The Julia Chang Thread

[learis1]

To people who are having issues with people blocking low (and not pressing any buttons to get frame trapped apparently) don’t forget that julia has multiple mixups.

1. hcf+hp, hcf+lp (go for a low), hcf+hp(backdash cancel to bait dp) are 3 options that a blocking opponent doesn’t have a universal answer to.
2. lp-lp-mp(mid) or mk(low) chain that’s a high/low mixup. They can dp between the first two lps but you can bait with just a single st.lp (safe on block). The overhead isn’t safe on block but the low is (and can be special canceled)
3. hcf+k, p-p followup: a mid and a high that is + on block. You can also threaten with a low from hcf+k or just block.
4. Plain old walkup throw.

All of these are bad options.

1. Unless they’re a scrub, they can easily hit you out of your gigantic leap if you do it right in front of their face. If you do it from far away, they can easily see it coming and jump/punish.
2. lp lp mp is an unsafe mid that does lame damage even if it hits since it can’t be comboed after it hits. It’s telegraphed from the first two lp’s. If you decide to go for the mk low, then you are commiting to cancel a move from it to go for more damage. Assuming they’ve blocked the first two lp’s, there’s no way to hit confirm that low, so it’s basically a bad gamble since all of her specials are unsafe on block.
3. Why does everyone say this is safe on block??? It’s only safe if the person is retarded enough to block the first hit and just wait for a few seconds for the next SAFE hit to come out. Otherwise, they can easily punish it.
4. Woopdy do. Work your but off to get in to do measly damage and give them a chance to escape again.

[Gemakai]

all of her specials are unsafe on block.
.

CADC backdash

[Pleasedontcuss]

All of these are bad options.

1. Unless they’re a scrub, they can easily hit you out of your gigantic leap if you do it right in front of their face. If you do it from far away, they can easily see it coming and jump/punish.
2. lp lp mp is an unsafe mid that does lame damage even if it hits since it can’t be comboed after it hits. It’s telegraphed from the first two lp’s. If you decide to go for the mk low, then you are commiting to cancel a move from it to go for more damage. Assuming they’ve blocked the first two lp’s, there’s no way to hit confirm that low, so it’s basically a bad gamble since all of her specials are unsafe on block.
3. Why does everyone say this is safe on block??? It’s only safe if the person is retarded enough to block the first hit and just wait for a few seconds for the next SAFE hit to come out. Otherwise, they can easily punish it.
4. Woopdy do. Work your but off to get in to do measly damage and give them a chance to escape again.

1. You’d obviously try to start this attack at mid-long range or after a tiger strike. Why would you assume you’d do a long startup move on top of them?
2. If people are constantly blocking low you can go for an overhead. Being telegraphed doesn’t really matter since they’ll be in blockstun so they can’t mash out of the unseeable 50/50 high/low mixup once you get to the second lp. Yes each option has a risk/reward but that’s what street fighter is about. You can cancel the low into qcb+p and backdash if it’s blocked, or do no followup since its not - on block.
3. So they’d be blocking the followup high every time? Then don’t do any followup after hcf+k and go for a low. See the mixup here?
4. Throws are meant to discourage people from only blocking in street fighter games.

I’m not sure what you really want out of a character. Most characters can’t combo off their overhead and don’t have command grabs or dive kicks. You generally go for overheads not because they start huge damage but because you want people to not just block low.

[learis1]

1. You’d obviously try to start this attack at mid-long range or after a tiger strike. Why would you assume you’d do a long startup move on top of them?
2. If people are constantly blocking low you can go for an overhead. Being telegraphed doesn’t really matter since they’ll be in blockstun so they can’t mash out of the unseeable 50/50 high/low mixup once you get to the second lp. Yes each option has a risk/reward but that’s what street fighter is about. You can cancel the low into qcb+p and backdash if it’s blocked, or do no followup since its not - on block.
3. So they’d be blocking the followup high every time? Then don’t do any followup after hcf+k and go for a low. See the mixup here?
4. Throws are meant to discourage people from only blocking in street fighter games.

