I think my natural reaction is c.LP to jab them out in this situation which is easy to execute, but also boring and conservative. Spd isn’t a bad starting option though if you can nail it consistently even if it’s just the first couple of times. If they adjust and counter it with something you’ve just conditioned them to react in a different way in that situation. Then it’s your turn to adjust. Next time they land from an anti air and they are scared of taking an spd, you’ve just got to pick the counter to their next option.
It’s usually a pretty close range scenario and you’ve got time til they land. If they are jabbing or jumping then they aren’t blocking so they are open to hits. Headbutt should beat them wether they jab or jump. If they are somehow getting under you with a crouching jab or something, EX RBG armour will absorb their attack and scoop them up, but this loses to a jump like spd. If they manage to get into the air before you react, you can charge s.HP and your armour will absorb their hit, or you could lariat if there’s time to activate.
Just made gold rank with Gief last night. It almost killed me though with all the rage quits and online issues. Even just super gold seems so far away, don’t know that I have it in me to push on. Might stick with casuals and battle lounges for a while. I think my biggest weakness is matchup knowledge, specifically knowing when I can and can’t push buttons against certain characters, and there’s a few gimmicks I still struggle to deal with.
hey guys, im toying with the idea to pick up zangief (again).
Had him at ~11k bp/ 2,5k pp in usf4, so im ‘just average’ but is that enough for sfv gief? I heard he’s really bad.
I dont want to play competitive, just be a good online warrior…
Thanks guys for the AA follow up advice =) headbutt sounds like a good catch-all after conditioning them with SPD’s, I’m going to try this out and see how it goes.
Ps. gigglz - You can be a good online warrior with anyone in this game. There are platinum and gold Gief’s out there, so it’s definitely doable. The character takes a lot of effort and you really have to put in work to win some MU’s, but I find he is very rewarding and a ton of fun to play, which is all that matters.
Definitely try Zangief. He’s extremely fun to play. Besides, there’s nothing quite as satisfying as getting great reads with him and watching your opponent fall apart mentally.
I’ve fluttered around the cast since the game came out and there’s no character I have more success or fun with. Hope it’s the same for you!
I took quite a long pause from sfv now because I just couldnt adjust to the unresponsiveness (is that a word…?) which seems to be that whole 8f thing
I just couldnt antiair consistently and it made me crazy… maybe now I’ve got enough distance from my old timings and habits to try again.
Probably will give it a shot later today
Thank you guys
edit:
it’s me again. Do you guys think it is helpful/ useful to play a couple of matches without any SPDs? Like trying to play gief as if he werent a grappler, only normals and combos into lariat?
I was thinking about that and said to myself; maybe you can condition your opponent for up to two rounds to stay grounded, so that in round 3 you can pile up easy spd damage 2-3 times.
edit2:
yeah… pretty discouraged now tbh. there’s a rant coming up:
Guile MU is probably unwinnable, nothing to add here. My brother came into the room right when I started a guile match and when it was over he was like: "why did they nerf gief in that matchup even harder than in sf4, was it not bad enough already?"
ibuki hordes are just running away all day and kunai “limitation” is practically non existent since I have nothing to move in quickly and stop/ punish it.
Tried to just walk my opponents into the corner (actually the only thing i managed to do every single round) but they’d just crossup me, take the damage and be free again … In sf4 I used lariat to stuff that shit, but I feel like lariat loses to everything
I only had one match where I KNOW I messed up and deserved the loss, in every other match I kinda felt robbed, winning the ground game only to mess up one anti air and eating a VTrigger combo -> life advantage gone. Having almost no combos doesnt help either. Only real damage source are his command grabs and those can be avoided easily… sorry for rant but gief doesnt feel like gief anymore. Im used to being able to chase the enemy down and stay in their face, not spending 80 seconds running after them. I may be looking for something “easier” to pick up again (even though I was a gief main…) .Gief at this point is unnecessarily infuriating to play (for me) right now.
I mean, why is gief so slow AND doesnt have a quick forward move? I always thought he had green hand to compensate for gis poor walk speed and to have a combo tool… both gone. I feel like I have to condition them to keep blocking, but doing that with jab strings is more of an annoyance for my opponent than an actual threat.
And last but not least, that unresponsiveness (it IS a word) didnt go away and it drives me mad, especially when I walk into fireballs I SWEAR I blocked in time but still get hit…
ok end rant, just had to get that off… pheww
It’s a tough and fair question. Because of SFV’s commitment policy, you either bet big and win or go home broke.
But if you want to be consistent, you have to grind it out. Play a slow moving wall defence game using your low commitment attacks: lights, mediums and V-Skill - countering projectiles and moving them to the corner for a slow, excruciating and painstaking death (for both you and them :s ) with very sparing and less frequent, occasional use of SPD.
Input lag + display lag + net lag, would kill your ability to anti-air properly. Once Capcom fixes the input lag, jumping will become almost impossible. 5 frame anti-air jabs, will function like a one button SF4 lariat, for all the cast. If you couldn’t jump Z in SF4, then you can’t really jump anyone in SFV. That’s how effective it will become. Hopefully SFV, has the “depth” of anti-ground jumping attacks in their meta game design.
Think of SPD, like bluffing in poker. Sometimes you have to play honest and sometimes you have to keep them honest. But having said that, a walk up LP SPD is harder for them to neutral jump / back dash punish than a point blank HP SPD.
