I can give a more detailed breakdown of my thoughts tomorrow, but my first thought from watching that was that both of you let a lot of shit go unpunished, and the matches was kind of one big scramble.
But again, that’ll be for tomorrow. Long day. Need sleep.
Okay, so here goes the wall of text:
Game 1:
Round 1: after some random pokes he lands a well-timed launcher, but fucks up and lets you Katarina him at the wall. ded
Round 2: He gets clipped by a hopkick and then eat a 112 > knee-trap. At this point I’d just keep my distance and milk the lifelead; instead you go in to finish it and get CHed twice in two seconds, though the Bryan screwed up his conversions.
Round 3: Bryan seems to have gotten your rhythm at this point. There’s some errant poking, but most of your attempts to run in gets you smacked in the face. Bryan does that sometimes.
Round 4: You controlled the pace really well here. The aforementioned delay timing worked well here and beat him out of several of his options, and you manage to just straight kill him. I think he pushed a lot more buttons than he should in this round, just trying to backdash and keep away seemed like a better option, especially when he did so well with doing just that the round before.
Game 2:
Round 1: …and then he starts by doing just that, before skipping off and starting the aggression again. This time he does land some crucial CHs though. You get two really nice sidesteps here, but you don’t convert from them at all (were you trying to step something, or just align?), and you even eat a CH WS3 right after one of them.
Round 2: Snake edge into the wall. Not sure if the option you hit him with afterwards is safe? Anyway, some pokes happen, and then you do 11. He immediately pokes back with something fast. Mental note. I see you adjust to that by applying 111 (unpunished) and 112. He doesn’t quite bite, but then he eats the 112 knee trap. He clearly doesn’t know the MU very well.
Round 3: good whiff punish by him into an unremarkable wall game. You didn’t launch his machine gun punches, sadface 
A bunch of midrange scrambles happen afterwards, but you’re down on health and end up losing.
Round 4: round start… ow. Then he establishes more control and manages to rush you down. He does 121 to bait a jab and launches you for it by ducking, well played. Then you do a bad punish on a spring kick that you could’ve launched (you had that round ), get your ass to the wall, and die. You also seem to be doing a lot of jabs out of blockstun now, that might be problematic.
Game 3
Round 1: you get in and do some nicely timed pokes, catching him mid-crouch, and then go ham with tighter pressure right after, and a good throw. Nice. Then you back off with a huge life lead and dance around for a bit (again, nice, you can’t get CHed if you don’t push buttons), but let a few whiffs go unpunished. You respond to a blocked orbital with a jab again (he ducks, probably buffering a low parry rather than baiting a jab), and get low parried right afterwards and get wall gamed.
Round 2: God damn that hopkick is dumb. And the wall happens. AGAIN he does 121 into duck when you’re revenge jabbing, but he doesn’t actually catch you this time. Some more pokes happen, then you’re at range 3 with a huge lifelead and then you run into a space control move when you can just chill on your lifelead. You get to the wall, he does 1,3, he ducks your revenge jab AGAIN but doesn’t actually punish. You do a big whiff, but his punish is paltry. His unblockable was actually really smart after that many pokes, I’d get hit by that too.
Round 3: Some pokes happen, you end up ducking a big high but only get a WS4. He whiff punishes your K4t4rin4-string, drops the combo, ducks your high and interrupts you with a WS3 to kill you.
Round 4: poking war, you win it pretty nicely this time and everything seems to land. You don’t punish his -10 WS3,4 when it’d kill him, gah. On the other hand you stay patient and just let him whiff a bunch of space control moves before letting him kill himself on another poke when he gets impatient. Smart.
Round 5: NICE whiff punish into massive hoochie mama damage. And then he gets you to the wall, actually baits your revenge jabs this time by sidestepping into a b4 (you’d be dead had your back actually been to the wall now). He actually gets you to revenge jab once more when you block another b4 but he doesn’t punish properly now. Then you land a big hopkick to kill.
Whew, wall of text. Anyway, stuff to think about here:
- you were revenge jabbing a lot and you paid for it a few times. Attacking out of blockstun is fine, but I recommend more fast mids and fewer jabs, as well as the occasional homing move or backdash to keep things fresh.
- if you have the life lead, you can sit on it if you don’t have clear momentum and force him to come to you. Don’t force the issue if you can win by other means.
- you let some moves go unpunished or underpunished, and it cost you a few rounds. Get dat free damage. You also had a few nice whiff punishes, but a lot of up-close whiffs (often from sidesteps) ended up going unpunished. Also something to work on.
