With the changes to T Hawk, one of his core strategies has now been nerfed. What I’m talking about is the button release piano piledriver:
In summary, one of Hawk’s classic moves was that you could tick with low jab, then immediately press and HOLD jab, strong, and fierce. Then you could do a 360 motion and release fierce, strong, jab in that order. That would give you three chances to get a piledriver out.
Now with his throw whiff, there’s a problem. Negative edging three buttons hurts you! Why? Let’s say the following sequence happens
frame 1: opponent in block stun – release jab
frame 2: opponent in block stun – release strong
frame 3: opponent out of block stun – release fierce
In regular ST, hawk would still get a piledriver, because one of the three frames the opponent was throwable. But in HDR, Hawk would get a whiff throw animation in frame 1 here, missing his piledriver.
So now Hawks should negative edge with only one button. Kind of sucky – I wish they had kept his no-whiff piledriver and nerfed him in some other way.
I remember reading your blog back when I just stuck to holding down strong and fierce even before j.jab hit the opponent.
Really nice article about negative edge Typhoons, too bad all these basic and yet extremely important techniques have lost their value. Also old habits of doing negative edge Typhoons after whiffing a Rising Hawk or Condor Dive, not leaves me completely open grabbing nothing but air.
Funny how things that you have in your backbone and is core too succeed in ST are no longer feasible, at least your articles were extremely good and helped me learn playing the piano.
might as well do all piano key inputs (6 inputs). if you get the whiff animation and then your opponent comes out of stun it can still turn into a throw (you only get the whiff credit on your super meter though).
i too wish they had kept the no whiff, but that was how they attempted to get rid of his throw loop. because you can’t do safe jump jab -> safe throw.
Meh, if Gief has to have a wiff, then Hawk does too IMO. Even so, I notice I wiff with the piano stormhammer a lot and still grab them. Like my wiff was canceled into stormhammer.
Yeah, I don’t think this is a huge problem. I’ve been using Gief for a long time in ST, and I still try pianoing his SPD all the time even though he has the whiff (with only Strong and Fierce, of course, like Kuni does, because pianoing with all three buttons result in Lariats a lot). It’s still useful to do, but admittedly, it DOES result in you getting whiff anims a lot more because you did it too early. This problem seems to hurt Hawk more than Gief. Maybe Hawk has better frame advantage on more of his moves than Gief?
But I think Honda TOTALLY should have had a whiff animation, if only to just make it so he can’t STORE THAT DAMNED OICHO ANYMORE!!!
Oh please, I’m so sure Honda is terrible without stored Ochio. Jab headbutt and hands already make it impossible to get near the guy, but of course that’s not enough. People have to have 3 free chances at a big damage, untechable throw on top of that. Throwing would’ve been the only viable option to get reliable damage in on honda with non fireball characters, but since he has stored ochio it turns into a very retarded match. Granted, it’s less retarded than it was in ST, but still retarded nonetheless. Non-fireball characters have very few options against Honda, and he almost singlehandedly knocks the majority of them down to mid or lower tier. If you ask me he should’ve gotten a whiff or lost the ability to store it. The game would’ve been a lot better for it and he would’ve still had a big advantage on non-fireball characters for one main reason: jab headbutt, it is one of the best moves in the game, as it is for all intents and purposes a safe dragon punch that travels halfway across the screen, and also nullifies projectiles.
honda still getting stored ochio and no wiff animation, like what was said, really makes no sense. its one of the reasons non fb characters cant fight him well. all you gotta do is hold db back and mash jab and get a free throw against the tiniest hole in a poke. pretty silly.
im glad honestly, that t hawk got a throw wiff. I am not a fan of option select. I feel if you screw something up, you should not be rewarded. You should be punished, with something. Whether its losing something simple like positioning or your offensive pressure, or flat out taking damage. It should reward the opponent in some way. t hawk not having a wiff was pretty silly. either get the throw, or get the block, basically making most reversals, rather pointless. Did he need it? yeah, he struggled getting in. Doesnt mean that free options selects when getting in is a good thing.
