Hello, are there anymore tips and pointers on avoiding hit stun decay other than “don’t use light attacks”? Are there assists or certain types of special moves that destroy your hit stun throughout your combos? I just feel like two of the characters on my team (X-23 and Nova, Dr. Doom is fine) have high hit stun decay for the amount of damage that they can deal, at least for X-23.
It just somewhat frustrates me seeing “those top tier” characters that have combos that last for a long time and I’m thinking to myself “WHERE THE HELL IS THAT HIT STUN DECAY!?” while my X-23 combos and Nova combos lost their hit stun way too quick for the amount of damage that they do.
Should I post the combo notation to see where I’m going wrong in my combos?
The combo system doesn’t function normally like in SSF4. Each hit does give a set amount of hit stun, but there’s an overall hit stun timer that steadily decreases as time passes on in a combo. So for instance, doing a certain combo very slowly will cause the hit stun to deteriorate more since the timer is running down. But, doing a combo faster will cause each hit in a combo to reduce the count on this hit stun timer and allow longer combos to be possible. So basically you want to do longer combos in the shortest amount of time as possible.
Some ways you can decrease the amount of time taken to do a combo is to instantly go into aerial combos as soon as you super jump off of an S attack (don’t do this if your opponent drops out though). For X-23, I recently saw ChrisG do some insanely long combos with her using two assists. The only reason it was able to work was because he did his aerial combos as soon as he left the ground.
As for Nova, I don’t think he has very many extended combos. The basic Nova combos I see involve basic LMHS MMHS Relaunch S H Super. And that still does “grown-ass man” damage. I’m not sure if Nova needs many extended combos to be honest since he does so much damage anyways. I don’t even think it’s very practical to do super long extended combos with Nova.
Oh btw, assists all contribute to hit stun now. That was one of the changes from MVC3 to UMVC3. So if you want assists that will not cause an opponent to fall out, you gotta use an assist that either wall bounces or ground bounces. You have a good ground bounce on that team from Nova’s Centurion Rush assist and I’m sure that can help out X-23 a lot in extending her combos since she can OTG herself.
The problem I have with some of the Mirage Feint combos would be that if you try to do them too quickly, the opponent will be too high when you do the air combo so it would whiff, same with the Nova ground bounce; doing S right when they go into ground bounce will cause the opponent to be too high for the air combo. I’ll probably go back into the lab and try to come up with something though. Thanks for all the info, I never knew that speed had to do with hit stun decay.
And I agree with Nova, although the combos are short and somewhat simple, they get decent amounts of damage.
Another tip I’d add in is cutting your combo up. For example, if your combo consists of 5 segments and it’s dropping at segment 4, play around with that segment to see if you can take away an attack or two so you can complete the combo.
For example, if I do LMHS, MMH (Flight) LMHS, OTG Launch MMHS, and it’s dropping at the second MMHS, I might take away an M or the S, and just combo into super.
Was that for Nova? For Nova I combined his flight/un-flight H loop with conventional ABC air combos: air H, s.H, s.S, air.H xx fly, air.H xx unfly, air H, land, s.H, air.S, OTG Forward H, s.S, air.M, air.H xx Super (Ball super preferably). If I add a air.M to air.H right before the air launcher to OTG, the launcher will whiff.
