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Killerwatt

Improving tips?

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A3R is right, that you shouldn't go in to training mode with out a purpose. Whenever I play, I keep note of the errors I make. The next time I get to training mode, I hammer them out. Then the next time I play I'll hopefully have a new set of problems to work out. I'd advise against fighting the CPU, for reasons I'm sure you've heard before. If you must fight the CPU, I would do it in survival mode. Starting rounds with not max-health, the gradual increase to the CPU's movement speed, and the occasional EX/Shadow/Gold chars will atleast keep your brain on its toes. Fighting in vs CPU mode, the CPU's "skill" is always constant. Once you figure out the AI, your brain won't get any execirse. It's like constantly sparing with a player who never adapts. The outlandish predicaments survival mode puts you in atleast keeps your brain activate. (And try your best to not exploit the AI's flaws.)

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ugh ... dunno about fighting the ai is a good practice. but 1 thing i know.... against ai you work on your pressure skill most of the time and learning the safe option on it (shadow I-No Fortissimo spamming is cute)... for the mix-up department... we need human player (;^_^)a

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There really is no substitute for real competition. For a year, all I did was play the computer on Maniac and training mode. While it builds confidence, it amounts to very little in actual competition. For example, it's very rare that you can mist cancel > throw or double dash > throw on a computer AI. Against a human opponent, this is a very powerful offensive tool. Also, computers tend to get hit by retarded attacks like 2HS every wakeup while blocking the most varied of mixups. This creates bad habits and false expectations from your opponent. Like mentioned before, JO needs to outplay his opponents by a larger margin than most of the cast. Unlike the two openings slayer or jam needs to destroy you, or the one knockdown millia needs to get you rolling the dice, JO needs an opening for a coin, and an average of 2-3 more openings to get the damage in. This is where playing opponents helps you where playing alone can't. You get exposed to a wide variety of characters and their pressure strings, their mixups, their okizeme, wake-ups. This will improve your defense and reaction. You also find good players who can block mixups pretty damn well on reaction, which forces you to develop mindgames and your 1-hit enkasu's to create openings for yourself. If you don't have access to varied competition, try reloadonline. Although going from #R to AC JO and back again can be frustrating, it's been very helpful to me.

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really, the key is finding local players that don't belong to your group. this can be hard to do but on the rare occasion i've been able to i've improved tremendously every time. just a month ago at fanime there was an accent core cabinet and a ps2 setup on the gaming table. most of the people i played against there were either far below my skill level or roughly equal; i could land ridiculous shit on them like 6K's to enkasu's and coins at the start of the round. i even tripped up an otherwise really good venom player with a jack return (his words exactly were "what the hell was that?"). then i found out they were hosting a tournament, and i naturally signed up. i had been talking with a guy from socal that day and i ended up playing him in the first round and i lost miserably. it turns out i had gotten so caught up in trying to win that i didn't throw a single coin the entire match. ever since, i've made it an effort to use all of my coins every round. in the double elmination bracket i played against a decent testament and ended up losing in the last round of the last match by about 10hp. but again, i was playing johnny on a controller, and he was playing testament on a stick. it was really just a matter of him having an advantage. at the end of the match he even said "if you played someone other than johnny, you would've won". point is, pressure can get to you much easier than you think. this wasn't even a large tournament venue or anything, just me trying to give johnny a good name among a relatively small group of people who played other characters. and until you start playing with other people a lot, anything you learn against cpu's/your friend that only mains sol and spams gv's is moot in an actual match. there's no real way to replicate what it's like to have a ton of people watching you play against someone else, so finding other people to play with is vital if you want to improve.

