General Strategy, Page 2
Playstyles:
Storm has a few distinct styles that she can use to mold herself to her team, her opponent and her current situation. The important thing to remember about Storm is that she is extremely flexible. While she doesn’t excel head and shoulders above the cast in many areas, she can do a little (quite a bit, actually) of everything and always being aware of how you can transition into a different way of playing is a critical part of playing the character.
This section will detail Storm’s playstyles in a vaccuum; her teammates will not be considered directly, although her team is an important part of the equation. Rather, this section will attempt to tilt the camera from Storm’s team to focus on how her playstyle can help her in her matchups, which can range from great to nightmarish. Even the good matchups can turn sour very quickly if Storm doesn’t utilize certain tools, so focusing on how her styles interact with her matchups is a good look.
Rushdown
Rushdown
[details=Spoiler]As with most 8-way air dash characters, Storm can be played in a rushdown style. Storm possesses both the quick lows and quick aerials needed to run an effective tridash offense and has a great plink dash to cover ground (or air) as necessary. She has decent abare, meaning her ability to convert from random hits is above average, but the pool of moves from which she can covert is relatively small. Storm’s rushdown is quite average, but is bolstered significantly by proper team construction. Regardless of the team, however, Storm has to be aware of a few holes in her rushdown style of offense.
The first major issue, and probably the biggest, with Storm rushdown is that Storm generally is lacking hitstun on many of her normals. Normals that would induce a certain amount of stun on average with other characters just don’t do nearly as much stun for Storm. What this means is that your offense and your tridashes especially, have to be airtight to prevent reversals, reversal assists and up-backs to ruin your chances at a confirm or to keep someone blocking. Your tridashes have to be pretty deep and your confirms have to be moderately close in order to connect for full combos.
Another issue Storm has is that her rushdown move pool is a bit small. Storm has a blatant separation between quick moves and slow ones, between air-to-air moves and tridashing moves. Fortunately, Storm can pre-empt her oppponent’s actions with relative safety, but she will more or less be using only tridash moves when tridashing and only air-to-air moves and option selects when air dashing. Even out of these small groups of moves, Storm does not have a crossup, so your side-switching, should you choose to employ it, has to be very on point.
In contrast, Storm has some definite upsides to her heavy offensive game. First is that Storm is one of the few characters that can stick resets in almost any part of her combos. As a generally low damage character, Storm often cannot justify spending meter to end a combo and resets can be an attractive option, especially against characters that have little to no escape options. Another upside is that, even when the opponent is blocking, Storm has the great ability to push opponents to the corner. The corner is where panicked players go to die and Storm has no problem reaping souls here; the corner represents limited options and that’s just what Storm needs to run a safer offense. With the opponent having specific routes cut off from them, Storm can more easily and more safely apply pressure against the options that are remaining to the opponent.
Finally, when Storm has an opponent blocking, you MUST make use of her jump-cancelable normals. Jump cancels are not just used to apply more pressure…they’re used to keep you safe! A situation where your opponent is not locked in blockstun or hitstun is generally an unsafe one and Storm relies on these moves for outs when her offense goes sour. When you have opponents in the corner of the camera or the corner of the screen, you can make extra use of jump-cancelable normals to perform instant overheads with Storm’s float, which adds another layer to her high/low game. Floating low to the ground even gives you enough advantage to perform another low altitude float after landing form the initial one if you like and doing this all behind the cover of an assist can make it close to impossible to guess Storm’s next move for an extended period of time.
Rushdown Storm is reliant on solid team construction and tends to be vulnerable to reversal assists.
