ehuangsan

Yeah that's precisely it. He's forcing yomiai. My guess is he has a hard counter to each of the opponent's options in that situation, and just guesses what the opponent will do and picks one in a convoluted rock paper scissors game. So maybe something like CSE beats block and mash but loses to IAD, run up 2k/5k beats stand for IAD preparation but loses to mash and ties with block, airthrow beats super jump, jump or IAD, but loses to neutral stand for IAD prep into AA mash. He risks getting hit quite often in such situations, but I suppose he doesn't mind and if he's right, the return is indeed very high. This is in contrast to someone like Faith of old or Machabo of today who will try to pick the move that allows them to counterpunch most of the opponent's options on reaction or convert into katame. You can't cover all of the options, but you can cover a lot of them with proper spacing and soft yomi (i.e., guessing that opp will probably not do this instead of predicting what the opponent will do specifically). Ain apparently prefers hard yomi (i.e. specific callouts) when he's on offense. It's not wrong to force yomiai for Ky and there are definitely certain situations where you should induce yomiai, but I don't think he's really suited for that since he doesn't do as much damage on average as most of the other characters. Of course, Buppa back in the day proved that it is possible to dominate by inducing yomiai with Ky, so long as your hard yomi is really on point.

^^This Actually I was unaware of the Xrd IK invul until you brought it up since I use it so rarely lol. I was intending an all in.

Nice. Let me know if this is possible: AA SVT counterhit (trade), immediate blue burst, land, activate IK, IK. There should be many good setups midscreen or corner with counterhit SVT but I haven't had time to work them out.

Of course Ky can win. In a 3-7 matchup, you are still expected to win about three times out of ten. Getting one chance per round means sometimes you win off that one chance. Ain saying that it's つらいつらい and worse than the +R Justice matchup and abandoning Ky for Leo speaks volumes about how rough that matchup is though. As for myself, I would rather encounter a high level Faust or to some extent, even a high level Elphelt than a high level Ram in tourney. The Sol/Venom/Zato matchups are not remotely as bad.

We are talking about 1.0 right? What on God's green earth could possibly make that matchup anything remotely resembling good for Ky?!

Changes are here: http://ggxrd.com/locate2.pdf Presently there's no proration, loke 1 had 90% proration on ground SE only. Other changes are greed sever does not pushback as far on block, split ciel lvl 3 (instead of lvl 4 in loke 1). After mashing Xrd for awhile, I am starting to understand Machabo's sentiment of why play Ky when Sol can do almost everything Ky does only better.

All stunedges having 85% proration is a pretty terrible change. The creators of GG really don't want Ky to do actual damage in any version of GG I guess.

Okay, those are pretty nice buffs. The Japanese tweet specifically says it's for air buffed S SE, and the RTL is grounded RTL in general will blow off farther on hit. Air S SE was already really strong though, this just makes it ridiculous level strong.

Regardless, I still foresee the wider BS window being rather problematic for Ky. I really want to see if it renders the Ain setup (5k, immediate TK air SE in corner) to be worthless. I also wonder if it repels j.D oki.

I guess I wasted time getting the YRC OSes down pat. This looks mostly like nerfs to me, although not having sacred edge reflected back by Leo's counter would be nice (if the change does that). I don't think changing split ciel to lvl 4 does anything for Ky; it would be like ending blockstrings with a 5HS and then what. The blitz shield changes will screw Ky oki for sure. I already thought that blitz shield was ridiculously strong as it was in certain circumstances. It's like having half moon parry in Melty Blood only many times better and much more applicable against pressure strings. BTW, for the change to the low neutral tech, is that directed towards eliminating that stupid bug where you can have a free fully invincible ground normal off a neutral tech?

Another reason why you should prefer 2S to 2D is in Xrd, 2D on whiff is absolutely horrible. You can die from that. I've never been so scared to whiff 2D before. In the previous GG iterations it was okay, but with YRC and the fact that the game is slower so people can react to 2D whiff, it's worse than whiffing a Ryu crouch sweep in Hyper Fighting.

I agree that the general strategy hasn't changed at all for the Ky/HOS matchup. However, the loss of stun dipper as a tool to escape from the corner or to check a jump is pretty big for Ky against HOS in +R, which is why it's now draw odds for HOS. Matchup numbers are useful for a frame of reference, but like Titanium Beast said, anything better than 8-2 is playable in tournament in practice, even at high level. 7-3s do suck, but you always get one chance to win a round and some people are very adept at that kind of play. At the very least, if you want to take a game seriously from a tourney perspective, you really should not main a character that has 2-8 or worse matchups. This is a copy/paste of my definition of the numbers from the Ky forum. Draw odds means that if a tie were to occur, the person having draw odds wins. 5-5: Even. Both sides have equal chances, just like a mirror match. 5.5-4.5: Draw Odds/Pull. Essentially but for one or two minor details that swing the match to favor one side, it would have been even. Examples: Zangief v. Ryu in ST, White v. Black in chess, C-Chun v. C-Sagat in CvS2 6-4: Advantage. Underdog has his winning chances, but in general, the flow of the match favors one side. Examples: Ky v. Testament in GGXX, Ryu v. Sagat in SFIV, Ken v. Ryu in 3S 7-3: Severe Advantage. Underdog pretty much only gets one shot or one momentum run at winning per round, otherwise the round is lost. Examples: Guile v. Zangief in ST, Sol v. Ky in GGXX, Yun v. Q in 3S. 8-2: You can be one of the best players in the world for the underdog and do everything that could reasonably be expected of you, and still lose to merely competent opponents due to the mismatch. Examples: Ryu v. Honda in ST, Chun v. Alex in 3S, Toki v. Shin in HnK. 9-1: You block something or get knocked down and the round is over. Examples: Akuma v. everyone in ST, Toki v. Jagi in HnK.

I actually think many of the nuances changed from AC to +R. I think Ky had a pull in AC; perhaps 5.5-4.5 in favor of Ky. In +R I think it swung around making it 5.5-4.5 in favor of HOS. The difference is the corner and near corner situation, which I think improved for HOS and allows him to rack up the damage a lot better and faster than from AC. CH Fafnir is now incredibly dangerous for Ky in the corner/near corner so stun dipper kinda gets banned because of that. It's one of the matches that certainly feels bad for the HOS side, but it really isn't. HOS does not have to succeed that often in neutral to run it all back.

He is a lot easier to use than any other version of Ky that I've tried. The game also feels a lot slower (maybe because of all those animations which pause the game like YRC) which I think is a plus for Ky. I didn't have time to really determine any cons. Although that new HS that he has (3HS? 5HS?) where he lunges forward is kinda suicidal especially if you do it by accident.

So I got to mess around with Xrd Ky all of once at EVO because the lines were ridiculously long. He's basically #R Ky all over again, with some fancy stuff tacked on and he can do combos a lot easier than in #R. Pretty much any combo that works in #R works in Xrd as far as I can tell. Including the return of far S into stun dipper which is a huge plus, and the old pinball VT combo (6P 5S 2HS VT RC air dash, land repeat). YRC air SE is not really as good as I had hoped it would be. Definitely a step down from AC and +R as it is simply too slow. YRC greed sever is interesting. You can air dash off of it, which leads to some rather interesting options. One thing I did note is that the YRC system is very unfriendly to people who double tap inputs as you can apparently YRC neutral for some godforsaken reason, so I would do multiple consecutive YRCs by accident quite often. Overall he was pretty fun to run. I think I'll pick him up in Xrd instead of Bedman, pending my testing of Sin and Sol.