I think the throw wiff was a good idea, but i also think it was a bad idea to keep the same frame data on the active throw frames. I think he shoulda got a few more active frames to keep the grab incredibly reliable, like gief’s spd. as many frames as gief? eh dunno about that, but it should atleast have more. Cuz the move does definitely wiff a lot, especially in parts where gief’s would never wiff.
i have a feeling now people will start to catch on to this even though ive been saying it since day 1. ive always said theres something fucking weird about ticking with hawk now (gief is still the same) but hawk is definitely different
“hey lets give hawk, a bottom tier character with only ** 1 ** thing going for him a whiff animation to take away that 1 thing he has but lets leave honda, a guy who beats half the cast and still has solid chances against the rest, the same and actually BUFF HIM UP!”
Yes…and nerf is in the first sentence of the first post of this thread.
The thread was created because a bread and butter strategy, probably the most effective for T.Hawk, and one of the best attack sequences in the game, has been eliminated with the addition of the throw whiff animation.
This means that all 15 character match ups for T.Hawk now need to be revised as the most effective strategy for O.Hawk and N.Hawk are no longer viable for R.Hawk. You can no longer tick into negative edge piano command throw, it will whiff if you mistime the pianos, or if your opponent reversal attacks, the whiff animation will come out, and you eat the reversal. But even if your opponent misses the reversal, if you mistime the pianos and whiff throw during their block stun, they can normal attack you or throw you during the whiff. This nerf is great enough that a thread was created for it.
That being said this thread could probably be merged into the T.Hawk strategy thread. But yes, I understand (as a Hawk player), how upsetting it is to have a whiff throw animation for his command throw.
Maybe Sirlin gave Hawk whiff animation so we could beat Japanese T.Hawks :P, kidding aside T.Hawk is still bad and really I don’t see the logic in a whiff animation anymore like people said here E.Honda is better but still can do those safe meaty’s and jump-ins into Ochio. Now here is one thing either the programmers missed or Sirlin didn’t think about, Zangief’s whiff animation in ST actually has a few automatic interruptable frames where SPD registers as successful I guess Capcom did that to avoid ST’s frame-skipping ruining a successful SPD attempt, that’s not the case of R.Hawk.
Or compensate by giving Hawk the best thing Gief doesn’t have…a decent distance knockdown with dive. Since the braindead throw loop he had is gone with the intro of the whiff animation, this alone would make him much more viable without being anywhere near Akuma stupid. You open yourself up, you pay. It would also prevent successful dive hits (that aren’t low or deep enough) from being punished. Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? If oooooonly they’d do one last set of tweaks in the patch…oh well.
i still think hawk is a more fleshed out character now. tick 360 is still stupid good, now that you got more reliable motions. I don’t play hawk and its still pretty damn simple to tick grab. Now you actually have to fear a little retaliation(reversal), AKA not braindead anymore. Adding a wiff throw, is still a great idea to me. honda not getting ochio wiff, is silly, OTOH.
The “more reliable motions” are only a help to total scrubs. It was basically impossible to screw up a 360 with the old motion, especially given that with negative edge you could time it so that the first button press or release happened when your stick was not in a jump position. The new 360 motions add nothing to his game.
Tick 360 is no longer stupid good. Doing something like a stand jab, short or forward that hits followed by a 360 is much harder, often they either jump out or you get a whiff.
In theory I agree that repeated safe negative edge throws were a bad thing, but taking those away and replacing them with nothing? What?
I much prefer my suggestion if making him bounce too far to repeat the loop but keeping no whiff anim.
Now when a player is dancing in and out of range while poking you can’t go for 360s any more without getting a whiff half the time, and it’s too easy for characters like Ken and Cammy to randomly throw out DPs when in trouble.
It’s really pretty basic - you can’t give one of the worst characters in the game a major nerf and balance that out (lol?) by giving another special what is arguably another nerf in some matches. A couple improved normals is not enough.
Look at a character like Guile - already a tough match. He got a huge buff that makes the match a lot tougher (rh FK) while Hawk’s nerfs also make the match a lot tougher. That’s balancing?
Even as a Honda player, I frankly think that Honda doesn’t even need the ochio in the first place, his normal grabs are already among the best in the game in terms of range, damage, and post-grab shenanigans; nobody’s going to accuse ochio-less O Honda of not being a total beast up close, after all. Getting rid of stored ochio and giving the ochio a whiff animation would have been no big deal to me.
I think Hawk and Honda are some of the characters who could have been tweaked a little better than they were.
If i had the option of using the old dive and they fixed the glitchyness of the whiff animation/ticking with hawk, I’d be fine. I could learn to live without the loop to be honest but I cannot get use to the weirdness the whiff animation adds.