How would you rate Team Watts, with Blackheart starting?
Well, Team Watts can either be really good or really bad, it depends on how much you try to autopilot on it. BH on autopilot only really works on scrubs, and so does Sent/BH on autopilot. If you try to play it as an easy-mode team then it’s not going to work real well at all. The prototype on game film to study from for how to play this team effectively is still Alex Valle, but there’s stuff that even he could have done better and didn’t. Eventually he sort of lost interest in the game and, perhaps, stopped advancing the team once people started getting better at fighting BH. And these days, the art of playing BH has regressed in most parts of the country so far that many people don’t think he belongs in the top 10 of a tier chart.
There’s a number of reasons for this. Chipping with inferno/HOD has gotten dangerous because any team with Cable on it anywhere in the roster will either guard cancel if he’s on point or counter to him if he’s in the back in order to shoot BH – if the point char doesn’t guard cancel out and hit BH before even that. Magneto players – once fodder for BH – have gotten more sophisticated and don’t fall for the basic demon-throwing patterns any more, and their ability to throw any number of infinites on him has gotten stronger, making it easier to kill him or snap him out off of random hits everywhere on the screen. BH lends himself far too much to easy-moding, and the ways to defend against the easy-moding have proven not to be that difficult once people got used to it. BH players, even some of the best of them, stopped innovating once this came about, and as a result he’s become something of a lost soul in the grand scheme of things. Throw that on top of the fact that the only DHCs that anyone’s really figured out at all how to throw off of anything BH does are hail storm and beam supers (neither of which helps Team Watts much), and yeah, BH looks pretty damned obsolete.
For Team Watts to be effective, you have to solve these problems. You have to get away from the temptation to easy-mode it with BH (and with Sent/BH, for that matter) and learn how to zone, how to defend against rushdown players, and how to position yourself and mix things up so that people can’t just shrug you off. And yeah, figuring out a good DHC with the team would probably be good too. If you try to play BH as a pattern player or Sent/BH as an easy-mode trap, Team Watts won’t get you very far beyond the role of a scrub-crushing team. Even if you figure out exactly how Valle played it and what was going through his mind in the game film of him, you’ll only get so far with it. To make Team Watts work these days, you’re going to need to push the envelope a bit, discover a few things that Valle and the imitators didn’t come across two years ago, and establish some new things for the squad.
If you easy-mode it, the team gets no better than 5 or so. If you manage to figure out how Valle played it in the old days and can duplicate it, it might rise to 6 or 7. Push the envelope with it a bit and I’d give it the potential for a 9 or 10. And yeah, I believe there’s some envelope left to be pushed. (Who, me? Holding out a few secrets of one of my latest projects? Nawwww… 
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Stilt said it all.
I personally however would rate it a 7 or 8. Because let’s face it… there is still Sent/Capcom and they really don’t need a third character. Hell Sent/Serv/Capcom could be good! :eek:
(Note: don’t take that above statement literally… just hyperbolizing to get my point across.)
Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Sent/Servbot/Commando would be that good. BH has a great deal of value to the team both on point and as an assist.
Update on my BH rehab projects: this past Saturday I got 5th at Seattle’s most recent Lanwerx tournament with BH/Sent/Commando. BH did his job on Magneto with my new defensive ideas just fine; even Row didn’t get a whole lot done in that matchup. Row beat me, but it was with Storm/Sentinel, not Magneto vs. BH.
Congradulations StiltMan! Keep up the good work gives Dan-style thumbs up
Any significant uses for instant air dashing and/or cancelling sj.fp into air dash before the demons come out? The first kinda works to get people jumping when your on the ground, but Sent-y+j.fp can do that too.
Are you talking about the floaty air dash?
Wow! Cool stuff. LightningStorm, StiltMan, you are my heroes:)
This stuff helped my BlackHeart improve so much^_^
Thanks to all!
The only thing i see that is useful about it is it lets u block before cable shoots ur ass down, or anyone attempting to get u up there if u let the demons out thier is a longer time before u can dash and block, that lil time frame that the demons come out is alot longer than it may seem. I use to do that tooo much to the point where no demons would come out and i would just sj. dash… and i was wondering WTF happened to my demons. So i learned a different way to use it. Its only a few circumstances that its makes it valuable but u can come up with better ways, cause i suck.
That airdash thing…
I like it for the instant block you can get that will protect from the magic bullet into ahvb and random hailstorms.
My favorite thing to do though (HELLA risky… but can catch most off guard at least once.) is to (against Cable) sj.FK airdash into instant block to bait the AHVB way up in the air. When Cable’s done with it push block the last hit of the AHVB Cable will fall BH will not for a minute, as soon as Cable falls out of screen do air judgement day. This will catch most Cable’s off guard, because they are expecting BH to fall since he used his airdash and can’t double jump. So the Cable will usually do something on the ground perhaps a regular viper beam, a psimitar, or a grenade. And air judgement day will stop all that. Like I said… it’s ridiculously risky but when it works the cable player is usually quite pissed at how much damage it has dealt and the fact that they fell for it, which a pissed off opponent is an opponent who is now off their game and easier to kill. 
And in my case I usually have a Hailstorm on DHC if Cable managed to get out of it.