The Bryan player went in too hard for my taste. His best rounds were when he managed to stay at range 2-ish and make you run into a keepout-move, or when he backdashed rather than poking and got a whiff punish from it. He did win some rounds on poking as well, but I do think he chose the wrong strategy.
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Damn that’s really good shit bro, much more than I expected. Much appreciated as well. Sometimes when we watch our own matches, we are bias and oblivious to our own blind spots…this was very helpful.
There is a local player here who pushes buttons non-stop with his Lars and his Claudio…he doesn’t give a shit about frame data but he has good timing and good reads. I learned Claudio last year just to fight him and Claudio players in general…but the last time we played it was still hard. God damn he punishes me hard and blows me up for revenge jabbing…he reads that shit easily with sidesteps and crushes And when I stop revenge jabbing, he goes in on me with his own offense. I actually noticed that subconsciously a few months ago and noticed it more when I watch my match from combobreaker. I always jab after safe blocked moves and people duck that shit and punish.
I’ve been working on life lead management…only from this past weekend though lol. My friend mentioned to this about a month ago but I never tried applying it. It’s something I honestly never thought about before in tekken…only in 2d games. But damn it can be so effective because it’s on the opponent to re-gain the life lead and spacing itself is pressure to the opponent when they have a life deficit.
And up close whiffs from side-steps…man this is something that I have been lacking forever…and I actually NEVER think about this during the match. I think part of it is katarina but I should be doing this with Shaheen or Josie as well. It’s almost like I sidestep just to sidestep to start my own offense, but never to punish. I’m going to have to practice next time and specifically work on this aspect and not care about winning.
Yes I agree and was surprised the bryan player got hit twice by the 1,1,2 katarina trap. I played bryan again for the first time this weekend in months and was working on seeing if 1,2,1 (blocked) into iws+3 worked…much like how this bryan player did to me.
I went online tonight and freaking got punished for jab revenge again lol.
the habit is so hard to break. But I started sidestepping in those cases. Before I would either jab, or mid, and sometimes I get dick jabbed so I got for a hopkick. Usually I sidestep after they block my move, not after I block their move.
Good to know that option exists lol.
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ive played him before lol anyways Naeras write up was spot on
that bryans backdash was awful and it was great of you to take advantage of that he missed some punishes too but essentially his lack of movement killed him because he couldnt abort when you closed in and he didnt have control of the pace
your couldve made more space and played at range but you won more so you did the right things. lots of df1 and magic 4s to keep him honest. he was aggressive because he couldnt backdash properly. you ate some counter hits and i think match he won he stayed at range 2 and you were at the wall and he played it right till you pressed a button and over committed so he could punish you.
but you were the better player. just be sure to back off if you feel hes getting to erratic with buttons.
if he didnt counter hit you he had no way to get you to the wall which is essentially what won him the matches he did win.
you have to be able to backdash with sway characters and that was his downfall if you cant do that you have to practice or play someone else because you wont always control the pace and being overaggressive wont hide that against good/great players.
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There’s a team tournament and singles tournament this sunday at super arcade in Socal.
Seeing as though I can’t make it to Evo this year, this will have to be my Evo. I think they will stream it so check it out if you guys can in between Abuget cup. My team will be with a new school bryan player who is the bryan that beat me in tournament a few months back, and one of my good friend’s who is and old school T5-T6 Xiaoyu player, who hasn’t played in months. It seems like when I got really into Tekken 7, he stopped.
This game is funny, sometimes you feel you got a lot better, then you get completely humbled. I played with another friend yesterday. He’s an og player in his 40s who has been playing since 2000 in the tag 1 era, he just placed top 3 at a local Tuesday event earlier this week (Rickstah won Grand Finals I believe). He said it best: “we’ll never be at that level Jeremy lol”.
At first I played on 2p side because I need practice on that side…but eventually I had to go to 1p side to at least give him a challenge. I think the score at one point was like 9-26 or something like that…though I did win the last game. I played mostly Kazumi and DJ. He mostly played Devil Jin, then a bit of Bryan, then a bit of Jack 7 when I changed to Josie and then a bit of DJ vs Jack 7.
My ego was rather hurt from the DJ vs his Bryan matchup…a matchup I feel I understand…especially with the recent games against Bryan and some of the advice you guys gave me here. Same thing happened with my Kazumi vs his Bryan. My two mains got bopped big time by his 4th best character.
We played a bit of Jin vs DJ…and my Jin is nowhere near the rest of my characters…but he told me he thinks Jin is a decent pick against DJ…and somehow I took at least a game and made it challenging. There was an insane sequence he did to me which was electric (blocked), dash electric (blocked), wavedash into demon paw ( I ducked) on oki, wavedash into hellsweep ( I was standing) on oki.
