vs. Leo

[madworlder]

What an annoying character with huge boxes and stupid ambiguous stance things

It's a good thing a lot of his moves are easy to Blitz Shield, but it leaves you wanting meter later on.

[Poultrygeist]

I don't have Leo yet nor have I fought him, but can't you bait his gorilla normals with Task seals and then eat him alive with 6HS and forward dash?  Pure theory fighter on my part, take it with a serious grain of salt.

[madworlder]

He has a move that hits on both sides that will hit you if you try attacking after a forward dash. I don't use 6H very often, but 3H was pretty good at the same idea. Mostly the person I was playing against just went in and mashed buttons, I wasn't great at dealing with the reset mixups having never seen them before, so that's when I started to try and Blitz Shield out. 

[Poultrygeist]

Again this is just theory on my part, but could you maybe low profile his mashing, or keep him tamed with f.S?  

[madworlder]

Definitely can't low profile anything. He's got a lot of forward-advancing moves, so good spacing with f.S is a possibility, but I wouldn't rely on it too much since Leo's boxes are generally bigger than Bedman's. I need to play it more (I'm still not 100% of all of the properties of Leo's moves), but so far I definitely think Blitz Shield is the way to go when fighting this character since you can see the forward-advancing moves very easily and reactively punish.

Task A and A' also got me pretty far, as expected. Leo's projectile beats both of them, but I'm pretty sure it's a charge motion and it definitely leaves Leo vulnerable to 3H. Leo also has some wacky counter thing he might be able to use to punish A'.

[NecroTheReaper]

If you fight a Leo that likes to 5HS>6HS, you can grab him out of it from most ranges. Can also grab him out of rekkas if you IB, but the second one will actually cross you up if you IB it, where it normally wouldn't. I think backdashing out of stance oki midscreen should work ok since all his moves seem to be lacking in range there.

[Tiamat]

Backdash is pretty good for getting away from his backturned stance but iirc if he does the backturn H it will hit your backdash if you did it after being hit by that air special (air 236H I think). Maybe backdash yrc would help.

For the Rekkas, the 2nd hit does become crossup if you IB the first hit, but this also means you are able to grab the 2nd hit after IBing the first. Also, if you normal guard the 1st hit the 2nd hit will be a forced block, but if you want to IB it you will have to use the correct direction. So first hit normal guarded you will want to IB the 2nd hit with 6. If you block the rekkas from far range I think none of it crosses up , but usually that won't happen.

[kex]

Someone answer, please, what is Leos hits that are unblockables? I mean that hit with leg, that seems to be overhead but still staggers me. Is it only 29 frames unblock or something?

[NecroTheReaper]

Its an overhead that causes stagger on standing block, so essentially unblockable. Luckily its slow enough to be mashed on or backdashed away from, but it does have quite a lot of range.

[Dullyanna]

Save meter to bs the unblockable on reaction or dash yerk against it in case you think he'll feint it to bait bs. It's fine to do it against his other bt stuff if he's predictable but your main line of defense should be solid blocking til he has to dash or spend meter to get back in.

In neutral I like to play outside of his s fireball range b/c it's his strongest neutral tool and he otherwise doesn't deal with zoning or runaway well at all. Around full screen he should never be able to get h fireball out b/c you have 3hs, but if he does you can avoid it in the air p easily.

Don't ever approach from the air or do bed slam without solid covering fire. Leo's 6p is godlike and leads to full air combo, and flashkick has short charge time along with an asston of invul. Keep him out and wear him down until you have a safe opening to start offense, his mobility is ass and. Demand plays off that really well.

[NecroTheReaper]

If you got 75 meter and wanna screw his wakeup game, do reversal Helios and YRC it>grab. I got it to work twice because the huge cinmatic is essentially a "COUNTER THIS" billboard that Leo's really wanna punish

[NecroTheReaper]

Some more cool funny tech. Crossing up with back float after 5HS (2) will make his dp wiff if he uses it.