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really, the key is finding local players that don't belong to your group. this can be hard to do but on the rare occasion i've been able to i've improved tremendously every time.

just a month ago at fanime there was an accent core cabinet and a ps2 setup on the gaming table. most of the people i played against there were either far below my skill level or roughly equal; i could land ridiculous shit on them like 6K's to enkasu's and coins at the start of the round. i even tripped up an otherwise really good venom player with a jack return (his words exactly were "what the hell was that?").

then i found out they were hosting a tournament, and i naturally signed up. i had been talking with a guy from socal that day and i ended up playing him in the first round and i lost miserably. it turns out i had gotten so caught up in trying to win that i didn't throw a single coin the entire match. ever since, i've made it an effort to use all of my coins every round. in the double elmination bracket i played against a decent testament and ended up losing in the last round of the last match by about 10hp. but again, i was playing johnny on a controller, and he was playing testament on a stick. it was really just a matter of him having an advantage. at the end of the match he even said "if you played someone other than johnny, you would've won".

point is, pressure can get to you much easier than you think. this wasn't even a large tournament venue or anything, just me trying to give johnny a good name among a relatively small group of people who played other characters. and until you start playing with other people a lot, anything you learn against cpu's/your friend that only mains sol and spams gv's is moot in an actual match. there's no real way to replicate what it's like to have a ton of people watching you play against someone else, so finding other people to play with is vital if you want to improve.

I can attest to this; I recently entered a tourney at an anime con, and fighting with spectators and with a character that typically arouses surprise when used (the minute I selected Johnny I could hear in the crowd "Wow, someone's actually picking Johnny", etc). I lost to a skilled Millia player, made even worse by that fact that no one in my group plays her so my knowledge of the matchup is slim. On the flip side, in causals I defeated a very good Robo-Ky because I do have a Robo in my group, and I know that matchup quite well. Finding different people/characters to fight against definitely helps. It's just a matter of adapting to the human player's style, once you have experience with their character's matchup.

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So guys I've been in training mode for qutie a bit recently practicing my FRCs (on PS2 DualShock) but I still can't quite nail them 100%. I'll hit them like 5x in a row, miss 4 times, hit, miss, etc. Mainly I've been practicing the air DB FRC and the DBT>DB FRC. This FRC is the toughest for me right now. Does anyone have any tips on how to better nail this? I think it's an important FRC as it opens up Johnny to more air options should his DB wiff/be blocked or can be used to bait. Thanks. And please don't *sigh* tell me to get a stick lol it's hard enough trying to become a better JO on pad! lol

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map PKS to L2. seriously. when i was still playing on pad, it made things way easier. i know you can't use it in tournies or anything, but it makes learning the actual timing 100x easier than if you're trying to press three face buttons on a dualshock at once (whenever i do that i feel like i'm playing incredible crisis). of course, i'd still recommend you get a stick. i know that the transition isn't easy, especially for guilty gear's wierd ass layout. i found that playing games with simple layouts on stick (vf, sf2) helped me get used to the shape of a japanese stick and after i got past that, getting used to a five button layout didn't take much time at all.

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So guys I've been in training mode for qutie a bit recently practicing my FRCs (on PS2 DualShock) but I still can't quite nail them 100%. I'll hit them like 5x in a row, miss 4 times, hit, miss, etc. Mainly I've been practicing the air DB FRC and the DBT>DB FRC. This FRC is the toughest for me right now. Does anyone have any tips on how to better nail this? I think it's an important FRC as it opens up Johnny to more air options should his DB wiff/be blocked or can be used to bait. Thanks. And please don't *sigh* tell me to get a stick lol it's hard enough trying to become a better JO on pad! lol

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa?! Trouble FRCing on pad? Like qwerty said, you should map your PKS to a trigger-- the bad part about this? You won't be using said trigger (shoulder button) for your DBT/KJT FRC's. I used to be a pad player before I converted to stick. I don't mind either, really but I find I am much faster on stick. There are things I could do better on pad but it's really nothing I can't practice on stick. If you're comfortable with pad, stick with it. You don't HAVE to go to stick. If you want to get more comfortable with the arcade feeling though, get a stick. Anyhow.

