Airk

Because they nerfed like EVERYTHING ELSE, and didn't want it to feel left out? Seriously, I pretty much expect EVERYTHING to be nerfed right now - have been feeling that way since the 2A change.

Yeah, it will - sorry, I meant "everything I have in the air", including air throws, most of the time. =/ No worries, I'll take what I can get. I think I just need to practice AAing with 2C a lot against varied styles of approaches so that I do it late enough to avoid shenanigans. Also, good advice as usual, BJ. I'll do that. I was messing around earlier, and trying to do 5B > j.B > j.BB > stuff, and that was proving annoying, so I'll try just j.B > j.C stuff instead. Now if only the internet were better, because nothing compounds old, slow reflexes letting extra input lag from the TV _AND_ from the internet. It makes me sad how much smoother it feels in training mode. =/ I just had a match where I swear I dropped 5BB>2BB>5CC>22C like 4 times. Fortunately, it guard crushed him and I won, but I am not proud. :P

I'm okay with 2C against basic jumpins, but anything complicated like double jumps or air dash-overs or even just jumping OVER me screws me up pretty badly. =/ I have a hard time air throwing Ragna unless I predict the jump on his wakeup because j.C beats my everything, it seems. :P

Why do I suck? Getting a little frustrated lately. Combos seem okay - IAD is mostly in hand, though no DP-Whiff yet except for 623C > j.236A<whiff> corner stuff. But I'm getting killed on my footsies/positioning - ESPECIALLY against Ragna, who seems to comprise like 2/3rds of the people I run into online. :P I just can't seem to find a good way to handle people who jump around a lot. I know part of this is me needing to be able to confirm an AA 5B into something more impressing that 5BB > <nothing> but I don't think that can be all of it. Any advice? =/

Buhhhh. @_@ I was so busy looking and making sure it could be jump cancelled on block that I wasn't paying attention to the () around the S. x.x

Boy, I wonder what was up with all the random 623C's in that Tao match. o.o

This confused me a bit until I realized what you were talking about, then I got confused again. Why would you need to "jump-cancel-cancel" these instead of just special cancelling them? I don't think you can jump cancel 6C on whiff, and you're talking about guardstun anyway. So er...what's the difference here? Artificially inserting a frame or two of gap? Can't you just do that by special cancelling a little late?

It's not that bad - at the range you should be doing this at, most attacks that can reach you will have more than 9F of startup. Even Jesus Kick doesn't extend to full range until late, so...

But you're kindof not. You're basically at neutral, because after blocking anything that resembles a blockstring, followed by 22C > 22A, your opponent is so far away that they really have no options that could be viewed as a 'punish'. While nominally they have a frame advantage, they basically have to use it up in order to get in range to do much of anything. Technically, I guess Ragna could probably get away with a dash 5B to apply honest pressure after blocking a long range 22A, but the options are limited. Tsubaki has about a billion of these, yes. Even in the most basic string, you're looking at: 5B 5C charge cancel 5CC charge cancel 6B anywhere 22C at any point, etc. The flexibility of Tsubaki's blockstrings is that you can end them in something neutral to positive at almost any time, so your opponent really has to be able to out-react you (You have the advantage, because you KNOW "I'm going to 5C charge cancel dash 2A" while your opponent has to react to the fact that you're not going into 5CC and try to do something accordingly.) The other thing about frame traps is that they are not JUST there to punish. They are there to help you read your opponent's behavior and condition them. If you do 5CC>22C a few times on a Noel, they're much less likely - even if they DIDN'T get hit, to try to call out a 5CC>6B with 2D than they would otherwise be. Similarly, if you do big strings of slightly delayed hits 2-3 times and your opponent never jabs, it's a pretty good sign that they're content to hold downback and you've probably got a fair chance of throwing them. Also, no, I think Excellence's list was bad. If you don't include the fact that you NEED to delay hits after 5B to frame trap, then you're not telling someone what the frame trap is.

Doesn't hit most characters crouching. Probably hits Tager and Hakumen though. Excelence's answers aren't really correct. 2A>5B is not a frame trap, nor is 5B > 5BB or even 5B > 2B. There's no gap there that a masher would be able to start an attack in. Indeed, without delaying the button press as DT notes, the only things you can frametrap with after 5B are 6B and 6C, and 5B>6C will actually lose to many characters mashing because the gap is TOO big. One of my favorite frame traps actually is 5C© > 22C. It's a tidy little one frame gap, and CH 22C can lead into some pretty decent damage. This works with 6B(B) as well.

