I do the same zoning that immortal described, except with a lot more of everybody’s favorite wall dives. I always want to keep my distance from boxer and above all, stay away from the corners. I do wall dives when boxer is waking up, to run out time, and at random other intervals (free c.HP when boxer reversals into corners).
Boxer’s super is a non-issue in this match as long as you exercise caution when he has it. You just have to be very careful of the throw loop, and staying away is the best way to avoid the situation.
Ganelon and I played a good set of games on GGPO of Boxer vs Claw. Here’s my take (Ganelon, please feel free to chime in here).
Boxer wants to stay on the ground, always charged in down back mode. You must be ready for fierce headbutt any wall dive, or do a kick rush at him. This is your #1 priority, because if you let him knock you down you can expect to lose 50% life on ambigious wall dives.
So you’re sitting in crouch, now what? Here low mk is your friend. It hits many of Claw’s moves. A smart claw will try to poke out of range with standing mp, and here there’s a 50/50 game of mostly blocking and occasionally rushing. You lost most of the guessing games numerically, but this is countered by the fact that if you can hit with a rush, you can do a safe jump with jumping mk, leading to 50% or so damage from tick setups.
I think the fight is about 50-50, perhaps with Boxer advantage if you really have your safe jump timing down.
Aziz, that short-cut was news to me. thanks for the golden info :tup:
double flip-kicks…or juggling flip-kicks. what is the best way to perform them?
am i right in thinking you wanna have your charge ready, and when you want to unleash, hit forwards, then press kick as you return the joystick to the back position? ie delaying the kick button by a plsit second so you’re charging the next flip kick before the first one has connected
this move is giving me trouble, but i had heard it was pretty tough to execute, and it’s only recently that i’ve started approaching this game, and competitive play in general, seriously…
the moral dilemna. i must’ve won 20+ games in a row a few days back against a friend of mine on ggpo. but i did feel bad about the wall dive abuse. now that i’m starting to really get into the intracacies of playing ST, and playing it online, what i’m discovering more and more is that the game is full of tricks, or “traps”, if you will. certain characters against certain other characters may have a set of moves that when performed in rotation make it very difficult for the opponent. of course there is usually a way to escape, but the player who doesn’t know that escape route is gonna lose to it time and time again. so do you see claw’s wall dive game as another one of these traps that is just inherently part of the game? i see a lot of people really anti the idea of counter picking, and i think this taps into that to a degree.
a good player can stop vega’s spamming wall dives easily if they know its coming. they can just jump back and attack. the key is to mix it up and that means spamming the dives from different directions and mixing up the hit front and back.
bad matchup i have is fei since his flame kick pretty much owns my vega’s tricks. any tips to evening out this match?
A good player can’t stop a good claw’s wall dives unless he chose certain counter-wall dive characters. If the Fei player is doing the shien kyaku on wakeup, you can hit him out of it every single time with a wall dive if you get the timing/positioning down and mix it up correctly.
You may be able to get by this matchup with an all-wall dive strategy here but the timing will actually be harder than just fighting him on the ground most of the time. From the sounds of it, you’re going right at him with a dive, which should get you knocked down almost every single time.
Really, if you pretty much just poke him when he advances and anti-airs when he jumps (the rekku kyaku shouldn’t be an issue unless you’re playing online in a less-than-excellent connection), there’s little he can do (unless he gets you in the corner) due to the fact that the shien kyaku can’t be perfomed while walking forward.
Fei’s low fierce punch stops Vega’s poke.
Slides and unexpected jumps against him are the best tools. And never attack him unless he do his shoryuken move.
So people keep talking about this secret tech from Japan that makes Claw undisputed #1…
Just kidding. However, I’m sure MAO taught everyone quite a lot at ToL this year, so I’m curious what Spanish muff… i mean wall-divers picked up from him. I hope someone harassed him for tips!
yes, early as hell Monday morning there were several of us learning some good tips from him. the only different is while Riz and everyone else was learning how to fight against this stuff i was the only one on the opposite side learning how i’m going to start incorporating this stuff into my arsenal. MAO even had us do a role reversal where he had me sit down to play Vega and he took turns himself along with Riz, Ultra Combo, and Mike Idge learning how S. Ken/S. Sagat/Ryu respectively can hope to defend against some tactics and at the same time i was getting in some reps using a tactic of his. good times!
this should be helpful to America’s ST scene. Vega players will spread his tactics and become stronger and in the meantime others will get used to seeing some of these techniques (still not on MAO’s level probably but getting closer) and thus will grow and learn to defend this stuff. it will be a win/win for everyone.
i don’t know about the others in the room but i’m the type that thinks keeping secrets from the community is bad and holds everything back. it stunts growth. i want all the info out there wide open for everyone to access but i don’t force it. ask Fudd, Riz, Mike Idge, Fatboy, El Trouble, maybe others i’m forgetting and hopefully they can explain this stuff. if they don’t come to me and i’ll gladly spill all the info to Vega players and shoto players alike. that is what we covered while i was there. if they went on to cover any different ways other characters handle the wall dive insanity then i was not around for that part, i had to get going for my flight.
