Airk

I've been reading about the evils of modern HDTVs and how much they lag and so on and so forth, and I'm curious; What are people here using to play these games on? Standard CRT TV/Monitor? Standard HDTV (with some 'noteworthy' amount of input lag)? (That's me, right there, BTW) Lagless/Low Lag HDTV/Monitor (The "Evo monitor" or something similar)? If the latter, where did you get it and how did you choose it? And when (Since a lagless monitor you bought 4 years ago is probably no longer on the market)?

To be honest, _I_ am still depressed, but I wouldn't regard that as a failure, because as I said previously, there is really no combo under the sun that could fix it. I'm facing a character who is, at the very least, MUCH more technical than anything I've ever been able to do anything with before. I can get by okay in CS2 because I can play basic, without being too fancy and since the character has enough strengths at neutral, it's okay that my combos are sub-par, and my footsies are iffy. It gives me stuff I can clearly set myself towards improving on, while still meaning that I can beat people who have better combo skills than me but less good fundamentals. I really don't see that happening EX without massive improvement on my part, because I'm going to get bloody well blown up by people who can still produce 4k+ in the corner, while I'm going to be stuck without any of the strengths I'm used to that help me open people up so I can get an edge there. When you kindof suck at combos (Look, I've been practicing IAD stuff for months, and it's at the point where I can -usually- get it off a naked 214D/CH 214A/B/C/CH 22A/B/C, and forget about actually using it to improve damage inside any other sort of combo. I even drop j.214A<whiff> corner stuff way more than I'd like for purposes of being competitive) then having your character's solid neutral game nerfed to hell isn't going to be compensated for by any sort of "Hey guys, our combos are still good!" stuff. =/ Fine. I'm bad. My execution is shoddy, I mash, and I can't block Gauntlet Hades, but I could still win a little in CS2. I'm really not optimistic about my EX game. But that's my fault and no one else's.

Uh, I thought the first rule of posting Youtube videos was to ignore the comments?

Well, either EX is going to cause me to level up my game a ton, or I'm going to be completely incapable of playing this character. >doomed<

This should probably be in the "Self-Improvement and Critique Thread" thread, but here's what I'm seeing off the top of my head: #0: Relax. You play kinda nervous. #1: Air charging at neutral is very dangerous, and you probably want to avoid it. For the duration of CS2, the way you get charge at neutral is the occasional quick tap of 5D. Once EX comes around, the way you get charge at neutral is you don't, you wait for a knockdown. #2: You really need to be able to make something of a 214D hit. Practice 214D {> 5B} > 2CC > 236B > 214B > 22B for starters, then work on adding an instant air dash combo part in after the 2CC. #3: Hitconfirms? More than once I saw you do something like 5B > 2BB and then...stop, even though you were hitting your opponent. You should've continued into SOMETHING in those instances. Just finishing these combos would be helpful. #4: Similar to 2 and 3, you need to be able to do something after a 22X counterhit. Again, the easy suggestion is 5B > 2CC > 236B > 214B > 22B. IAD stuff can come later. #5: Charge management - you need to be constantly aware of how much charge you have, so that you can use it. If you're doing 5BB > 2BB > 5CC > 236A > 214A > 22A while you have a charge (Without a reason), you're wasting damage and corner carry, since you could be doing 5BB > 5CC > 22C > 236D > 5B > 2CC > 236B > 214B > 22B instead. This combo takes a little bit of practice, and regrettably doesn't work on a couple of characters (Makoto is the one that leaps to mind) but it's still FAIRLY easy and produces much better damage and carry than the basic zero charge stuff. There are times when you might opt to do just the basic stuff (probably when you're pretty-close-to but not quite in the corner, and want to save your charge so you have enough for a really nasty 2-charge corner combo.) but overall, you're better off spending the charge than not. #6: I assume the random 6Cs were mis-inputs? #7: Do -something- after you land a throw. Either 6CC > Air stuff in the corner, or 236D > 5B > 2CC > 236B > 214B > 22B if you have charge elsewhere.

Off the top of my head, I can't recommend another distributor, but this site has good but slightly dated information about buttons and model numbers and the like. I don't think there's any real magical system behind them to "understand" though.

Given this, we should basically never use 2A, since it's now even on block just like 5A is. Edit: well, unless they nerfed 5A too. Trust nothing. Also, 214C does take a primer in CS2. Yeah. Not useful. =/ Especially since even if you guard crush with it, the next hit lands immediately and screws up whatever you might want to do. If you're bored you can check both supers (C and D) - they used to break primers too, but whatever. I'm curious if they've done any more tampering with the D version to try to make it useful.