We closed out with my Bryan vs his DJ, to which my Bryan got destroyed in the reverse mirror. He requested some practice against Katarina with DJ with his DJ, which wasn’t too bad. But eventually I took the last set with Kazumi DJ 2-1.
Probably going to run Kazumi or Katarina in the tournament, Devil Jin is too damn hard sometimes against good players.
Good luck with the tournament!
The guys who usually arrange casuals here are moving, and the national champion was in town this weekend, so we had a pretty large casual session yesterday. Was really fun, it was a good mix of people from newcomers to people who have played for 20 years. I got to play a short Kazuya mirror against the champ, ended 3-1 in his favor. Was pretty pleased with that.
I had two really long sets with two of the best players around here as well. The first guy is a very strong Eddy-player. That did NOT go well, the final score was something like 35-2 in his favor. I just don’t get the matchup, I have to completely rewire my approach to Tekken against that character. He also said he thought Leo was one of the worst characters at blowing up RLX, and I’m sort of inclined to agree right now. She has tools to beat it, but an unsafe RLX-transition is going to cost him 10 damage, and since Leo is the aggressor in this matchup, it doesn’t really matter that he gets pushed away when I hit him out of RLX. I’m thinking of going DJin if I face him in tournament, just to have steel pedal as an option. Maybe Shaheen too, he’s easier, fits my current style and also has a ghetto b4.
The second set was against the nationals runner up, an extremely strong Mishima / Bryan-player. He starts out with Bryan (who he’s already beaten most of the people present with), and I proceed to beat him three games straight. He switches to Devil Jin, and I manage to win two out of the three next games. At this point he’s starting to get a grip of what I’m doing, and over the next 30-ish games I think I win three games. He pretty much beat me with movement and electrics alone, whiffing anything would cost me half health. In spite of that he said I was playing a lot better than he thought I would (note: I was even playing on P2 here, by far my weakest side), and said that my main problem was just dealing with the electric. I mentioned that his movement was better than mine too, but he actually didn’t seem to agree with that.
Something like half my damage yesterday came from simply doing 1,2 or df1 into sidestep and launching their revenge buttons. It’s part of why people seemed genuinely impressed yesterday, and why people thought my movement was quite good even though my BDC isn’t as good as other players that were present. In spite of that I also did get blown up for it a bunch of times, so I’m thinking of learning to do sidestep+block better, along with doing more pokes into backdash to observe tendencies since that option is safer. Still, I’m pretty confident in saying that I’ve really learned how to use this option by itself, so the next step is to learn how to use it as well as possible.
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Team tournament didn’t go so bad, I actually enjoyed it more than expected. There were 15 teams. I didn’t enter singles. It was SBO style but double elimination.
The two teams I didn’t want to face I faced however lol. They announced it was character lock for the entire team tournament…which was kind of cool. My best friend IRL who plays xiaoyu, didn’t show up as I predicted even though I asked him about a month ago to go, dude hasn’t practiced this entire week, and when he finally went online last night, he complained about the lag and when I invited him into a lobby to test out the speed, he signed off lol. Then today he was on his way to the tournament and he was gonna be late as usual, then said he forgot his wallet and had to turn back and would even more late…so I had to find a 3rd member, luckily our third member just randomly volunteered. T7 is his first tekken but he placed 3rd at a recent local tournament.
First round Nina/Yoshi/Hwoarang vs our team (Kazumi, Bryan, Heihachi)
I beat Nina player, who is a solid player from T6, then the Yoshi player (sentomessej) comes up and I knew I was in trouble. He’s beaten me at two tournaments before with his Yoshi and Drag, we’ve played sets online and it doesn’t go well, just a solid player and seems to have my number. I played some casual sets at combo breaker with him too and didn’t go well. He beats me, the bryan player, and the heihachi player and we get sent to losers.
I wanted a piece of the hwoarang as he is the only real hwoarang and best hwoarang in socal nowadays.
Later on this Yoshi player takes out 3 socal OG legends who were top players in Tekken Tag 1 back in 2000, he was playing super well
Second match it was us versus a Noctis/Xiaoyu/Katarina team.
Our Bryan takes out Noctis, thank god as I have no idea how to play against him, loses to the Xiaoyu. This Xiaoyu is an OG player and tied with another Socal guy as the highest placing Xiaoyu player top 24 (#17 on eventhubs) at Evo 2017. Our Heihachi goes up and loses to Xiaoyu as well. I go up and was able to secure the win somehow…everytime I got knocked down…I laid there and took the hit or rolled out of the way…fuck that oki lol! He tried to hit me with an aop d+1+2 on wakeup, I just continued laying there and did a getup 4 FTW.
