The technique behind instant blocking?

[Fujiwara]

Lately, I've been trying to work instant blocking into my game. So far it had bred many good results as I'm punishing things I usually wouldn't punish before. My only issue here is that sometimes I get hit while trying to instant block during strings. What I've been doing is tapping down back before I think a hit is coming, but sometimes I get hit anyways and then combos happen. I believe I'm hitting down in the process and getting hit since I am no longer blocking.

What I'm asking is what's the technique behind instant blocking consistently? I've seen player ib every hit in a string no problem before.

[Rhiya]

Don't IB in bad netplay connections unless it's basically guaranteed (Litchi 6D second hit, for example.). You'll miss and get hit.

If it is your fault, though (and you should pretend it is, even if it isn't, because you'll get better by practicing), you should record the training dummy doing a bunch of strings in training mode and practice IBing them. That's going to be the easiest, fastest way to get better at it. There's no trick to it; you just need to practice.

[Circuitous]

There's also a delay before your inputs are received by the game. You might just be hitting back a little too late.

[TheRealBobMan]

1. Make sure the way you interface with your controller is practiced well. You might be right in assuming that you're hitting down instead of downback, which means you need to grind that out in muscle memory.

2. Learn to time an input to what you see on the screen. It's probably as easy as it sounds, yet different than most expect. It takes the brain a while to respond to seeing stuff happen, so things are happening a little bit earlier than you think, which means you need to press the button/stick slightly earlier than you would expect. I think IB has a 5 frame window, and you might be pressing back closer to the last few frames than the first few frames of that window, which would mean that if your margin of error is a few frames wide, you'd get hit from time to time by pressing it too late.

3. Learn what moves look like. Some moves can't really be IB'd/SB'd on reaction because of their startup, but some moves are slow enough that you can if you know they're coming, and some are slow enough that you can no matter what. When you factor that block strings generally don't have too many branches for some characters, you can get away with just finding the rhythm of the other guy and pressing back to that, erring on the side of being early. If you're too early, whatever, you still blocked, and if the timing was within that 5 frame window (which is plenty big), you're good to go. The thing is, if you're just tapping back, your opponent can vary his/her blockstring to try to mess up your timing, or go for stuff to punish your IB attempts or successes. So while you want to IB stuff to get meter/pulse, sometimes you only want to IB the slow H move at the end of the string or a specific move early in the string that'll leave a gap that allows you throw reversal out of the string, if you notice your opponent varies their blockstrings effectively.

Anecdote: I actually backdash a lot when I attempt to instant block, because instinct kicks in and says to block, and then I'm like "I can instant block this no problem" after I've already pressed back once, which means I tap it again, backdash, and get hit. I'm getting better at handling the stick part of playing on a stick, but I still feel more comfortable going for slashbacks in a lot of cases because it's easier for me to press a button when I want, and I can choose to commit or not without having this problem. If backdash is like forward dash, you have a 10 frame window for the input, which means that if you tap back for the IB within 10 frames of starting to block, you'll do something you didn't want.

I've heard that you can actually just switch from blocking high to low and vice-versa and it'll register for instant blocks, but all of my attempts at doing this so far result in that not happening, or getting hit. It'd definitely fix my problem if I could figure out why that is. It works for other players. *Shrug*