Yeah, but on the other hand, UMvC3 brought 12 new characters, compared to, essentially, 1, for Extend. Even viewed as a percent increase, that's a significantly bigger release. Buy Extend used. :P

Not really sure how being closer will help considering everything is at least -1. We don't even really have a "dead spike" equivalent with slow startup that leaves us there, unless you count 6B, which is... okay. And I think staying in that close comfort range is going to be really awkward with the changes to barrier pushback. =/ I'm waiting for the mook too, but all this is mostly just shaking out pretty much the way I was worried about. =/ I don't understand why they would do all this. =/

So I was watching Xie's stream the other night, and complaining about Tsubaki, and he said that someone had discovered that you could use Air Mugen as...er.. a sortof anti-anti-air or something. I'm not sure what was meant, but the wording was pretty close to: "If you jump in on someone, and they anti air, then you can do air mugen into dive and it's like 100proration starter" or something fairly close to that. Can anyone figure out what is meant here? Maybe blocking an anti-air > air mugen > j.214D > stuff (probably 236D)? Also discussed was 22D unblockable > 3CC > RC > stuff to get the bonus prorate from 3CC. That frame data makes me SUPER SAD though. Like, heartbroken kind of sad. Like, no combo you guys can come up with will make me happy kind of sad, because our neutral game looks so terrible right now. ;_;

Of course it's not. Moves that leave you plus give you a chance in hell of resetting your pressure after your opponent breaks away by holding A+B for like, 3 whole seconds. And we can't have that, now can we? After they fought so hard and all. /cynicism

Most of this info should still be relevant in CSX, except that your options are less good. :P

D-DP won't really help you much against Dead Spike anyway. It has only very marginally more invulnerability than the A version, and Dead Spike has an enormous number of active frames. Unless you are considering trying to DP whatever he does AFTERWARDS, in which case, the A version is fine. The trick to beating Dead Spike seems to be either A) Don't let him do it in the first place (by being on the offense or by being airborne) or B) figure out WHEN he's going to do it, and jump out or counterattack during its rather long startup. I find that I can get some limited success in this matchup by playing the "air footsies" game - aka trying to do a lot of varied, confusing jumps in the hopes of baiting an inferno divider/hell's fang/dead spike/other long recovery move. You'll actually mostly want to barrier while doing this, particularly if you're in the Inferno Divider Zone, and you'll need to be careful of his jump C and air throw, but if you're not predictable, it's not too bad. The only trouble with this is that Ragna gets a surprising amount of damage off an anti-air 5B or 5C, so getting hit by one of these while trying to jump out is bad. =/ Otherwise, you just need to really play the 5B footsies game, and correctly bait Inferno Divider once you're on the offense. Also, how is Ragna getting in on you? Depending on how he likes to approach, there are different tactics you can use. (If he just likes to dash in 5B, 214 series can ruin his day.) That is going to determine a good deal of what you need to do to beat him. My personal problem with Ragna is that I just can't seem to get a handle on how freaking FAR all his normals go. (That and the retarded crossup hitbox on j.B x.x)

Yeah, they did sortof a sloppy job with the hitboxes for projectiles when they added the hitbox screenshots to the frame data. For example, look at the hitbox for Dead Spike - they show the projectile entirely seperately. It's just that whoever did the Tsubaki hitboxes didn't bother. :P Sadly, I don't know how they extracted them, but yes, it's safe to say that the hitbox isn't much larger than the actual visible sword-projectile bit.

If it makes you feel better, _I'VE_ said that. So I'm not just ignoring you. I'm ignoring me.