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Runaway/Keepaway
[SPOILER NAME=Runaway/Keepaway]
In truth, runaway and keepaway are two different styles of play, but I don’t think they’re different enough to warrant their own sections each. Runaway focuses on putting obstacles on the screen to cut off the paths available for your opponent to chase after you; once they eventually make their way to you, your obstacle course should have been set such that you already have a moderately safe way out of the situation and can position yourself to make the opponent chase after you again. Ideally, you’ll be doing this while draining their resources in some fashion (most commonly through chip damage) in order to slowly tilt the match in your favor as time goes on. Keepaway also a defensive playstyle, but focuses on making sure the opponent never actually gets to you and, if they try to approach, end up putting themselves at extreme risk to land a hit on you. Keepaway is less fluid than runaway in general and is more pattern-oriented, making it a bit easier to break if not designed solidly.
Runaway Storm can be played solo simply on the merits of Storm’s mobility. While she cannot control multiple areas of the screen at once, she has tools that reach almost any corner of the screen at any one time and the best part is that whether you’re just putting an object on the screen as an obstacle or you’re punishing a poor approach, your moves almost all push the opponent fullscreen again, forcing them to redo the whole trial just to get to you. Fortunately for Storm, she has great ground and air mobility and can hustle out of a telegraphed approach very cleanly. The weakness for Storm here is that she has to pick her moves very carefully when performing them; Storm needs to ask herself some very important questions before committing to runaway. How quickly can your opponent get to you and do they have to respect projectiles? What are their angles of attack and angles of approach? Can the opponent intercept you while you’re running away or lay a trap at your destination even if they don’t catch you directly? The answers to these questions will determine which options Storm can use in specific situations to make the enemy’s approach frustrating, if not difficult.
Keepaway Storm is much harder to play and, by virtue of her frame data alone, needs to be played with team support to make it possible. Keepaway Storm uses the great pushback on her moves combined with assists and DHCs to push opponents fullscreen while also closing off multiple areas of the screen, assuring Storm that the opponent has to have specific ways to counteract the keepaway or succumb to death by chip. A key element of keepaway is spotting the punish on a poor approach or attack. While your goal isn’t necessarily to frsutrate your opponent and force mistakes, it happens from time to time and Storm should always be ready to punish. Whether you need to plink dash in for a ground combo or fullscreen punish with Elemental Rage (or even assist punish with a DHC out from Lightning Storm to a more suitable hyper), you need to make sure that when the opponent pushes their way in without covering their vulnerabilities, you can send them right back out again to force them to approach a different way or with different cover. This style is all about limiting options but making it SEEM as though you are actually removing options. Having Storm’s team back her up means that she can cover multiple different approaches in variable ways with only slight adjustments needing to be made from either herself or her assists in terms of timing and vertical spacing. Don’t forget that, depending on your team, you can also use Fair Wind and Foul Wind to manipulate your opponent’s position on the screen.
Runaway Storm is reliant on an acute sense of both the opponent’s options and Storm’s paths of escape when pressured and tends to be vulnerable to absolute rushdown.
Keepaway Storm is reliant on team construction slanted toward assisting keepaway and tends to be vulernable to projectile negation and mid-screen instant offense and assist punishment styles.
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Hybrid
Hybrid
Spoiler
The legendary hybrid style is a truly flexible style that requires situational awareness first and foremost, combined with above average reaction time with a little bit of prediction thrown in. A hybrid style of play allows Storm to flow between offense and defense seamlessly and in the lowest-risk fashion possible. Hybrid Storm does not have to bear the burden of team construction because the team does not have to be built around her necessarily to make her successful, but she, in turn, risks becoming a burden to her teammates because the hybrid style offers the least amount of up-front advantage out of all her styles, so Storm has to fit in more with her team for this style than her team fitting in with her.
