AmayaGin

Vancouver Battle Royale is back, featuring such anime classics as Guilty Gear Xrd, UNIEL, Blazblue, and Dengeki Bunko Fighting Climax! https://www.picatic.com/vanbattleroyale2 The next event will be Janurary 23rd at SpaceKraft, 201-4501 Kingsway, Burnaby, BC, Canada

These replies are amazingly helpful. Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to write them out.

The flowing charts are generated using the algorithms described in this YouTube presentation. The charts represent the optimal distribution of characters played in the strongest possible community. Basically, your local scene should have this distribution if it wants the highest chance of beating any newcomers or visitors to your scene. Xrd Sign: http://imgur.com/SZw8UNf Xrd Revelator: http://imgur.com/rhCrX8g Data was collected from the arcade data available on ArcSys's website. Kudos to this reddit post for everything involved here Discuss away.

I'm surprised I didn't see a thread up for Vancouver. Vancouver Street Battle, located in Burnaby, hosts locals every night. Anime nights are Wednesdays for laid back play, and competitive play on Saturdays. We have tournaments, cash prizes, and a chill area where you can watch big tournaments or locals streamed from a comfy couch. VSB is run by CCG(formerly..) | Air, and while is a primarily Street Fighter location, has a really great anime scene with everything from Blazblue to Guilty Gear to Arcana Hearts. Primary web location is facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vancouverstreetbattle/timeline?ref=page_internal Also on twitter: https://twitter.com/vanstreetbattle If Burnaby is too far for you, I also try to host casuals in the White Rock area, which is much easier to get to from Langley/Surrey. Send me a message and I'll do everything I can to let you know when we're meeting up. I'll try to update this thread when big Vancouver tournaments are happening, to try and draw in our Washington/Oregon brothers. More bodies pls.

I'm well aware that XRD is a combo heavy game. Thankfully, once you get the basics down, a huge amount of combos open up for easy memorization. This leads to a really cool sort of build-your-own combo system, which Japanese players really exemplify in their situation-unique combos. But for a beginner, or a fairly new player, these combos are fairly out of reach, both in terms of execution and landing them. Since last year, I've been focusing on my fundamentals, and landing any hits at all instead of worrying about flashy setups and character specific punishes. It's worked pretty well for me, and since Venom's balls do wicked damage, allowed me to call myself somewhat of a competent player. However, I seem to find execution heavy opponents quickly get tired of fighting me, and I can't help think it's because my combos aren't anywhere near theirs. I'll take a round off of them, and hopefully demonstrate my competence, but they'll quickly abandon the match after the first game. So my question to Dustloop is, how do you feel about fighting an opponent with weak comboing skills? Is it indicative of a lower level of play, and a weak opponent? Does it make the match more boring if your opponent is focusing on raw hits and spacing? I've hear Guilty Gear is a grind-heavy game. Should I really have my bnbs down solid before I go looking for matches online? [x-posted from /r/guiltygear]

Which stages are your favorite? Which do you dread playing on? Lacking a dedicated training stage, which stage do you train on? Do any stages provide benefits for certain color palates or characters? I'm thinking similar to SFIV's volcano stage, where certain character's fireballs are hard to see properly.

Just gonna throw my own 2 cents in here. I haven't been playing long, but I've gotten a really good feel for Ram and her less technical abilities. The majority of my fighting career has been Ultimate Ninja Storm, and while VERY different, is surprisingly similar to Ramlethal in many applications. Please excuse my lack of abbreviations, I'm new to the whole fighting genre. Wake-up: Crouch swords. Unbelievably brilliant. I usually start with DownSlash, because it comes in from above, but if your opponent is in the midst of standing up, the DownHeavySlash might work better, as it comes in from below. Use them in conjunction, as the delay between the two can catch a lot of people off guard. Even against rank 7-9 people, I've been able to land some serious damage as they block the first sword, and jump or try to CH only to get hit by the second. Once that's done, you can lead into other combos or just keep mashing DownSlash/DownHeavyslash for extra deeps. Pokes: Both Kick and Punch come out unbelievably quickly, albeit at a much shorter range. I usually use DownKick to punish. It has the added advantage of moving you forward, inching you closer, and transitions into Ram's many Kick/Punch combos quite well. Additionally, if your HS sword is deployed, DownHS or ForwardHS (can't remember which) does a quick downward slash from above. A little more situational than the Kick/Punch option, but can be hard to see coming if you're distracting your opponent with other moves. Safe Pressure: I'm sure there are a thousand better ways to do this, but I've been having great luck with deploying both swords and dashing in for Punch/Kick combos. Anytime you get a breather, like knocking your opponent down or during a decent recovery, send out your sword again. I've had best results with only using one at a time and then jumping in for more Punch/Kicks. It keeps the damage coming from multiple angles and if you can get good at positioning them, can create some real problems for your target. Sword Activation: So hard. The damn start up time on those suckers in painful. It takes a while, but eventually you get the knack of planning your attacks 1-2 seconds in advance. That part is all about practice, and developing that Ramlethal intuition. A couple of helpful tips; Swords can be activated from mid-air. A favorite of mine is to use DownSlash on approach and come in with Kick+Punch+Kick. By the time it finished, the sword's swinging in and hitting your target from behind. Activate swords before dashing in. Makes a great pairing, and it's tough to defend both a Kick/Punching Ramlethal and her swords hammering down on you. Can be used to lead into the aforementioned Safe Pressure tactic. S'all for now. Posting this less to help Magusheart specifically, and more for any other newbies like myself seeking Ramlethal help. If I've made any glaring errors, please let me know.