Strats versus El Blaze?

Okay, so it seems to me that every hit he does either; staggers, crumples, collapses, throws, or side turns.

What are some general strategies to do vs him? I have gotten better @ blocking the drop kick and ducking the spin kick. But other than that, I'm not sure how to counteract his abominable tool set. Seems the only way to beat him is to grab the advantage and go all out offensive to overwhelm him.

I realize this question is somewhat character specific, but what I'm focusing on here is what points can we interrupt his flows and turn the tides? What traps and set ups to be on the lookout for and how to avoid? Where can we interrupt his strings? Etc.....

What mindset do you go into the match with and what distance do you find him most and least effective at? Or perhaps I should break that down to: what are you weary of at each distance,close, mid, long? There has to be a way to intelligently defend myself other than grabbing the initiative and not relenquishing it.

Thanks for the help.

 

I actually typed up a huge post before in the blaze forum that I called "Unmasking Blaze" I gave a outline on how to approach him and a fair few tips and tricks on how to better defend against his mixups and how to completly break some of them.

After doing this I didn't post it. Decided I wasn't going to do the homework for everyone on my character.

I will give you some advice though:

Learn what ends high
Know when you're at a disadvantage
Learn to jab on reaction to open demon dances (his flip)
React to low dropkicks from Rocket Discharge
Don't attack him when he goes into Rocket discharge off of blocked moves.

Blaze doesn't really have anything other than his K+G and the kick from his stepping stance that sideturns so if the Blazes you're playing are on your side a lot you're getting evaded. The staggers from 46K and demon dance K are very, very tight. Possible to break them in time to block the knee. I'm unable to do it but staggering has never been a strong point of mine.

Best way to learn a character is to use them yourself. It certainly wouldn't hurt to read up stuff on the Blaze forum as well.

 

Can you elaborate on this ?
Against most chars like Brad or Vanessa with her intruder step, when you block it's usually the moment you can start attacking because they need to hitcheck and if they don't they "lose" their stances mixup.
Do you have some typical situations where it's not recomended to attack?

 

I tested quickly; I couldn't find any blocked moves leading to rocket discharge that could not be interrupted.
The best was +~ which can only be interrupted with punch (which means you may get under it with the roll?), and iirc ~ which can be interrupted with elbow. The rest could be interrupted with some slow-ass launchers for the most part.

I tried to do RD K asap which afaik is the fastest move out of RD.

 

Check the blaze forums. Or don't. If you guys want to keep attacking after blocking my 9p+k, k or 4PK that's cool too.

 

Checked.

In my opinion it is exceedingly important to be aware of what the guessing game is in these cases, and now we know.

4PK(blocked)~6 demon dance K is interrupted by PK or Jacky PPP
4PK(blocked)~6 K is interrupted by PK or Jacky PPP
4PK(blocked)~6 P+K+GP is interrupted by Jacky PPP (third hit)
If you do just the roll and block you avoid getting hit, though.

edit: same results after blocked 9P+KK~6

If I guess correctly and evade RD K, I got 103 damage from high angle punish.

To reiterate: everything after blocked RD starters can be interrupted, although it is nontrivial in the case of 9P+KK and 4PK.

 

right, my mistake. BRB.

edit:
After blocked 4PK~6 both RD K and RD 2K are defeated by Jackys P4K (aka punch-sidekick). Same goes for every other followup I can think of including roll, demon dance, etc. P4K also beats everything after blocked 9P+KK.

But this is not a universal solution since not everyone has a string like that. So I'll take back that much.

P4K is -6 on block.

 

Isn't RD P+G 15f, 1f faster than RD K, and is a catch throw? As a catch throw, it should beat attacks, no?

 

13 frame mids eat the 4pk into RD. Another option Blaze has is to jump out of RD to bait nonsense. There is a way to completely break this though that works for every character (bar Taka) but I'll let someone else figure it out.

 

You want to start acting like GT now?

edit @YOMI: and the throw will lose to Jacky P4K as well.

I also cant find a way to jump out of RD that wouldnt get hit by the selfsame P4K.. But this is pretty stupid cause you can always just do 4PK and simply NOT press forward..

 

Come on, if you have some tech, why not just share it for the benefit of everyone's game improving instead of hoarding it.

Well scratch that then.

 

I was going to share everything I had on how to break Blaze at one point but I figured why should I bother breaking down my own game with my own character for the benefit of others? Seems genuinely counter productive. At least I'm telling you there's a way to squash it.

It's not that I'm acting like GT I just don't see how this would benefit me or the other Blaze players at all. Hell, if you don't want to do the ground work you deserve to get a face full of rocket discharge every single round.

 

Well I guess everyone else who posts on the character forums their comboes and strats to everyone's viewing pleasure are being counter productive. I guess we lose our edge and never win tournaments when everyone knows our secret tech. Don't worry though, I'm still a nice enough guy to tell you everything I know about the characters I play, just ask away if there's anything you want to know, or read my posts on Jeff and Taka forums for example.

Have a nice day.

 

There's a difference between people sharing strats and setups and people sharing a technique to beat somehing outright. A big difference.

The only secret technique I have is the full body spin technique but that doesn't magically allow me to win tournaments.

People become better players when they do their own ground work. In theory people could sling out a bunch of false information and people would accept it as gospel. Yet the people who work on their character matchups and shenanigans will know better.

I certainly don't expect people to tell me how to beat them. Figuring it out is half the fun as far as I'm concerned.

 

I get what you're saying. I myself think that there is no technique in VF that doesn't have a counter to it, so I'm less rigid talking about this kind of stuff. Theres a counter to the counter and so on. Important thing imo is understanding the guessing game so you can make educated guesses what the opponent is going to do and how he will react to what you do.

In a tournament setting having a strong technique that opponent doesn't know the counter to is very strong of course.. But they will have it figured out next time at least.

 

Exactly, manji. There is a way to burst the whole rocket discharge thong but I already have something that would deal with that.

Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something you know

 

For 4PK on block you can jump back to escape RD K, RD2K and RD throw.
I guess it should work for 9P+K K too.
Maybe it even works on hit, didn't try.

If he does the 2K (whiff) you're at at least +20 after the jump since I was able to punish with Lion's P+K
For RD K options I wasn't able to punish with P, may be throw is guaranteed, anyway, Blaze is at serious disadvantage.
For the throw I can't remember, I think P didn't work either.

With Lion you can also 44K and beat the throw and the Knee (make it whiff with the built in back dash) for 74 damage, which is more than the RD throw and probably more than RD2K combo, so you are begining to turn the risk reward into your advantage.
It will only lose to the RD 2K. So I guess backdash launcher may be close to a universal answer for other chars against these two options, experiment ^^.

RD2K is not that scary, a lot less damage than RDK, unsafe, slow, linear, there are a lot of ways to beat it.

 

OK. Gonna try something here. Between now and Friday, I'd like everyone who's interested to point out specifically what their main issues are with Blaze or any questions they might have on him. Your contributions will help improve the El Blaze Wiki and benefit anyone who cares to study it.

Please post your issues and questions right here in this thread. Please do it by your Friday evening.