To Dasrik: Isn’t floaty air dash when you air dash and then do something like sj.fp immediately?
To LightningStorm: Hmm, never thought of using it to bait AHVB. Thanks (Nice new av btw, 2 of my favorites 
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One of my main “tactics” with BH is baiting out AHVB in the fashion described above (although many times, it’s just serendipitous). The timing is easier than it looks to finish the airdash before Cable can shoot you. SJ.Fierce airdash is a good tactic on Sentinel. Airdashing back is the most useful, but if you airdash forward after SJ.Fierce, the demons hang beneath you, which is obviously useful on people who like to get beneath you and attack/airthrow.
BH team strats:
Some BH team Strats:
I have a little different strategy here, but I hope you all will read it. BH can be, when used correctly, a very good rusher and can easily can push someone back into the corner with well placed demons and an assist or two. My main team is Cable/I(Iron, not Ice)M/Sent, but sometimes I play BH/Cable/IM. IMO, I think BH is a good starter, and I always have him on point. He doesn’t rely on supers much at all, which lets you fill up for Cable, and like is said earlier, the right assists fill in almost all the holes he has. As for assists, I always give Cable AA, IM Proj, and BH ground. It gives you a full zoning coverage of the screen so no matter who you are, you always have a partner who can cover the other parts of the screen. Also, my main strat. when playing with BH, is to push the opponent back into the corner. This can be easily achieved in a few ways:
- Send some c. or s. demons to cover the ground. Pull out Cable’s or another’s AA assist to cover the air just in case the person decides to jump in, over the demons. Dash in to get closer. (The demons you threw will cover you ascension from the ground if they didn’t jump over them) Repeat
Or, My fav. way: - Call out IM’s assist. Since it covers a good mid-sized area and lasts for more than a second, you can just dash in while he’s covering you.
Once you have your opponent in the corner, UNLEASH HELL! No, literally. Rain standing HK demons until armogeddon! (sorry, another bad pun) Have your proj. assist(IM) constantly out and time it while kicking up demons to create and endless barrage. Usually your opponent will block. Be careful though, when the demons are blocked, you lag like hell, so keep that in mind. They will probly try to get out after a while, so be prepared. But if they do get caught in one of the demon packs, OH MAN ARE THEY SCREWED!! Immediately, since the demons don’t last long, either do Heart of Darkness(with or with out the Inferno before it), or Call out Cable’s AA assist, Armogeddon! Or, if you want to rack’up some more damage: Cable assist, lp, mp, Armogeddon.
There are some more possibilities, but these are the ones wich I have found to be most useful. Create your own: BlackHeart is a very vercital character. Although I would say I am a very good BlackHeart player, I’m nowhere near a master of this game, so please rate, criticize, cons; Any type of advice would be helpful. And LightningStorm, I would very much like to hear some of your comments. It doesn’t have to be all bad though:cool: See Yah!
BH team strats:
I’m with you on most of that. Those strats are unique enough to catch some good players off guard and will most assuredly beat scrubs.
Only points of contension I have are the assist for BH… BH’s ground assist is decent, but if there is no other aaa on the team BH should be the aaa. And Cable’s doesn’t count… Because Cable is the one on that team who most needs the aaa as well Cable’s aaa doesn’t work for BH nearly as well as it appears it should. Cable’s aaa usually saves people from Inferno xx Super by carrying them through the inferno allowing them to block before all of BH’s supers.
Also I wouldn’t be abusing BH’s standing FK quite as much, unless BH had Doom or Tron as assists.
Unless you have drones, s.roundhouse = death. Don’t even use this move.
Pentland Tournament - Viscant v. Soo set 1 match 6 & 7
I’m sure we all have alot to learn from one another here. Don’t give too much credit out though, you can’t forget your THE ONE who started this. And It’s still holding out as good too.
BLACKHEART IS THE FUTURE
(Ground) Judgement Day is safe on block, right?
Can you please rate my 4th(And newest) team? BlackHeart/Sentinel/CapCom(Used to be Cable)
My 'Lil sis said BH/Sent would make a great Duo, is that true?
Peace:)
There’s a rating for Team Watts by Stiltman & LightningStorm a little earlier. As far as BH/Sent, Sent-a can work like a ghetto Capcom, but Sent-y is better for Watts since:
- You have the real Capcom already
- Sent-y is great for getting in the way of rushdown
- If you corner your opponent, you can get free chip by calling Sent while doing shorts, and then timing an Inferno xx HoD so that the drones hit during the time where it’s normally escapable (if you time it well and the Inferno actually hits, the drones hold you opponent and make a ton of demons hit [I’ve gotten around 20 hits off the HoD alone this way], but I can’t remember off the top of my head if the damage is significantly more than the standard Inferno xx HoD [stupid damage scaling]).
That having been said, I like Sent-y with BH alot. Covers the ground nicely and helps pin annoying rushdowners a bit to make BH even less rushable. Oh, and it happens to be Capcom’s best friend when he eventually gets snapped out.
Just a couple of questions for now,
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Are there any practical ways to land Blackheart’s snapback (mostly for fighting Cable and Sentinel)?
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Any practical uses for the launcher?