I was expecting the third guy to play kazumi, but he played Katarina, I went up 2 rounds against him and he brought it 2 back as his teammates were cheering him on. He used strings I don’t use with Katarina and it caught me off guard. Holy Shit Katarina is hard character to play against. 3rd round he fucks up a conversion, then I fuck up a wall combo…we got a slow motion and I win with a df+1. I was pretty much wiped out after this one game match. It was awesome to high five my team after this set.
3rd match we played against a Jack 7/Eddy/King team.
Bryan player wanted to go first…to everyone on my team’s surprise including him, he beat the Jack 7 player, another solid player from the T5 days.
I could see our bryan was jabbing too much and wasn’t doing hatchet kick (qcb+3) enough at first. Eddy player takes him. Me and the Heihachi were both looking at ourselves like fuck we don’t know the Eddy matchup. Heihachi player goes up and loses. I play against the Eddy, somehow won…I guess Kazumi can pick up RLX. The I fought the King player who is a really solid up and coming new school player named Duke, I beat him once in a team tournament before with Katarina, but he got a lot better since then. I was only able to take one round from him. Ate two giant swings in a row for the lost. In retrospect, it might have been better for me to go second and hopefully take out the Eddy, and then have our Heihachi go against the King player.
We didn’t play the matchup correctly. A mishima player has to have execution and experience to go against characters like Eddy and Xiaoyu.
I’m happy I was at least able to play 6 times and win at least one match in the first and third game. I bought some water bottles for my team after the first game as it was hot af in socal this weekend. The first team we lost to ended up taking third place behind Run it Black’s team and Team Vegas (Jackie Tran team )
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so, based on a leak it seems that there will be a second season pass.
i really wonder what we will get. harada said that he will not charge for legacy chars.
so either he had to change his mind or it will be again new ones.
i heard the mobile version had some missing chars which even got some new moves so maybe something from that get transitioned into t7? really curios about how it works out this time. the only thing i dont want to see is another game mode. it made the previous sp already expensive and didnt add much value to the game itself.
While i use devil jin for everything he has tools to deal with xiaoyu and eddy i usually pick nina she has a great matchup for both of those characters. she can float eddy out of unsafe transitions with df1 and hit AOP and interrupt with uf3 because it has a huge hitbox and it crushes lows which is extremely useful cause not many characters have hopkicks that hit those stances uf3 is a completely underrated move though. it helps that not alot of people in our region play nina so alot of people dont know the matchup. i know alot of their characters though. last time at tournament I played a eddy I mauled him because he didnt realize how bad it can get when you play reckless against her.
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There are several Nina players here, and I don’t like playing her, so I think I’ll stick to Devil Jin for my counterpicks. Leo does fairly well against Xiaoyu, and I don’t hate that MU as I hate Eddy (I think she’s a lot easier to deal with even though she’s a much stronger character in this game), so I don’t need to counterpick there.
As for S2: I’d imagine they’ll charge for legacy characters now, considering how loud the Lei-whiners are. I’d imagine him and Julia are the likely picks if old characters return, Lei because everyone’s whining, Julia because she’s relatively popular, and both have very distinct playstyles.
Doublepost, because this is important:
I think I’ve learned how to do instant while standing moves from Mishima crouchdash. I even hit someone with Kazuya iWS2 in a real match.
You may now refer to me as the god of execution, because that’s how I feel right now holy shit.
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You had issues with it before?
I’m trying to get iWR+2 (fff+2) down from range zero with dragonuv and trying to apply it to DJ and Hwoarang as well.
There’s two frames of thoughts from what I’ve seen, the first way I learn is that you have to do a forward dash and input the last f with the 2 at the exact timing…prior to your character finishing the dash. It’s almost like an electric.
The second method I believe is doing f,n,ff+2 super quick. Again, your character has to finish the input before reaching the other character.
I’m not able to do this consistently but every now and then I can string 3-4 in a row.
Yeah, I’ve never been able to pull off iWS-moves consistently before now. Just didn’t fit my fingers. I found a method of doing it on hitbox that works well now (it’s essentially inputting the crouchdash then doing a halfcircle backwards, rather than the normal CD, neutral, back). I’m still not all that consistent yet, but I can get it to work in real matches, so I’ll stick it out.
My P2 electrics are improving too. I still wouldn’t ever pick Kaz / DJin on P2 as I am now, but I might get there.
Point blank iWR-moves I still can’t do though. Gah.
aw sweet man, coincidentally I saw a video last week about doing a half circle back method and when I tried it, it seems to work better at times…over the years though I am more used to doing the regular neutral back method…but I don’t know how you guys play on hitbox in the first place.