Hopefully you took good notes immortal, I’m going to start picking up claw so us west coasters don’t get blown up next year when Mao comes back again. I’m going to need to ask you for tips and advice. We all need to make sure that cold style claw doesn’t strike twice on American soil.
I understood the gist of what Mao was trying to teach us, even though it was pretty difficult to get past the language barrier.
I’ll spare the precise details now, since it’s difficult to explain without some sort of diagram or drawing. Basically, good Claw players will attack with a wall-dive at 3 sectors.
The space in front of the opponent.
The space slightly behind their opponent’s head, but above them.
The space beyond the opponent’s shoulders, on the cross-up side
It’s insanely difficult to react to which option the Claw player will do, so you’ll have to learn which sector they prefer to attack based on player preference. I forget the exact percentages, but Mao said he changes his attack sector based on what his opponent does, but he usually starts the round off 70% of the time by attacking the front side. Afterwards, he’ll change it.
Depending on which sector he’ll attack, you input the following reversal commands for a dragon-punch (this example pertains to shotos). Each number corresponds with the above-mentioned attack sector. This example assumes that P1 is a shoto, P2 is claw. When Claw wall-dives to the opposite wall, then he will be on P1 side, and shoto will be on P2 side.
You do a standard reversal dragon punch from P2 position.
This is the difficult one. You input a half circle starting from the stick position #4 (left), going down and around towards stick position #6 (right), and you negative edge all 3 punches. This inputs a reversal DP, while also incorporating a block.
The reason it works is that Mao is able to quickly change Claw’s position above the center-axis of the shoto, so that he will change sides during the reversal input. Basically, it means that he’s able to change position at the same time that you input a reversal DP, so that the game will eat your inputs, and no reversal will come out. This is the reason why many shoto players, myself, Damdai, everybody who tried, could not EVER get a reversal DP if he attacks in attack sector #2. You perform the half circle in order to achieve the ‘towards, down, down-towards’ input needed for a dragon punch, but doing it so that you change sides. It’s similar to the cross-cut auto-correct DP that Choi uses in a variety of games, including SF4.
You do a DP from P1 position.
That’s about as good as I can explain it, without having the necessity of diagrams and a powerpoint presentation to explain it better. Hopefully some of the others that were in the room can try to go into the details.
yeah that’s a good way to explain it. this was in reference to Vega taking the wall behind the shoto and then attacking in one of three possible sections. in the heat of battle trying to discern between them… good luck. and even if you guess correctly #2 is coming it’s very hard to slam that dp in there with the half circle motion. like El Trouble said it can sometimes result in blocking so that’s not so bad right? wrong. MAO would always keep pressure on, often throwing immediately. he would continue to have the advantage after a blocked wall dive many times. anyway a diagram is probably needed.
the other big thing was anti crossup stuff. i still haven’t quite gotten the hang of this yet but essentially unless a crossup is deep enough (taking advice from Riz on this one) then MAO would always just use reversal crouching jab as a way to move Vega’s hit box so far forward and out of the way that your crossup whiffs and then guess what, he throws and begins crazy pressure again. not sure if i’m not getting the reversal timing right or not choosing the right crossups to do it, but a few attempts against Damdai on HDR classic got me crossed up every time. i guess this is to be expected at first.
I’ve experienced this first-hand. I don’t know what it is, but Mao knows exactly how to whiff a cr.jab to slide his hurt box under and away from any of my cross-up attempts, even my spin kick cross-up attempts. It’s similar to how Guile is able to cr.strong Ryu’s early jump attacks, to slip underneath, and throw him.
Mao especially loves doing crazy shit like random whiffed jumps into throws, and it works surprisingly well.
i tried to put together some pics that show the 1/2/3 sections we are talking about. i tried my best but i’m not an artist by any means and had a lot going on quickly to try to get the pics, i’m not as coordinated as Desk at doing so much with so little number of hands. hahaha.
this is the default position i’m using for these photos. i have the opponent standing but keep in mind you will usually set this up after a knockdown of some sort …
MAO would almost exclusively take the wall behind the opponent and this was the goal in teaching us the sectors, we would always use the wall behind …
most importantly here are the 3 areas. #1 is always staying on the same side of the opponent after hitting the wall, #2 is barely crossing up just slightly, and #3 is a more pronounced crossup that sails you past the opponent a bit more. since we are taking the left wall the order is 1/2/3 but if the characters were switched and we take the right wall then the order becomes 3/2/1 …
this hit in #2 and it’s the trickiest not only for Vega to space it but also for the opponent to recognize and counter. as previously stated you have to kind of cross cut it. you do a half circle starting with the direction of the wall Vega took (L, D/L, D, D/R, R motion), and apparently you have to execute this in about 8 frames and at just the right time … http://www.flickr.com/photos/82512215@N08/7553713374/in/photostream
i guess this is to be expected at first.