Hybrid Storm should present the following idea: always be moving. Whether this means moving around on the screen or moving characters around through DHCs and TACs, things needs to always be in motion. The idea is to not be playing any one particular game, but to play enough of one to make the opponent understand something that’s not actually happening. For example, if you plink dash back four times into the corner and start chucking Whirlwinds and other projectiles, the opponent will assume you’ve taken up a defensive posture (it’s a safe guess). What the hybrid style of play would do from here is to rely on both prediction and reaction to spot if the enemy takes certain actions in response to certain styles and capitalize on that. Even the simple action sequence of jumping and throwing a Lightning Sphere :l: (predicting that the opponent will run underneath the projectile if they are able) and then performing an ADDB j.:s: on reaction to this move is a low-level example of the hybrid style of play. It’s not so much a bait-and-switch as it is establishing what the opponent can perceive as a constantly changing reality. Remember, this doesn’t just have to be a <take a defensive action> <change to an offensive action> <run away> sequence–the idea is to shift your actions such that the opponent doesn’t actually know what’s coming next or if you’re even planning anything at all. The style sounds really cerebral, but Storm can make good use of it as long as she and her team remain healthy enough to abuse it.
The strength and the weakness of the hybrid style are in the prediction/reaction space. Storm needs to be able to have an idea of what her opponent will do when she assumes a certain posture. If the opponent acts truly unpredictably, then Storm needs to take risks to either force them into a more predictable line of play or to react to the opponent’s commitments and at least make them more passive. Storm can gamble, but the problem with this is that because of her limited amount of truly effective options for many scenarios, the burden of predictability now tends to shift from the opponent over to Storm as she attempts to work her way out of a situation she didn’t really want to get into in the first place. Storm now has to deal with the opponent in a manner that may be easy for the opponent to read unless Storm has specific low-risk outs that make predictability not a heavily influencing factor.
Hybrid Storm relies on solid team construction and tends to be vulnerable to truly unpredictable play.
Approach Methods:
Storm has mostly straightforward approaches with the mixup being where she will hit you instead of how or when. Storm’s main approach methods consist of the plink dash, the tridash and the air dash.
Plink dashing (in this case, referring strictly to ground approaches) is Storm’s main easy way in when the opponent has done something unusually silly in the air and you need to cover ground for a full punish. Plink dashing is also great when used in conjunction with assists–certain players or characters will feel the need to jump and plink dashing gets you right in range for air throws. Storm can also employ the traditional shimmy-shake by plink dahsing up to a character, dashing back when predicting an attack or throw meant to intercept her, and then dash back in for a punish. The shimmy-shake is especially effective against players that use grabs as their main form of close-range offense! Speaking of throws, plink dashing is a great throw option select, so be sure to hold either 
or :f: while dashing to snag a throw when the opportunity presents itself.
Tridashing is an MvC staple and is the foundation of the concept of “the mixup”. Tridashing brings the high/low/throw guessing game to a whole new level with terrifying speed. When used with assists that cover the point character, poor visibility also makes the reaction or guess increasingly difficult and many players will just resign themselves to committing to blocking a particular direction until they get opened up. Without the ability to get full combos from ground throws, Storm relies heavily on the tridash mixup to prevent opponents from blocking her all day.
The air dash is different from the traditional tridash in the sense that air dashing can come before or after projectiles meant to provide cover or frame advantage and can cover more angles than tridashing does (a tridash only approaches from one angle while an air dash can go eight ways and approach from four of those ways). air dashing is used to get a less rigid position in the air than tridashing would give and is a tool for a slightly more passive style of play; indeed, some tridashes are punishable or grabbable on reaction so there will likely be times where you want to move forward in the air without putting all your offensive cards on the table. Mix air dashing with Flight and Float to further vary the speed and angle of Storm’s approach.
Hit Confirmation:
Hit confirmation is important with all characters, but low damage characters like Storm that have the ability to force situations with projectiles and assists need to be able to squeeze damage out of every opportunity. To be clear, hit confirming is not “the initial part of a combo”, but rather the string of attacks used to determine if the opponent is blocking or not before dialing your combo in and proceeding to what would otherwise be unsafe button territory.