I’m not sure what you really want out of a character. Most characters can’t combo off their overhead and don’t have command grabs or dive kicks. You generally go for overheads not because they start huge damage but because you want people to not just block low.

1. Because the point was that you were talking about characters that are constantly holding down back, whether far away or up close. Up close it’s useless, and from far they can easily react to it and punish if you just throw it out, or they can just roll forward if you do it after a tiger strike.
   2)The point is that her payoff is really lousy compared to the risk and won’t discourage people from downbacking. Her overhead also pushes them far away which is typically not where you want turtles to be.
2. Do you see that her low normals can’t link into anything, so there’s no way to confirm them for damage. It’s a complete guess on your part, and the risk to reward is highly in the opponents favor.
3. In SF4 where they had better range and where a knockdown actually meant something throws could discourage blocking. Not here, and especially not with Julia’s poor walk speed. Good luck getting a tick throw.

Most characters without comboable overheads or divekicks or command grabs at least have something going for them to compensate for it. Whether it be very strong pokes (Vega/Rolento), projectiles for zoning (Shotos/Sagat). Heck, at least being able to confirm a low normal into a combo. Take these away and what are you left with? Characters like Julia, Kuma, Yoshi, etc. who will most likely be the worst in this game.

[option.iv]

I think the sole reason why Julia lacks various tools to open up people is because of the 1 frame super. The 1 frame super can punish anything -2 on block or hit. The developers must’ve been having balancing issues or were fearful of having a character that could punish and shutdown so many things and open up characters at the same time.

The super definitely changes the game, but I’d rather trade off tools that could open up somebody and get a gimped super instead. Seeing the game at this point where timeouts are rampant, it doesn’t really help Julia’s cause that much especially when behind on life and down on time.

Her comeback potential seems extremely low.

[UltraDavid]

Dang, Kuma among the worst in the game? We’re talking about the same character with a better-than-Abel roll, huge range, good damage output, good antiair, and command grabs? That doesn’t make much sense.

As for Julia, yeah, she has the same hole that lots of characters in this game have: normal throw range sucks. Imo she has good frame traps, good ways in, does a great job of dealing damage while keeping the opponent standing, and has some interesting meaty tricks. And I actually like her normal throw better than most characters because if you have the opponent in the corner and you throw, you’ll end up almost exactly where they’d roll to, so you can just take a tiny step or two forward and mix a rolling opponent up in terms of which side you’ll put out a meaty attack from. If they don’t roll, great, they stay in the corner and Julia seems decent at that range.

[Pleasedontcuss]

1. Because the point was that you were talking about characters that are constantly holding down back, whether far away or up close. Up close it’s useless, and from far they can easily react to it and punish if you just throw it out, or they can just roll forward if you do it after a tiger strike.
   2)The point is that her payoff is really lousy compared to the risk and won’t discourage people from downbacking. Her overhead also pushes them far away which is typically not where you want turtles to be.
2. Do you see that her low normals can’t link into anything, so there’s no way to confirm them for damage. It’s a complete guess on your part, and the risk to reward is highly in the opponents favor.
3. In SF4 where they had better range and where a knockdown actually meant something throws could discourage blocking. Not here, and especially not with Julia’s poor walk speed. Good luck getting a tick throw.

Most characters without comboable overheads or divekicks or command grabs at least have something going for them to compensate for it. Whether it be very strong pokes (Vega/Rolento), projectiles for zoning (Shotos/Sagat). Heck, at least being able to confirm a low normal into a combo. Take these away and what are you left with? Characters like Julia, Kuma, Yoshi, etc. who will most likely be the worst in this game.

1. I have three options that all look identical at the start. If you do hcf+lp and they forward roll you can meaty them on wakeup. Forward rolls make oki a guessing game for every character.
2. Yes but it can push them away or push them towards the corner. Its not always a downside.
3. I agree her low normals aren’t great for starting combos. You were complaining about people downbacking though. A viable hitconfirm for lows is cr.lk-cr.mk which you can then confirm into an ex move or a tag combo. It looks like its safe on block.
4. Again if people are resisting you throwing them then they are pressing buttons or moving. Not downbacking.

