shiki aka the vortex… Maybe I’ll dig through a lot of the tweets when I’m free…

Earlier that day I talked to him and he said he thinks Akuma is still going to be good albeit no doubt, weaker, that the nerfs arent really that much of a big deal. Sure, he needs to find new setups and test new stuff and all that, which can be troublesome and all but its all good.