I always enjoy the streams from over your way. And not just because it's Tsubaki blowing people up either. The hype and camaraderie really comes through, and, well, everything is better with a British accent. :P

That was pretty hilarious. Also, I don't think you guys have enough abbreviations in your handles. Maybe Kiba could be HD NGI Kiba Esq. LLC. :P

The french stream someone posted over in general has had a pretty good Tsubaki going for a while (using my colors, no less. You can tell it's not me because they have real combos. ;P) and might be worth a watch if peoples are bored.

Huh. Ooooookay. So I presume he's talking about her Drive, not "mugen", since her drive is officially called "Install". I wonder what this means, since almost every aspect of her drive seems to have gotten worse. o.o Have we come to any conclusions about how magic charge cancelling is or isn't? That doesn't really seem like a big deal though. >lost< Still, not feeling very thankful for the decision to completely upend the character and turn her into something new. If I wanted an all-new character, I could just pick someone else. :P

A character doesn't have to be CS1 level of unplayable to be depressingly bad, especially when one is accustomed to a certain toolset. The problem is that this is all ANY of the communities have had, but most of them are looking at the limited information available and saying "That doesn't seem too bad." whereas we look at it and say "Wait, what? They did that AND that AND that AND that AND that? Why!?" There's no particularly compelling reason to believe that somehow we've completely missed something major enough to meaningfully offset the beating we seem to have gotten.

Explain please. As far as I can tell, all games have footsies. Unless you think that the movement options in BB invalidate them, but doesn't GG have all the same ones? BB has throws that require strategy?

Er.... what exactly do you propose? While 3D might give you a disadvantage because a lot of people think the more D's you have, the better your game is, 3d ABSOLUTELY ages much more rapidly than 2D. I just recently acquired a PS3 and grabbed a demo for Uncharted 1. This is a game that's 4 years old now, but current gen hardware. And pretty much my VERY FIRST THOUGHT looking at it was 'Holy crap, uncanny valley! It hurts!'. But I could go back and load up Odin Sphere (A slightly older title, for an older generation of hardware) and it still looks gorgeous.

This, more than anything, is what is going to make my decision on whether Arc Sys totally screwed us or not. :P

Well, I saw someone doing a mid-combo air charge the other day, which was new to ME, but I haven't entirely been studying this stuff.

I think it's a great competitive game, with, yes, excellent variety of matches, and I think that in spite of Arc Sys's best efforts, it will continue to be so in BBCS:EX. That said, some people are completely unable to get past the game's aesthetics, which I personally think is sortof pathetic, but it's not really my business. The other fact of the matter is that it's a lot more complicated than say, SF4, and some people can't be arsed, too.

Possible run-speed nerf, possible 214D nerf, blahblah stuff. But don't worry, 6A is a fatal counter now! <tries to remember the last time he landed 6A as a counter hit...> And you can do air Mugen! But yeah. My mind is blown. It feels like we got the treatment usually reserved for top tier characters, when I don't think anyone would have accused Tsubaki of being top tier in CS2. (I had some random Hazama-using loser on XBL the other day ask me why (after I beat him) that I used such a bad character, and that he doesn't understand why anyone uses anyone besides Hazama and Bang. ... ....... ..... ? I love XBL.)

Dunno. You could work this out scientifically, but I don't think anyone here really knows, say, how much damage Arakune does right now (Probably answer: Tons with curse) or whatever. But it's not global. Especially with characters like Bang and Ragna actually going UP. And as soon as we stop pretending that 'oh, everyone got a damage nerf, so it's not that bad' the closer we'll be to reconciling to the current state of our character. But fundamentally, stuff like this makes me discouraged for the game as a whole, because it shows that, really, Arc Sys doesn't really know WTF they're doing. Their modus operandi seems to be "nerf the everyloving crap out of the top character or two, and just kinda hand out random stuff to the rest of the cast without even doing basic theoryfighting on what that will do the character." I don't know what sort of data gathering they do, and obviously it's just a few short loktests, but you'd think that, relying even on just that, they'd try to make changes that make some sense, but obviously, their sense of what "makes sense" is pretty radically divorced from what most other people think. What's more, they still seem to be struggling with the fact that they're in the digital age here, and don't need to sell people new arcade boards everytime they want to tune something. These screwy "big updates" based on like, 5 days of playtests by random people really need to go and be replaced by a more methodical approach to patching and versions.

I'd be happier if this were more true. The so called 'global damage nerf' seems to have been inconsistently applied at best. Makoto does way less damage now, but Noel does practically the same, if the recent videos are anything to go by. Word on the street is that Mu and Valk aren't exactly hurting for damage either. Doesn't sound as universal as one might like.

Unless you're in an arcade in Japan, in which case it's not, it's just an update.

Soo...the person who doesn't play the game at all is "sticking with Tsubaki"? Uh, thanks for your support, I guess?