Don’t get me wrong here I’m not claiming that Julia is great but I feel its way too early to say that she’s awful. She’s got very good hitconfirms off her chains, a good DP, a great backdash, decent health(1k) and good meterless damage. How the metagame evolves will determine if her lack of strong high/low mixup into combo ability will be the deciding factor in how good she ends up being.

[option.iv]

I know this isn’t the Kuma forum, but he has similar problems like Abel. Ground anti-airs against moves that alter trajectory become guesses and far from solid anti-air. Not that saying Kuma is another Abel clone, but characters like Rufus with divekicks in this game and SF4 series do extremely well against characters limited to ground anti-air options. It also doesn’t help Kuma that he has to go into Hunting Stance for his better anti-air. He definitely has crazy tools (his command throw is really good), there’s no denying that. I dunno, someone prove me wrong and show me a legit bear mauling a Rufus and I’ll eat my words.

I’ve been thinking about the possible Julia metagame. Say your team is at slight life deficit. Once she gets super, it becomes a guessing game. If she somehow gets in the opponent’s face. It’s either throw out strings to bait something out, go for unsafe overhead tekken combos, or go for frame trap/tick throw mixup.

If you manage to bait something, and the opponent goes to their usual “safe” stuff (which is unsafe now because of Super), they eat a raw 310 damage. The counter to this is if they choose to downback. This is the safer option of the three for Julia.

If you choose to go offensive and take risks by using her risky mids. You may land Divine Impact which would hit at 90 damage and soft knockdown assuming the opponent was in down-back blocking the first hits. Her other mids come from Tequila sunrise or Swift Step explosion. If you try these moves canceled from a string, they are punishable because of startup. The opponent doesn’t have to be mashing to punish these moves, they’re perfectly reactable to. The only time that these get thrown in the mixup is when you score a knockdown off Tiger Strike and either Swift Step or Swift Step explosion.

But how are you supposed to land Tiger Strike if the opponent defaults to downback? So Julia is limited to Divine Impact which does measly 90 damage and a soft knockdown…

The other option is to try to tick throw. Considering how bad throws are and how much time they take, the opponent can crouch tech. Even if you bait a crouch tech and block the cr.lk, most lk’s aren’t -2 and below on block meaning you can’t use super to punish that. You’re going to have to try to bait a cr.mk or cr.mp crouch tech attempt or frame trap.

So it’s either try to bait (which is the safer option and yields more damage), go for risky overheads which don’t yield that much damage and reset the position, or go for frame traps. You can see the best option for the opponent who’s in the lead is to down-back and take those weak overheads and throws.

Even the opponent can mash out dp or backdash on the Divine impact strings because the LP,LP portion is not a true block string. Another guess that Julia needs to make. Since throw range is so bad in this game, it’s much easier to anticipate throws, which means frame traps are less effective.

Julia is essentially left with baiting as the safest and most rewarding (if it works) option to go to in terms of damage and positioning. However, the biggest counter to this is… wait for it… down-back.

The only real factor that can maybe land Julia a win is that no one plays her, or that other players don’t know her gameplan/playstyle yet. Honestly though, it doesn’t take long to figure it out on the fly.

Julia is seriously going to have most trouble against the most patient of players. I guarantee it.

[Gemakai]

So while I was practicing today, I noticed something peculiar about Julia. She has a corner cross up after Tiger Striking in the corner.

If you swift step (or swift step explosion) almost immediately after you recover from doing a tiger strike on a opponent in the corner, Julia will literally hop over their bodies in the corner. The window is small very small, I want to say it’s like 1-2 frames, but it’s possible.

It doesn’t seem to work on large characters like Hugo, but characters like Cammy, Dhalsim, Jin, and Xiaoyu, I’ve been able to perform this on.

It requires more testing but I think it’s a very neat mix up possibility.

[Shin_Oni]

So while I was practicing today, I noticed something peculiar about Julia. She has a corner cross up after Tiger Striking in the corner.

