Errol

You are, of course, correct. A lot of the mistakes I make are simply my own fault, for not reacting fast enough, etc. Some of it mixes with lag. In General I think that lag just lowers my accuracy rate here. I can't perform 100% offline. in 4 bars, it's a tiny bit worse. in 2 bars, it's significantly worse (but doesn't neccessarily matter depending on the matchup) It's like, fucking up on offense against Nu, you have a good amount of slack anyway. Fuck up on offense even the slightest bit against Hakumen or Tager, and you're dead. Unless you want to try to play their guessing game - which is a losing game, with differing health totals and rewards.

It's not just combo drops, but it's mostly technical stuff. I never said it was just combo drops. There are some things in neutral, for sure. But neutral is nebulous. Neutral is not set in stone, it's very difficult. And, Neutral revolves around risk:reward. if risk:reward is shot because of execution, that you can lose with a winning neutral strategy. Make sense? Yes I know 'If you're not winning it's not a winning strategy'. The problem is, that there is a *route* towards 'ideal' Rachel play that I strive for. That's what I'm playing for. The issues I have around that stick out like a sore thumb. To lay it out 1. Combo Drops (relatively minor, used illustratively) 2. Pressure Drops Much larger - Things like messing up jump direction in pressure, or messing up wind direction. Going for fuzzy but going slightly too late and it resulting in a normal jump. Or leaving gaps where there shouldn't be a gap. You know how difficult Rachel is to block. Messing this up can result in taking 4k+ damage instead of doing 4k damage. Think of starting a match with 6k life and your opponent starts with 16k. Messing this up once is game-changing. 3. Oki Drops The biggest (against you, against most other people, pressure drops are the biggest, or neutral). I'm going to lay this out very clearly because Rachel players don't know how Rachel's Oki works. 3C>frog> Wait to see what the opponent does> Opponent touches the ground, does not emergency tech> delay 2a. This beats quick wake-up, rolls, and staying on the ground, on reaction. Opponent touches the ground, emergency techs > You're reacting to what he does. You decide after the tech whether you want to press a button (5b), or not press a button (bait a dp). Everything here is completely doable on reaction. There are no judgment calls to be made if you can react correctly. This is fundamental Rachel oki theory. 3C>Pumpkin> Same as above, but when you emergency tech, on reaction j.A. delay wind 2d. This beats every option you have except for yukikaze. I learned this setup from N-O. The point here is that, executing Rachel's oki game here, does not depend on the opponent even a tiny little bit. It depends on your reacting correctly. With any decent amount of lag, it's impossible. With no lag, it's certainly possible. I'm not 100% accurate at this even offline. But there is NOT EVER any guessing, choices, or judgment involved. If I'm playing a bad connection, I will resort to other strategies because it is either impossible or the accuracy goes down massively. -------------------------------- 4. Predictability in blockstrings. Honestly, this doesn't hardly come into play against you. It does come into play against NothingCells, or Toan, because a. Nothingcells blocks (we have historically had a very good connection, 4 bars), or B. Toan has no options to punish small mistakes so it plays the same either way. When this is an issue, I can identify it as an issue. Sometimes it is an issue, sometimes it isn't - that's not always so easy to judge. In General, players should be able to block Rachel more than 50% of the time, nearing 70%. The reason is that while Rachel's mixups are complete 50/50s, Rachel players do not take either option half the time. the overhead option is much safer and leads to continued pressure. going for lows can allow a chance for the opponent to escape (But not for Hakumen.) 5. Neutral. Same as 4. #2 and #3 dwarf this. You have the perception that you win in neutral against me. My perception is that you win in neutral part of the time against me. I believe that you think you 'win in neutral', because the reward I get when I win in neutral is much lower than it should be because of #2 and #3. In my mind, My neutral against Hakumen is ok, but, like all matchups it could use improving. Neutral is the biggest issue vs Toan. 6. Defense. Relatively speaking, I think I do ok on defense (Give no fucks tsubaki play aside). I make reads, I instant block, I tech throws, I don't do any of this perfectly. Sometimes I get blown up by stuff, and sometimes I get out. Its hard to identify what # this lands at, because as we all know, it's more important in this game to be running your offense than it is to be defending. So, here's how I identify my trouble points with some people: Mac: 2, 3, 1 (Hakumen is a uniquely hard character to combo for Rachel, standard midscreen combos do not work, things are tighter). Toan: 5, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1 (neutral neutral neutral) Mucky: 2, 3 (we have the worst connection on the planet) NothingCells: 4, 6, 3, 2, 1 (Ragna causes 5c to whiff after Iris a lot.) BoltOfShadow: 3, 2, 4, 5, 6 (bolt also likes to try to find mistakes in applying oki and pressure a lot. we have a pretty good connection. In my memory, our sets range from me winning 40-50% if I'm off my game or it is laggy (either resulting in technical execution issues) to 90% if I'm on my game in a smooth connection. Good player, he's the biggest person helping me overcome some of these execution errors because he tests me in an environment I can do something about it. So, maybe you won't agree, but I try to look at anywhere I make mistakes. And in my case, against you, I think I have correctly identified what they are. You disagree. But, we'll have to agree to disagree then.