When I was playing on pad, I found using the mapped FRC button was.. not arcade style. Which is funny since playing on pad isn't arcade style at all. If you use the default setting (P square, K x, S triangle, HS circle, D R1), I found it was a lot easier to tilt my thumb to hit square, x and circle for my transport FRC's back in XX. Soon I was using these 3 buttons for all of my FRC's. Maybe you could do the same. Hope this helps. Keep practicing!

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when i played on pad i used PKS on L2 and PHS ( or was it KHS/PK?) on L1 and pressed the button missing for FRC on the DBT and KJT. Much easier on a stick :P

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for DB frc, other than macroing the p+k+s knowing the timming when too frc the moves would help a lot for practicing as it's not a difficult frc point imho

btw the macro also works for KJT/DBT as long as u didn't mess up the timming or KJ/DB pop up, other troublesome problem using the macros is, we didn't release the s fast enough when we hit the macro and the ai register it as pk... just get your timming down for this

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Thanks guys. I will definitely take the tips, and invest in a stick at some point. Out of curiosity, what's everyone doing in training mode these days (those of you Johnnys who do that regularly)? In addition to nailing my FRCs I'm trying to get my blockstrings down, and working on being able to consistently TK Ensenga. The group I play with loves to block low, and throwing a TK Ensenga in my pressure could be a nice, consistent surprise.

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If you're going to use TK Ensenga, practice RCing it -> airdash -> continue pressure/combo depending on whether it connects or not.

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What MissedFRC said! Just practice doing the motion and getting it low enough to hit most of the cast. If you do it too high then you're gonna whiff. Get used to doing a TK ensenga out of a 5K since you can jump cancel it. Players are conditioned to Johnny usually doing an HS or a 2D following a 5K. Just make sure you're doing the Ensenga when you've got meter so you can RC. Also, if you're close enough, you can do Ensenga out of c.5S-- this move is kinda tricky because you have to be so damn close to actually get it out there, but it's jump cancelable also only it's a bit easier to whiff at this close of a distance. Work on it!

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In training mode I'm currently working on getting my combos down pat. I still drop them too often for my tastes, and I'm getting more familiar with some character specific combos. It's slow going since I rarely practice, and then rarely get to play against an opponent as well. Loooove connecting with a simple poke and performing MSJH to get in, and then follow up with a combo into knockdown (with mist if possible) or a Lv2 combo. Also working hard on my timing issues, both FRC and wakeup, since my meaty attacks aren't always as... well... meaty as I'd like them? Jo> Whoah, you can get a TK Ensenga to connect off of a max range c.S? Fantastic! That would be great, since I imagine that most players don't see JO bust out with an ensenga after c.S.. it would probably catch them off guard the first time, and if nothing else you have the usual mixup of 2D or TK. Sweet deal.

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Yo'. Well, your ensenga won't connect. It's not a combo! Unless you get a counter hit, then maybe... but for right now, I'll say it won't connect. It's just some mix-up variety. I bet your opponents have never even seen Johnny's c.S in their lives. Don't forget your throw game! If all else fails TOSS THAT BITCH! Practice makes perfect!

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Yo'. Well, your ensenga won't connect. It's not a combo! Unless you get a counter hit, then maybe... but for right now, I'll say it won't connect. It's just some mix-up variety. I bet your opponents have never even seen Johnny's c.S in their lives. Don't forget your throw game! If all else fails TOSS THAT BITCH! Practice makes perfect!

Haha XD You got it, I rarely use c.S, I usually use 2K or 5K instead. And I love my throw game, especially using MC mixups in your strings to go for a dash>throw instead of throwing out another poke. Which reminds me that I should mention I'm still working tightening up the timing on my dashes after a MC.

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Yeah, actually if you're close enough you can do 2K>c.5S>TK if you want or do whatever. 2S sounds like a solid poke to mist cancel>throw. Hrrm, well once you become fast enough, you won't really have to worry about your dashes. I don't know how fast/how proficient you are with mist canceling, but if you really get them down well enough you'll find yourself pressuring with some sexy mist cancel gatlings. Why not try wave dashing right out of your mist cancel? This idea hit render when he was playing Slash. When you mist cancel, you're holding (assuming) K then tapping HS. Why not just hold HS and 66464.. etc. just to tighten up the blockstun? So yeah, there's a good idea if you haven't figured it out already. render's patent pending.