If you swift step (or swift step explosion) almost immediately after you recover from doing a tiger strike on a opponent in the corner, Julia will literally hop over their bodies in the corner. The window is small very small, I want to say it’s like 1-2 frames, but it’s possible.

It doesn’t seem to work on large characters like Hugo, but characters like Cammy, Dhalsim, Jin, and Xiaoyu, I’ve been able to perform this on.

It requires more testing but I think it’s a very neat mix up possibility.

But now you’re in the corner where you don’t want to be with Julia. Along with losing all your best pressure/spacing/zoning/etc. Not even adding roll which then you lose a chance of reading and punishing the roll and losing the even more ambiguous j.HK crossup in the corner or reading the roll with a neutral j.HK or something else to punish said roll.

It’s neat. But unless something else is found out with it, it’s not really worth it.

[Geovski]

I haven’t seen anything like this with Julia yet…So Imma post up a little something I found day one…I was in tournament last night getting people with this…Also I think Julia’s fine the way she is…I mean I reading nothing but complaints and how she sucks…Well F-THAT…I think she has potential…V-Ryu is using her? Hell when I found this I was thinking about how she plays like Makoto and how V-Ryu played her…Capitalizing Hardknock downs and meaty attacks, 1k health, a Cross over (Julia CAN do this on some characters using the lunge dash (LP) still figuring out the timing after hardknock down using tiger strike), and now a Cross under RESET?!..

[media=youtube]6E9p-RTj7rM[/media]

[JiBbo]

So I did an in depth 45 minute long tutorial about how to play Julia live:

[media=youtube]_TzK8Q92ZcE[/media]

Enjoy.

[Raynex]

Good shit JiBbo! Really good tactics in this video, I appreciate the link up.

One thing: I saw you do Hugo’s EX Lariat into a TC jump-in combo with Julia. Try TCing into HCF+HP for the stun. You might get more damage!

[v-ryu]

if you predict opponent’s forward roll after a tiger strike:
tiger strike -> backwalk a bit -> jump HK

jump HK will be very ambiguous

@geovski:
Make a reset after hcf+HP isnt a good idea, because you can do a 400 (500 with 1 super) damage combo after it ^^

[Gefen]

t.t
s.lk s.lk 4.mp is 1 frame link, why Julia why?

[option.iv]

The most ambiguous setup I’ve found for j.:hk: and j.:mk: is after a cr.:lp:, cr.:hp: CADC :f::f:+:mp:. Mix this up with post cr.:lk: or CADC backdash, and you’ve got a decent mixup. I also am starting to fall in love with cr.:hp: CADC :f::f:+:mp: as a frame trap and a hit confirm. Starts to feel like Makoto’s st.:mp: utility all over again.

[The_Final_Lion]

Julia seems like she has all the good qualities of the SF cast, and all the good qualities of the Tekken cast, really wholesome character. Seems like she is going to be really good in this game.

And oh god that 1st round win pose is so gold

[eightbO]

if you predict opponent’s forward roll after a tiger strike:
tiger strike -> backwalk a bit -> jump HK

jump HK will be very ambiguous

i dont think many people will go for roll if you are still half screen away, they will stop themselves
will test some hcf+lp options against roll after tiger strike tomorrow

[Essay]

So I did an in depth 45 minute long tutorial about how to play Julia live:

[Awesomeness]

Enjoy.

Great stuff. I like the use of f. HP off of aerial counterhits to squeeze in the ground bounce. Speaking of f. HP, here’s what I do after landing the overhead (even works on punishing full-screen tags). Walk forward until they crumple to their knees, f. HP for the ground bounce, f. MP>LP launcher, d. MK xx Tiger Strike. Easy 385 damage and a hard knockdown. If you’re in the corner, d. HP xx Tiger Strike to end the juggle breaks the 400 mark.

[WonderTonic]

Im not sure if it has been noted. But HCF+HP can be back dash canceled right before the actual punch startup. Nice to do when anticipating a wakeup reversal, or if that expected tag didnt happen as expected.