Lariat has a different role in this game. I would say anti-fireball and combo ender like a mini tatsu. You need to shop around for a better anti-air =)
Itabashi Zangief made 5th place on a premier event stacked with killers. Zangief can’t be so bad after all. There is no reason not to do well with him especially when just playing casually.
Also this should be a lesson for all the “8-frame delay ruins my ability to anti air/react/etc” complainers. There just are plenty of characters who need to use more than one anti air. This is not sf4 in which you can just use lariat for every kind of jumpin (different hitbox/distance/trajectory) and there is no reason for a comparison in the first place. As an example jump back normal is an effective and reliable method for every character to deal with jump ins from close range (crossups). There also is hardly any risk to it besides loosing a little bit of space.
Rather than riding the hate train people should work on their game with gief as Itabashi so convincingly demonstrated.
No offense but Gief still sux. I think Itabashi is the best in the world now so just cause he’s godlike doesn’t mean the character is good. How many other Giefs made top 50? Top 25? Looks like zero to me. Then look at how many Cammys, Chuns, and Kens are in top 25. It’s ridiculous.
@scratchback thats because no one plays zangief because everyone says it sucks. If half of the player played him you would see a lot more zangief in top 16 / 8… Dumb example but you get the point, Of course hes not the best in the game but you can win if you put work, just like everything. Now can we chill with the zangief sux post? Everytime i check this i read the same comments. If you really dislike the character you can always pick another one. Im talking in general now, not to you personally.
That has always been the case with “bad” characters. If you put enough work in, you can make the character viable.
I can only speak for myself but Im just upset that the character seems to require much more work than most of the remaining cast and I still like him enough to continue with him (mained him in sf4 as I already mentioned).
And he also did require work in SF4, but that seemed way more “doable” for a casual online warrior like me. In sf5, it looks like you really have to commit your time to the character to make him even slightly fun in the online environment. Compared to necalli, whom I played beforehand, Zangief is ridiculously harder to pick up
No one plays Gief cause he’s bad that’s the point. It’s not cause everyone says he sucks, he sucks lol. We don’t dislike the character we dislike how they they made so weak in this game especially compared to everyone else. At least that’s how I feel.
Gigglz, I agree 100%. Gief players have to work harder than anyone else by far. It was hard in 4 but it’s insane in this game. Non Gief players just have no clue what the struggle is like. Then you have people that play Ken. Cammy, Mika, etc that can just turn off their brains and go dumb and win.
It’s not that people don’t play Zangief it’s that his flaws are even more noticeable in this game and given his lack of tools he has a harder time getting results as compared to more equipped characters. The issue many including myself have is that a Gief specialist can never really win a tournament unless he does the following
Gief becomes the secondary character
You have an extremely solid Ryu, Nash, Ken or Chun in your pocket.
So far Itazan has made it the farthest out of any Gief specialist but will he have the same luck in a 5000 person bracket idk. What you can expect is a Specialist of the big four (Ryu, Nash, Chun, and Ken) followed by Karin and Necalli with Mika maybe rounding it out.
I’m not a tech specialist but Gief tech feels very limited and with the abuse of quick rise and jab mashing it becomes more of really reading your opponent and short sets really don’t help you get a great gauge.
Heck I’m still trying to figure out the true benefit of “infinite armor” after V-trigger activation if you still move slow as molasses when in reality you want to close the gap. Honestly it sounds perfect if his V-trigger was two meters but being currently at three most Gief players are really looking for the home run play.
In the official sfv Bible (primagames) Zangief is rated as the most difficult grappler. Balancing can’t account for ease of play, but I can understand where you are coming from. I used to main gief in sf4 because anti airing and punishing was easy for a beginner such as myself. In sfv you can’t resort to using a fully invincible anti air, but instead you have to use at least 3 different. His parry introduced a challenging dimension to his punish game.
This is why there shouldn’t be any comparisons to sf4 in the first place. Rather view gief as the hard to learn/master character he is and expand from that point onwards.
The problem is that gief seems to be a hard to learn/master character but then is just barely viable.
Why put in hard work and end up average, instead of putting that hard work to use with a character that shines once mastered. Zangief can be made ‘good’ as seen by ita. But the interesting question would be “if ita used his time to learn nash/ mika/ ken/ chun, would his results be better, same or worse?”
I can only argue that the results would be better, except ita actually CAN only play grapplers (which I doubt)
I’m going to go against the grain and say despite his flaws, zangief is a great character for someone like myself and I don’t think I could do any better and would probably be much worse off if I invested the same amount of time in someone like ryu/ken/chun li/nash/mika. I don’t have great twitch reactions and I don’t think I could ever get really solid with mashing out big combos with tight timing or complex movements. However I can read the play and understand how to develop strategies to setup the opposition. So when I do pick right, zangief allows me to dish out huge damage with relative ease and consistency. I probably wouldn’t have gotten so serious about this game if I didn’t give zangief a try when I realised balrog wasn’t currently on the roster and being sick of button mashing with the stock standard ryu. My main problem isn’t the set of tools he has available, I’d just like to see some minor tweaks and cleaning up of a few weird glitches and interactions that stuff CA, vtrigger, spd, rbg and lariat.