TD. It's really irrelevant whether he thinks I'm wrong about execution. I specifically said that because he does play Rachel differently, and he can play Rachel however he wants. I try to model my play after N-O. my opinions on these subjects are almost parroting what I have learned from reading and talking with him on twitter. You got a big chip on your shoulder tho, Glad you got it off.

How is 'Rachel also benefits from lag' any more than paraphrasing 'it's also a fact that lag goes both ways when your gapless blockstrings contain 50/50 mixups. just sayin' Actually, the part that I am talking about involves no judgment and no choices. it's strictly technical execution. You conflated basic technical execution of combos and oki, with things that require judgment and choices. I assume no mistakes from the other player. Are you really saying people aren't allowed to identify their reason for losing as being things like dropping combos?

Here are my comments: I played mac in a set of games the other week. I haven't played BB in like 5 months and have been playing UNI for the past couple of months. So we Played, and I played 1 game with Rachel and just said, nah, nahhhhhhhhh, and played a lot of gives no fucks tsubaki. (Because I really didn't.. I don't play this character seriously in CP). I played some matches of Rachel again towards the end, after somewhat ridding myself of UNI habits. (it's hilarious how short throw range is in BB though, really.) TBH, I don't care how people play, I have no issues with someone running away in a match. I talked about him playing 'cowardly' out of humor. Doesn't match his usual play style and he likes to play gold and stuff. So you posted a lot of good matchup info about haku vs Rachel. Which is good stuff. The stuff being argued about was not really anything to do with matchup information, matchup knowledge, or anything to do with neutral. It was mostly about the effects of mistakes on gameplay. With me being on the side of 'Mistake are much more punishing on Rachel than just about any other character', and 'the primary reason I lose is not because of gameplan or neutral, but because of technical failures in execution', and Mac being on the side of 'Hakumen suffers from mistakes too' 'Rachel also benefits from lag' 'Everyone makes mistakes so mistakes aren't the determining factor'. Among other things. But the info you posted is vastly more useful, and I don't care to discuss what I discussed with Mac any further to be frank.

D

some combos are rather stable even in fairly decent lag. Rachel's corner combo for example. It's the stuff that you have to do on reaction that is bad, or very specific timings without BB's usually buffering... Hit confirms, JA confirm is probably one of the hardest, yet possible, confirms there is Then combos with rachel are basically just the ones where altitude matter. JC>2D>5B or 6A, JC>J236A>2D> 5B... Cat chair > 2D> combo is another (wind is used on reaction, the altitude they get winded down at varies on slight differences) Or on reaction pumpkin winding.

Rachel gets hurt by lag in general more than most characters.

playstation now is the thing where it plays the game on a central server and it just streams the video and audio to you and you stream inputs to it. don't play rachel

I thought he was saying that she was top 5 in 1.1 Am I wrong there?

I heard here that Bang's 6D was nerfed to not be from frame 1. Is there any real proof of this? Talking with Rachels in japan they don't think it has been.

Lambda was kind of the first character I picked up, because I could hop into training mode with no practice and do some nice 4k combos. Anyway, it is the change that's a problem and that upset a lot of people. Lambda/Nu was never a character that required any kind of technical skill, so CP put a lot of people off. People that played technical chars in the first place were playing them for a reason, and were ok with it. They do try to have these different characters for different people.

It's specifically that inputting it was difficult. I think it took people a while to get used to having to mash buttons so fast basically. Obviously they fucked up in CP2 but I don't think the nu, lambda split is fundamentally wrong. The core problem here is the usual arcsys problem, their balancing leaves something to be desired.

Tsubaki is pretty decent in CP2.

Doesn't matter. Yeah she had gravity DP, but it was slow startup so easily OS'd. and she had crescent loops, although difficult could do a lot of damage. But lots of characters had explosive damage in CS1 and she had bad matchups vs S characters in that game (e.g. Bang)

CS1 is her worst iteration, she didn't have sickle storm oki until CS2 I believe.

I'm going on the assumption of lists being relative to the game. CS2 Rachel is stronger than EX Rachel (3f guard point cat chair ->8k), but relative to the rest of the cast, EX Rachel wins.

Jin? CS1? Ragna? CS1?

JB>JC>J6B is just immediately more friendly to my hands. Just a minor thing I guess, easy to fix. priority to me though is being able to do it reliably without messing up. had similar problem with orie, 2C OTG off crappy starters being inconsistent, and a 2c whiff is always either punished or have to block. Also what's the preferred way of confirming TK kuugas on hits?

are there issues doing JB>JC>J6B instead of JB>J6B>JC etc? additionally, what's the deal with ~J2B> 2C being easy to whiff on poorer starters? any tips? Wonder if JB>JC>BE J6B>2C might work more stably?

I specifically asked N-O once about rachel across versions came out like this CP1.1=CP1.0>EX>CS2>CP2 CT wasn't listed

how did Bang's Drives change? does this affect rachel too?

your mu is a ho alright

Imagine you would play the top 3 of any BB at this point.

wow