Something to think about is whether you need to threaten with these overheads as much you think you do. Manon has a powerful, far reaching command grab, and instead of making your opponent guess between blocking high or blocking low, you can instead try to focus on making them guess blocking a strike or jumping to avoid a throw. Put your opponent into a Zangief/grappler style guessing game.
And you can pepper in the 214+HK from a large distance occasionally to keep them off balance- if you space it from far enough away, it may be more difficult to punish while still commanding a lot of space. For example, try hitting them with the 236+P hit grab, and then follow up with the 214+HK to quickly close the distance and meaty them with an overhead.
At the lower ranks like silver, I don’t think it hurts to utilize raw drive rush. Partly because many people won’t yet know how to deal with it, but also to learn its strengths and weaknesses so it can be a part of your repertoire once you’ve gotten to a higher level and it’s not as strong of a strategy anymore.
It can be used as part of the same grappler style mix-up. Drive rush into crouching MP gets you a combo on hit. If it’s blocked, you get huge advantage and are close enough to start your regular close-range strike-vs-throw mix-up game.
Drive rush into command grab gives you a really fast, far reaching command grab. While Manon’s drive rush doesn’t move her as forward as other characters’, it still enables her to do a gappler-style strike-vs-throw mixup from a distance.
You don’t want to blow all of your meter away of course, but they can be effective tools for pressuring your opponent especially in the latter parts of the match where you’ve built medals and a single command grab can change the momentum or even steal a win.
It’s not that she doesn’t get anything off neutral rush, it’s that hers is the slowest and shortest in the game, so it’s hard to threaten with it. she needs to connect first and pay the three bar toll to get things going, like gief
Is it just me or does the upgraded Ultimate pass seem really bad compared to the regular character pass. Pretty sure that I will in fact want these characters especially since Rashid seems like he may be Better Kimberly.
The only difference between the two passes seem to be 4 additional costumes for… which characters exactly? I at first thought it would be for the DLC ones but have my doubts since they didn’t announce anything else besides his classic one as costume 2. Speaking of which, the current announcement seems to imply that even this costume 2 can be acquired through World Tour by maxing Loyalty like all the others which sounds pretty trivial at this point after I’ve beaten it. No mention that you need the Ultimate pass for it.
Besides that it’s… 2 stages (not even concept art of what they might be) and 3500 more drive tickets. Hot diggedy! That’s half the amount you need to buy a single character’s alt colours! Gonna need to be a real good set of 4 alt costumes (will they even show them off before Rashid is released?) to be worth 20 bucks.
Seems like such an obvious thing that Kudos could be used for unlocking instead of just titles. Especially when you get all alt colours for the World Tour costumes for free.
I have hit Diamond with Manon and Honda. I regret doing Honda’s placement matches after not playing him for weeks but whatever, I bet I can get to Master, it’s just about grinding, ranked is goofy and not a great indicator of a player’s actual skill but I want to see numbers go up.
It really surprises me that the battle pass doesn’t give drive tickets, I woulda bought that shit if it gave me even a slight boost, I only have like 2 alt colors, it’s absurd (but also I’m not sure I really want many of the available alt colors…would be nice, though!!
I’m glad everyone else did a great job with Manon advice, guess I don’t gotta do it myself!! We should all play sometime though, I am back to being a very lonely man so I will be able to fight a lot.
I was watching jiyuna the other night and he was analyzing gold/silver replays and giving tips on how to escape those ranks and they were actually really good and counter to a lotta common (yet good) advice. Doesn’t seem like he’s uploaded those clips to his youtube channel yet unfortunately, looks like it’s only bronze at the moment, but I know there was shit like “Don’t be afraid to jump” which is actually true, isn’t it? 90% of players don’t bother AA’ing so even if it’s “bad play” it does fucking work a lot, doesn’t it. Also use your meter, I really don’t think you gotta be too precious with that shit, being in burnout is bad but like…supers? Use them, they rock, I throw out reversal level 1 super all the time as Manon, it works a fuckin’ lot. Like it works so often that I use it more than I should and eat shit because of it BUT
I’ll get better at that, just like how I’ve gone back to not using DI really poorly. I’m doing better! For the most part!! This game rocks!! Can’t wait to win EVO!!
Youtube recommended me this LordKnight video the other day, which is probably similar. You’re right in that it’s important to acknowledge that even through platinum you’re going against people who don’t have “fundamentals” down yet, and a lot of the strategies you see in high level play literally will not work in lower-level play because the high-level players know that they need to respect each other’s knowledge of dealing with each other’s characters. But at lower ranks people are still learning, so you can and should abuse whatever works for you, and then when that strategy stops working is when you learn something new.
For example, playing the wake up game and making the opponent guess blocking between overhead and low and throw is important, eventually, but if you come across someone who always seems to be pressing a button on wakeup then that strategy will never work. You instead should just meaty them every single wakeup. That’s the optimal strategy for the moment, even if that won’t work once you get to higher ranks.
That was an issue I ran into at low level Virtua Fighter play, because strikes always beat throws in that game and low-level players always mash buttons. So throws, despite being one of the fundamental mind games of VF, are kind of useless until both players are good enough to start blocking reliably.
E. Honda may be my favorite videogame character. I love his muscly-fat body, his kabuki face paint, and almost all of his special moves. But I’ve refused to mash those hand slap buttons my whole life.
I have zero enthusiasm for Street Fighting at the moment, and Honda’s not in the demo or the cracked beta, but at some point I will try E. Honda in SF6 and then I may have to buy SF6 and become a Street Fighter guy.
I managed to get to Gold with Ken, Jamie and Manon last week. Gold feels like a real skill wall for me, it really knocked my confidence, but I know mostly what I need to work on. Having a strong punish combo is one of the main things, I don’t get enough damage when I get an opening.
Jamie is a lot of fun to play, even if it can be a struggle against zoner characters. I need to incorporate his unlockable specials more, I always forget which unlock at which level.
Manon in silver, I had a lot of luck with anti-airing with the ex QCF kick and then doing QCB medium kick to carry them into the corner. If they don’t jump or DP you can command grab them. You learn pretty quickly if your opponent is going to stop you doing it. I used her overhead kick, QCB heavy kick, when they get up, which has already been mentioned. I found out yesterday that it can be DP’d, but that was against a platinum in casual. I don’t think most players in silver will try that if you space it right. Being reactive really helped me, letting someone jump in and anti-airing or countering a DI to get the command grab. Her level 3 special is good on wakeup if your confident the opponent is going to press a button.
I think Manon’s back HP is a meaty which you can combo into hitgrab. I find it difficult to get close enough to do it before they get up though. I’ve also found that her back medium kick target combo catches a lot of people out on the second hit, which you can combo into one of her special kicks.
Sorry if I repeated what other people have already said about Manon. She’s a really fun character when you can get in full flow and hit the big damage numbers.
Lv 1 = 1-Legged Divekick
Lv 2 = 2 is down, so we’re down on the ground breakdancing
Lv 3 = ‘Free’ (Three) action on the command grab
Lv 4 = Fourth bit added on to the basic rekka and an extra Swagger step followup FOR you
Unlocked Target Combos just follow the progression of strength:
1 Light
2 Medium
3 Heavy
4 Mixup Heavy
Running into them broke my brain and I couldn’t play at all, I was just too excited to meet another fan of the most cool and dangerous enhancement pill to ever exist
After having a tough start to gold life, I managed to put a run together and get to gold 2 as Jamie.
I’m slowly starting to integrate the dive kick, but getting used to when to use it. Also can’t believe the heavy breakdance kick does so much damage, I’m trying to combo that with crouching heavy punch when I get a chance for a punish.
Catching someone out with the back heavy punch combo you get at level 3 (I think) after they block the first hit is fun.
Small correction while I’m at it to @loki and anyone else I may have misled. While there isn’t any offline avatar vs avatar fighting mode the part that I said about how changing your appearance after the initial creation requires a semi-premium currency is false. You can change your appearance at any time in the World Tour mode for 1000 zenny which is an incredibly miniscule amount just a few chapters into that mode.
Changing your appearance using the very limited Drive Tickets is only if you do it in the online hub place and is therefore a complete scam if you do it from there since you use the same avatar for both the single player and online multiplayer modes.
Oh that’s good to know, because my impression from the help tips was that I had to use drive currency to update the character so the extreme character customization felt like a waste because no one is going to pay real money just to update their character.
There are character design save slots, right? But you can’t have multiple characters in stock at once, just switch designs at the character customization screen?
Kind of just want to shout in the game chat whenever I see someone with default appearance standing by the body modification desk in the battle hub that they are making a mistake but know they can’t hear me while they’re in those menus anyway…
Like many have mentioned the online currency stuff in this game is some of the worst parts, and not necessarily because it’s maximum evil but just dumb. Really seems like there might have been internal arguments up until release about what was gonna cost what and what currency should do what and they just had to settle with something real weird by the end.
Not quite sure what you mean. You have multiple slots where you can save avatars you make to but each time you change into one of these you will be charged either 1000 zenny in World Tour (again, this is a tiny amount of money) or 50 Drive Tickets in the Battle Hub (DON’T). Also to note that is that anybody you see in online Battle Hub you can save their appearance into your own slots. Just go up to them, view their battle profile, scroll to the tab that shows their avatar customisation, then scroll to the bottom past all their clothing slots and choose to Save Avatar Appearance or something. Doesn’t save their clothing though.
Ah, okay. I meant it’s not like you can have multiple create-a-characters you can instantly pick from on command, you instead of just one character and you have to change that one character back and forth every time. Which sounds like it is the case.