There are more hitbox players than ever before in socal and one is a big up and comer.
Sometimes while watching the Korean players…I’ve seen Knee just do it the slow method, full crouch dash, duck ws+2 instead of the instant cancel ws+2 method.
I love hitting people with instant while standing moves lol especially with devil jin it just mind fucks them because now they cant autopilot crouch blocking if you know iws and ff moves from WD. then the hellsweep and uf4 ruins them so they try to avoid the situation which makes them more vulnerable to electrics. i had a mini deathmatch with a kazuya it was a mirror match and he had trouble cause iws twin pistons tracks it was fun promoing off of him he looked perplexed by it. im practicing to better this technique on p2 and im doing good so far on p1 my success rate is about 85%
because knee is able to lightdash he sometimes will do a single elongated crouchdash to throw off their timing you can delay the hellsweep or ws1 its almost like a law slide mixup or annas full crouch mixups.
with the pad i an do instant ws moves with L1 and instant running moves with L2 its cause i used to play fox in melee and for years i would practice wavedashing. he had a fast jump for the window is pretty much frame perfect. similar to electrics and IWS moves.
i use the WD then press back method you just have to watch you character at the deepest moment of the crouch dash.
for instant running moves ill usually do FF-2+F that how my hands vision it press ff then press 2 then f your directional inputs are less stubby then pressing a button so thats why you would press slightly before
As a Leo player (Naeras), what do you think of the leo vs bears matchup?
I played it today and damn I did not like it at all.
B+1,4 on counterhit whiffs.
B+1,4 into 4 (the low) whiffs because of the bear hitbox.
I’ve played the matchup a few times against a friend who plays bears/Shaheen. I tend to win against him, but that’s largely because I’m better than him tbh.
On the whole I think the matchup is quite okay. You want to get in because the bears have longer range than Leo, and Leo does well up close since she has better pokes. The bears lacking a sidestep sucks for them since Leo doesn’t have that great tracking on her close range pokes, which solves her biggest range 0 issue for her. Lackluster sidesteps also means they struggle at getting away from the wall, also known as the place you want to get the fuck away from against Leo. So Leo can control the game quite nicely and force the bears to do something risky to get out. Everything else is just learning to punish the bears properly, defend against HBS, and by god not whiffing anything in the midrange since you’ll eat df2,1 from halfscreen away and get mauled.
As for b1,4, it isn’t all that rewarding against the bears since the combo drops on CH. At the same time bears have no real way of escaping b1,4 as they don’t have a good sidestep or evasive move (to my knowledge), so it’s possible to just wail on them with that move and accept the fact that you won’t get a full combo (CH b1,4, KNK4 is all you get lol). You can also do b1,4 crouch cancel-stuff without risking that they escape if you really want to bully them with that string, and they have to mash something to get out which means they’re risking KNK2. Also use CD1 rather than KNK4 as the low of choice from this situation, it doesn’t whiff (even though the bears get a fucking massive punish on CD1 since it’s -13 x_x). You can just skip doing b1,4 against them overall though since you don’t get a full combo, do d1 or b1 alone if you want a mid CH launcher.
But yeah. Approach them like you’d approach them with Kazumi or Katarina. Get to range 0-1 and keep them honest with basic poking and general up-close bullying, then punish their responses accordingly. And accept that sometimes you will get 111ed or eat a twin pistons.
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I’ve been messing around with Shaheen lately. I’m jealous. I want Leo to have his pokes. They’re so much better for my current playstyle than those Leo have.
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Shaheen to me is like a turtle 3rd Strike Chun Li. Good pokes, range and massive amage off hopkick, orbital, or ws+2 into walls.
I’ve been playing King after learning about him from a local player, and my win % rate with him is up there with my Katarina, Josie, and Kazumi (low 70s)
At this point, I’m just a jack of all trades. Devil Jin is pissing me off again…and I’m starting to like hwoarang again…I think I need mokujin…I started playing ranked again and got my Josie to Vanquisher, nothing to brag about but I have no desire to go higher than that.
I don’t think she’s that strong of a character but her flow is just so good at times, and she has more options than Katarina and Kazumi so it is more fun at times.
Previously I had a hwoarang at Vanquisher and got demoted to juggernaut. Shaheen, Katarina, and Kazumi are all Usurpers. And I had a great back and forth match against a Josie with Hwoarang…it was actually the most fun set I’ve had in awhile so I’m gonna post it below. The conditioning and reads that was developing throughout the set was so cool. I actually love the Hwoarang vs Josie matchup in both directions.