I probably do come off a little bit negative, because I soldiered through CS1, and while I'm still not particularly fierce, I like the feeling of not being at a heavy disadvantage. I'm also somewhat arrogant, and unfortunately, life has proven me out on a lot of this stuff - I regrettably AM better at a lot of technical nitty-gritty balancy type stuff than a lot of people. :P That's not to say that I've necessarily got a grasp on this whole situation or anything, but it's not doing anything dissaude me. Mostly what we have here though, is thorough disapproval not so much of the changes themselves, but of the apparent motivation or lack thereof. When I can't understand - by looking at what someone is doing - why they are doing it, it tends to shake my faith in the idea that THEY know why they are doing it. The collection of changes to Tsubaki feel, as Pk points out, as if ArcSys isn't really sure what they're trying to do with her. This, fundamentally, is what frustrates me. It speaks to me of a less than methodical approach to the situation as well - with these sweeping changes coming in yearly updates based on what I regard as almost hilariously little testing. I don't like that. It rubs me the wrong way. As a result, I am probably going to continue playing CS2 for a while. I'll cheerfully theoryfight as more hard info on extend comes out, but I'm going to be a late adopter. Okay, so that was a whole big messy pile of justifications. I REALLY need to stop talking about this stuff until I have some real data. Changelists, people. It's almost 2012. Super secret figure out what happened yourselves patches went out with the 90s.

Heh. No. Though it apparently un-nerfs our D-specials a little, taking them back to their oh-so-overpowered CS2 proration, at least. Sadly, Mori-san seems to think we're supposed to be building our game around it and that it's the reason Tsubaki doesn't suck now. Heh.

Well, if you're going to argue about something, it might as well be something fundamental to the character. We couldn't have this discussion over the 2A nerf. :P

Sure. But NONE of this has ANYTHING to do with whether the risks and rewards of the character are balanced for any given incarnation. You could have everything listed above with any number of different charge time to charge power ratios. Heck, everything you just said was true in CS1, where Tsubaki sucked. Basically, all you've said is "It's cool to have a character who charges and gets more threatening if she can." I think we all feel that way or we wouldn't be in this forum. Nothing in your post relates, really, in the slightest, to the balance of the character. I think charge moves should be more effective, not less, when you slow down charge gain, and I think that charges should translate more directly into the kind of damage that is gotten by characters that DON'T have to play the above game get. That's all.

That seems in line with my experience - a lot of my wins come from calling out people who like to jump out of the corner by just air throwing them when they try. It can catch a lot of stuff, but attacks with a lot of reach tend to hit you out. I think I need to master positioning myself for 2C. That and trying to keep the stick at 2 instead of 1, lest a crossup turn it into 3C. Not that 3C "anti-air" is entirely bad since it's kinda low to the ground, but if you mistime it, it sucks. =/

Obviously it depends on how much untechable time your knockdown gives, but a forward roll covers a lot of distance and only takes 30 frames. From there, something like Ice Car can hit you in 15 frames or less. Based on extremely lazy observation, it takes about one second to get one stock. It's going to be close. Just saying that that's a low bar. :P

I guess I'm not feeling so good about 4.9k in the corner for two stocks when Noel gets 5.5 for free. :P

Which game are we talking about here? I've officially lost track, because this doesn't sound like EX at all. Either way, in a vacuum, a character that much expend resources to do things needs to be rewarded for that more than characters that don't. I could say "Well, character X needs 50 heat to do the same damage as character Y", would you then argue that that is character X's "playstyle"? There's a reason why Hazama, with heat, does more damage than most characters with an equivalent expenditure - it's because his sans heat damage is bad. Tradeoffs. See, this isn't what I was talking about. See, I was talking about Extend. As far as I am concerned, CS2 Tsubaki is fine because her charge rate is fast enough. I still feel that 5 charges should be worth more than it is, however. 5D <slight hold> is enough for an opponent to forward roll and punish you after the average knockdown if they have a move that covers ground. As you say, it is unsafe. And "faster than CS1" is A) Not entirely true and B) Like saying "it's better than a poke in the eye" :P

What do you mean by the bolded section? Most videos of CSEX, the number of charges people are getting can be counted on one hand. It's neither fast nor particularly safe. At a cost of two charges and still being able to be jabbed out? (Takes 30 frames for an unblockable.) Good, because you've been pressuring/punishing all the time I've been trying to get stock? See above. They DID make it slower. =/ I dunno - is 4.9k in the corner off an unblockable good? I'm not sure it is - other characters can get awfully close to that without having to run away or score a hard knockdown to fill up a special gauge. I've been in this camp for a while, but as far as I'm concerned, Tsubaki with 5 charges should have a higher max damage than virtually anyone else in the game. If we want to blow 5 charges on a combo, the damage should be CS2 Makoto level, or at the very least, Ragna Blood Kain level. I don't care how "easy" it is to get charges, it's not free, and no one else in the game has to sacrifice to use their drive. Everyone else just has to push a button, and if they're particularly unlucky, they might have a gauge that automatically refills.