I’ll follow this up with a vid or pictures. I finally got some time last night to dig into the boxes for Thunder and saw some ‘scary’ things to take notice of.
s.HK - his ‘convict kick’ if you will, it moves him forward a good distance while shoving his foot into someone’s crotch. It’s slow. However (pic will follow) his foot and leg have no hitbox at ALL, it stays with his core body the whole time. so in theory, unless a move has high invincibility or stupid range, you can snuff most attacks with proper spacing. To test, I recorded Saberwulf doing rapid fire s.jabs. It’s got pretty good reach for a jab and has great speed to go with it. Not a SINGLE time was he able to stop the kick. Even still (looking into frame data next) - it looked to be ‘almost’ safe is spaced correctly. This move looks down right abusable if a Thunder player practices the spacing and timing for it. Its use will be more match-up dependent - air-heavy Sadira players could give two f#cks about it, but other characters could get quickly annoyed. Especially if you just do something like s.HK, headbutt or s.HK, command throw. Hell, even the backthrow might combo off it (not sure, will playtest when I get a chance), in which case you could really go to town.
EDIT - While not a true safe jump, I played around with the distances a bit, and with good timing, you can force someone to get up blocking or get hit in the face. If timed right, most people have to rely on a shadow move to get past it on w/u, and with proper spacing/timing, you can do the appropriate counter - either his shadow throw or his shadow headbutt. But something as simple as ending a combo with his headbutt xx juggle in the corner, then taking a step back and timing it, can lead to a ‘near’ safe situation for maintaing pressure. Just don’t make the mistake of linking it with a ‘hard’ ankle slicer and don’t link with a hard attack afterwards either…it’s the easy and meaty thing to do if you connect, but its also super predictable.
j.MK - his cross-up kick, nothing broken here, but just a heads up that it covers the entire bottom of thunder, so when it comes to ambigious cross-ups, this is the move of choice
j.HP - this is almost like an air version of his s.HK. All of his tomahawk normals have no hitbox on the weapon itself, but this attack sweeps all around his front and bottom with a HUGE hurtbox (it’s the exact opposite of his c.HP). It stuffs pretty much anything that’s not invincible. It seems down right abusable. On top of that it can cross up too, just avoid being to SF about it with j.HP, c.HP, special. It might work now, but it will get broken all the time later on.
s.mk - its like his s.hk without moving forward and a paltry hurtbox - on the flip though its speed is pretty good. I’d compare its usefulness to Yoshimitsu’s d/f rk …
s.jab/c.jab/j.jab - all seem ‘bleh’ on first review. For meeting people in the air, j.mp & j.hk are better options. For crossing J.HP and J.mk are better. For jump-in J.HP runs them all. S.jab has solid speed, but crummy range. Stun from it is too long for a ‘good’ tick IMO, but it can be used to bait and punish. Due to the height, it is ineffective as an AA option. c.jab is a low standing jab…
More to come…
- :bluu: