delete_me

Pick VS2 if you play on bad WiFi. Pick VS1 if you play on really bad WiFi. I kind of hate Ken now. He deletes Rose's best normal from the game. He doesn't even need to know the spacing, he can just mash DP after blocking her HP and at worst he's taking fireball damage. There's no scenario where the DP can get blocked unless she cancels it into V-Trigger but then Ken has five thousand frames to react to the activation and just don't do DP. Add to that the fact that most Ken players on my level play this game like they had a stroke on the VS screen (which I could understand, looking at that dumb face) and it's just a very exhausting matchup. I wouldn't even say the matchup is in his favor but it just feels like shit when playing it.

Ok, so I tried this and it's not technically true. There are exactly two spots where it's safe if you cancel into light fireball: right at the very end of the range where it's still a blockstring and just a couple of pixels further away where it's a frame trap and the fireball hits him on the startup of DP. But good luck getting that range every time right. So unless you're playing a Top 10 Pro Rose and you're Ken, just mash the hell out of h.DP whenever you block her st.HP. Oh, and do it as well after blocking f.MK, that one's punishable from every range. Edit: Unrelated but the Falke matchup is so beyond stupid for Rose. You could remove the kick buttons from the Falke player's pad/stick and it would still be in her favor.

So with Kens' increased h.DP range he should be able to punish Rose's st.HP without meter at every range on block... (?) I have to test it but I feel like spacing that correctly will be a nightmare now, you basically have to pick a spot where st.HP into fireball is a blockstring while making sure it's still far enough away so fireball isn't unsafe.

The juggle on Dan's red fireball is serious business, you can actually dash forward and connect with a DP midscreen. Add V-Trigger cancel or the corner to the mix and there's even more of course. But 15% activation chance is tough, that's not going to have a noteworthy impact on his performance.

I suppose you can now V-Shift them and punish her or something.

That slide/dash fits her VT1 so much better since it actually looks like she's sliding across the ice she's creating. I'm still baffled how her VT2 made it out of the concept phase back then. It was one of those "let's just make VT1 obsolete" moments that made no sense.

So 33% chance of it coming out going by that clip.

I think DOA5 found an interesting workaround about unlocking characters/costumes in that you could unlock them the old-school way, but you could also just input a code and have everything immediately. I think that was an ok compromise. Also, didn't expect those balance changes so soon. Their way of removing Dan's infinite is actually really cool. Instead of messing around with pushback and frame data and whatnot, they actually gave him some kind of neutral buff, even if it's random. Not sure about Gief EX SPD though, that feels unnecessary and I say that as someone who hates Gief as much as the next guy. Also, I wish they had waited a couple of months for these changes to properly evaluate Rose as well. Some things about her could use a couple of adjustments IMO. Edit: oh, yeah, and they have absolutely no idea what to do with Lucia. They can buff V-Skill 2 all they want, nobody's going to use it as V-Skill 1 is so integral to her combo routes. High level (if you can confirm cr.MK) she's probably quite a bit better now thanks to better oki off Tornado Spinner, but for me there's nothing here to go back to her.

IIRC the dude voicing Bison is black and nobody cares, or rather, everyone cares because the voice just fits and it'd be dumb to switch him out for a reason like this.

Lucia too, but she's so bad I forgive everyone for forgetting she's in the game. (Shoutouts to Xiaobao for using her at the tournament btw., though obviously it got him nowhere and he had to switch to Vega, who's also garbage but-not-quite-as-garbage).

It says on the picture that the rewards will be distributed in August, so that answers the second question. Edit: the first one. Even if it wasn't a question.

And another CPT Cammy win, yay. On the other hand there was some nice character diversity here, thanks to Infiltration and Xiabao (Juri, Ed, FANG, Lucia, Vega). I didn't even know Vega could cross-up with the first hit of his CA, that was cool.

I use the analogue stick as well. Just thinking about rolling over the DS4 D-Pad for quarter circles makes my thumbs hurt. Analogue isn't ideal but it's closer to the classic stick movement and the lack of tactile direction feedback doesn't matter too much on my level of play. I'm kind of intrigued by the new Xbox pad with its disc-D-Pad though. IIRC SFVI will be multiplatform again so maybe I'll get it on that system when the time comes.

She's hard to place IMO. From fullscreen to midscreen at around st.HP distance away from the opponent and with machine-like AA reactions for Soul Bind she's probably Top 10/15. But if you're closer than that or mess up that one crucial AA and get cornered and she's completely screwed, even if V-Shift/Reversal help her more than others. I place her at "takes 80% more effort and mental energy than the average SFV character" tier.

He did really well with Rose but it's just too easy to overwhelm her once you get that one, momentum-swinging jump-in or knockdown. I wonder why they didn't give her a side-switching V-Reversal. Maybe to avoid some feature overlap with VT1, but she'd need it so much.

I just got cornered by some Seth and he was going crazy with shimmies and waiting for me to tech but little did he know I had an itch and used my right hand to scratch. My defense never looked better.

Strength level aside I always felt he was incomplete. I grew bored of him after 200 or 300 matches already, you're just always doing the same thing. And I know that's kind of true for a lot of characters but for some reason I found it extremely obvious in his case. It's either Target combo 1 into EX Spin Kick or Target combo 2 into V-Trigger activation with a little bit of divekick and cr.HK in between. I'm surprised he got sch a good reception conceptually because it's just Cammy 2.0, more or less. His V-System is fun at least, I suppose. Uh, yeah, that wasn't the question. Having only played Rose since the update my perception might be a bit skewed because he's a bad matchup but he seems decent still, but probably not as god an all-around pick as he was last season. He's probably "why not play Cammy?" tier or something.

Can? It's basically an aerial version of Yun's EX Lunge Punch.

I think Cammy is really strong at certain ranks. Low rank she's obviously not that good because everyone is just mashing sweep and her low life means she dies quicker to random sweeps than Ryu does. When you reach a certain point where people start playing the game more properly but without using certain aspects too much (CH confirms, whiff punishes and whatnot) while also simultaneously not being 100% consistent with everything they do, then Cammy immediately jumps up on the tier list. Because everything Cammy does is really easy to pull off, there's less room for error than using, say, Dhalsim or Rose where a misplaced input can quickly get you killed. That situation remedies itself a bit the further you climb along the ladder because as soon as you reach a point where mastery of a character is kind of expected and everyone is using them to their full potential, the difference between a Cammy player and most others isn't as big anymore. But she'll always be on top because she does exactly what you need to do in this game to control the pace of a match with get consistent damage and some of the best AAs. Also, that Rose tierlist from Pochoclo looks like a list made after another balance patch. I really don't see how she beats Karin or goes even against Rashid and Juri. Karin mauls her close-up, as does Rashid, and Juri can just remove all her fireballs from the game just by existing.

Didn't know the fireball was meaty enough to allow a link into st.HP. I've been doing that setup regularly but I always cross-up teleport and it has yet to fail. Will probably change in a couple of weeks but it's good to know there's a lot more to it than I was doing. I also still firmly believe in VT1. I think VT2 is too easy to mess and blow your entire gauge for a little bit of chip damage.

Yeah, plus some combo video V-Triggers that don't really matter in a real match because you're going to spend all that meter on V-Reversals and Shifts anyway. I'll stick with her for the time being because I have no idea who to play otherwise. Not sure about Oro yet but he looks similarly complicated with possibly just as little payoff for your work. Akira seems to fit better in this game from the little we've seen and if nothing else I'll just get her to watch her intro animation.

After two (?) weeks of Rose I think I can safely say that among the characters I've played in this game so far she has some of the worst matchups I've ever experienced in this game. And it's not just a few, I'd say there's ten-ish characters in this game that she has a massive disadvantage against. Can be really frustrating if you know your opponent is half asleep and you have to give 101% just to keep up. The Rose train has already departed as well, I think I haven't played the mirror match in a week.

Since V-Shift more or less made the unblockable setups improbable it's certainly not that good anymore, but it can still catch people off guard or make them hesitate to push buttons in certain scenarios where she's negative. I haven't played her in a while and I always preferred VT1 anyway, feels less restrictive.

Abigail is one of those character where the question "what weakness should he have?" was answered by "he's ugly" as a joke but then they decided to roll with it anyway.

RIP every character having ten different taunts like in SFIV. I went through the trouble of finding a favourite for all my characters even though I never even used it.