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I can mist cancel at the fastest possible rate with Lv2 MCs most of the time, but I don't always get an attack or dash or whatever out as fast as possible after the MC. This, I think, is partly due to playing on pad and I feel like it would be less of a issue on stick. Also, I'd love to wavedash.. but I just can't on pad without having to take some recovery time just to re-grip the controller. I'm eager to utilize wavedashing, and when I do that idea of Render's you mentioned sounds genius, thanks! But yeah, I practice with Lv2 MCs a whole lot, I'm more than decent on Lv1 MCs, and I'm not good at all at performing a Lv3 any faster than a Lv2 without messing up. Concerning 2S, I use it semi-often, but I sort of don't like the recovery time if it's whiffed. It's fairly brief, but even so it's been capitalized upon quite often by my experience so far. I'll use it more often on some characters than others, of course, but I find myself using 2D more for the better range & KD, and using 2K the rest of the time.

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Yeah, I'm not so much of a fan of 2S myself sometimes but the move is there, sooo.. Hah, well in AC Johnny's mist cancels are the quickest at L3 so maybe you'll want to stick around in training mode and keep hitting your cancels as fast as possible. I dunno. It's too bad you're on a pad though, unless you're gonna be switching from using your thumb to using your index and middle fingers to wave dash on a little pad. It'll look like you're playing a Dragonforce song or something. Clutching the controller with both your hands so close together, lol. The image in my mind is ridiculous! Personally, I don't feel that wavedashing is very essential to Johnny but knowing that I have it and that I can execute it just makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Wavedashing is pretty risky as you can dash your ass into some pretty crazy stuff (pokes, uppercuts, etc.) and it's kinda tough to keep the "controlled mash" controlled. Still, doesn't hurt to have an extra card up your sleeve!

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Wait, the lvl of your mist finer affects how fast you can mist cancel? WHAT?

Yep, it's true! The higher level your MF the faster Johnny enters kamae(Mist stance) so that means you can cancel the stance faster. Go ahead and try it out in training mode, just MC and hold forward to walk. Notice that at higher levels, Johnny begins walking sooner.

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Yeah, now that I've started paying attention to it, I do recognize the difference :o Although, question. Does getting a faster mist cancel justify spending the tension to get a MF lvl via RJH?

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I POST EVERYWHERE! I think.. RJH is pretty worth it if you land the jackhound in the first place and you don't have a level 2 yet. It's pretty tough to shake off the Jackhound stagger in time to block the Return Jack since it happens almost right away. Unless you don't want to spend meter which is fine too. You could just follow your Jackhound up with a 5K>2D>Coin or somethin'. It all depends on you.

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I POST EVERYWHERE! I think.. RJH is pretty worth it if you land the jackhound in the first place and you don't have a level 2 yet. It's pretty tough to shake off the Jackhound stagger in time to block the Return Jack since it happens almost right away. Unless you don't want to spend meter which is fine too. You could just follow your Jackhound up with a 5K>2D>Coin or somethin'. It all depends on you.

I'm with Jo on this one, don't Return Jack for the MF level up unless you're out of coins or that little bit of extra damage is really going to help you. The 5K>2D>coin is a better option for getting your level up, especially since you save the 25% tension for another JH, a KJFRC during that Lv2 combo you can do now, or just for keeping that 25% to save up for 50% to keep your opponent guessing about your new options like DAA and especially overdrive.

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Ah, thanks. The main problem though is that when they are hit by a JH, usually they can mash out of it fast enough that doing a 5k won't connect. Not only that, but I'm usually going for a throw or something else (probably arising from previous bad habits). Is it harder to mash out of the stagger from a CH, or is it just the same regardless?

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