Howdy y’all, someone on another forum I frequent was talking about how without a reversal a character can’t defend and although this can be an argument, it seems that the concept of defending was lost to them, so I decided to write this up. I thought it may be helpful here too and decided to share in case it made anyone’s thought process easier.
The art of defending on wake up: A non reversal guide to staying alive.
This is really just explaining how there are a variety of counter options.
Pantheon of opponent actions on your wake up:
Left high.
Left Low.
Right High.
Right Low.
Throw.
Command throw.
Evasion.
Wait.
All of this can have the various properties of being oki, invincible, Safe timing, double as anti air, ranged thus un-hittable etc.
Your opponent does not often have access to all of these at the same time, Abel’s ambiguous roll comes the closest IV gets.
Overheads are slow as frick in this game. Low block as a default, then visually confirm and block high if necessary. works in most situations, along with this only Rog and Chun go into actual damage off an overhead so it’s your lowest priority.
Left Right in this game is also pretty relaxed, ambiguous cross ups often both lose to FA back dash or simply back dash. On top of this comboing them from this height to be ambiguous isn’t always functional. So the left right game isn’t too bad.
Throws in this game should always be late teched, wait a little until after the throw would come in if they were to do one then press throw tech. This A techs throws, B does not throw animate or crouch short animate if you’re in block stun, but will tech if they attempt to throw you, learn people’s patterns.
Some want to be all flashy and reversal an anticipated throw, but unless you’re 98% sure they’ll do it, don’t go for that option as although it has good rewards the risk is severe if they just sit back and block.
Command throws, this is the only monkey wrench to defense in IV, the shiz can be bloody hard to deal with if the person correctly mixes it up, for this you need to be invincible or off the ground, that simple. This is the only kind of defense you have to do on assumption and cannot really do on reaction, everyone has the options of jump forward, neutral jump, jump back, back dash. Depending on the situation all of these can be useful:
Jumping forward can get you out of the corner, where even if they hit you it will likely reset you. That does less damage than a combo and it gets you out of a corner.
Neutral jump can sometimes punish the whiffed command throws with something massive though of course if they didn’t go for the command throw they get to anti air you for free if they did nothing (Bad plus potential knock down.), and will often reset you if they did something dual purpose like Gief’s standing strong.
Back jump can be a great defensive tool here though suffers from often the same things that beat the other jumps, this one can take you some distance from your enemy and on correct assumption re-establishes footsies and zoning to prevent the command grappler from getting a knockdown again.
Finally back dash, it fails to a lot of things that aren’t command grabs, any kind of option select low shorts etc, but a lot of things with A-moderate recovery and B- normal amount of hitting frames will not connect and not allow for punish.
Evasion, if you’re defending this likely means you just got additional space to work with so rejoice!
Wait, although this does not beat nor lose to block, depending on your opponent’s speed of thinking and that of your own you may still be on the defensive here, but it’s no longer a wake up situation.
Hope this is helpful!
Oh and if there are things you feel should be added please tell me, as this is meant to be informative more than anything else, not just ego tripping with knowledge.