For ground confirmations, Storm has a few simple options. The safest and lowest damage options is to chain c.:l: into itself until you can spot the block, which is usually within two strikes. The next option up is c.:l:, s.
to make use of Storm’s jump cancel. The other option up is c.:l:, s., c.:h: to give yourself two jump cancel situations to work with–be careful with this chain because if all three hit, your following jump loop combos will need extreme precision to complete. If you are able to confirm into s. alone, Storm has more variable combo options from there that tend to do more damage and gain more meter. Chaining c.:l:, c. is usually not a good idea and the c. doesn’t even hit low, so while c. is better for actual combos, you don’t want to use it unless you confirm straight from c.:l:.
Air confirmations with Storm are a bit tricky. Your main air to air normal is j.:h: with some limited use from j.. A standard confirm is j.:h:, air dash, j.:h: or j.:h:, j.:s:, air dash, j.:h: but you have to be careful here. Dashing forward out of any of these on block can get Storm grabbed (especially the j.:s: variation–remember that j.:s: has less hitstun than j.:h:) so you may want to dash into either j.:l: or j. and cancel into Flight once the opponent has blocked these faster moves that they shouldn’t be able to grab as easily. Performing j.:h: into a Lightning Attack in the direction of your choosing is also a solid idea and Storm having three Lightning Attacks means she can attempt an offense and back away if the need arises while still retaining the ability to net a full combo if the Lightning Attacks connect, depending on height. As a less used option, canceling j.:h: into Lightning Sphere :l: will also score a full combo if it confirms while keeping Storm safe.
Advantage Over Time:
When talking about advantage over time, which is an important concept to understand with characters like Storm is that because Storm doesn’t kill in one touch by herself without X-Factor, DHCs or THCs, the opponent will almost always be given the opportunity to respond once Storm is done hitting them. Storm’s contributions to a team, therefore, have to be weighed in such a manner as to determine if what she’s doing at any one time is worth the opponent most likely not dying if they get hit. The keepaway style of Storm, for example, probably offers the most up-front advantage out of any of Storm’s playstyles. By closing off several areas of the screen at once and forcing reactable approaches, Storm is doing chip damage (right now) and gaining some meter (right now) while forcing the opponent to establish a counter strategy (which is a less immediate benefit) along with opening up the possibility of tagging opposing assists that try to help the enemy point character bully their way in (also a less immediate benefit). Over the long run, however, when comparing Storm’s life total to most other characters (meaning she eats chip at a higher risk to her health than high HP characters) and examining Storm’s meter efficiency (meaning the shreds of meter you gather up to make a whole bar could be spent without making a meaningful dent in the match) and the opportunities in which she gets to spend meter, regardless of efficiency for this particular style (alpha counters and snapbacks are good, for example, but don’t complement this particular style of play; the opponent shouldn’t be able to get to you, remember?), then the benefit Storm offers gets weaker and weaker. RIGHT NOW, that is to say IN THE CURRENT MOMENT, Keepaway Storm is doing very well as long as she’s keeping the opponent away.
Rushdown Storm offers a more balanced advantage over time to her team. While she’s rushing down, she’s doing damage (right now) and gaining meter (right now) and can possibly set up for aggressive DHCs or THCs (less immediate). Over the long run, she’s not doing terribly high damage, but as the match wears on and her teammates may or may not fall (less immediate to far off), her ability to rely on X-Factor to close up the gaps in her game jump up with each level, effectively balancing out the advantage offered more or less. As her X-Factor levels increase, her ability to effectively use meter also increases and so you can see how Storm needs to be cognisant of what she is offering to a team at different stages of the game. When you examine the style with which you want to play Storm, the team with which you want to equip her and the advantage she offers over time and at any one point in the game, you can more accurately tailor your gameplan for an optimized approach instead of formulating a very generic gameplan and wondering why it doesn’t work (if it doesn’t). Advantage over time isn’t a catch-all for team building, but it can serve as an early warning system to a player building a team if all of the members of a team playing in their individual styles do not offer little or no advantage in certain points of the game or in certain situaitons. A good question to ask yourself is, “If Storm isn’t offering an advantage at a particular point in the game, then who on my team can?”
