How to fake being good at KI

Any riptor players here?

By the title, I mean that players with little to no skill can win easily with riptor. Can someone give an analysis of this fight?

Considering a good deal of Riptor’s moves are simply :point_left:,:point_right:. attack, and you can nearly do a full combo by simply mashing HP over & over…yeah she kinda is a noob’s best friend. My 4-year-old loves playing as her, if that tells you anything.

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I think you were very unlucky. Even when you tried the counter breaker he didn’t bite. Try more air ORZ against Riptors.

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The few takeaways from me watching this wasn’t so much what the Riptor was doing, it was a few areas you can look to improve in: not canceling lights into ORZ (it doesn’t combo), playing a bit more grounded without jumping or teleporting, etc. To me it kind of just looked like you were both just throwing random moves at each other until something connected. If you notice your opponent doing this, then the way to beat that is to sit there, observe some patterns (in this Riptor’s case, dash HP and jump HP), and then execute a precise counter attack to those things.

As an aside, in the first 2 seconds of the fight, you knock Riptor down with a jumping attack. Because she has no meter, you should look to be abusing Riptor on wakeup, but you just backed off and gave her full screen to work with. Hisako’s gameplan involves lots of heavy wakeup pressure so I would encourage you to take massive advantage of that on characters without meter.

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I can’t add much to what @Infilament said, but a lot of this match was decided by combo play. You got broken a bunch of times on medium and then went for a counterbreaker and didn’t get it. And then you got locked out a couple of times, at least one missing Riptor’s flaming heavies which is probably the easiest break to read in the game. It happens, we all do it, but it suggests to me that you need to relax and not panic when you are in a combo state.

Twice you jumped into flame carpet. Less jumping is definitely a good idea. Hisako doesn’t need to be played like Sadira. Also, twice you tried to counter Riptors jumping HP. That’s a fast multihit move and if Hisako can counter it at all it’s going to require terrific timing (I don’t know that it’s even possible). That’s just matchup knowledge.

Not to be preachy, but I would be careful about saying things like any noob can hit buttons and win with Riptor. I don’t think your opponent here was a noob, just based on combo play. Unless he got incredibly lucky he knows this matchup. Riptor depends on offensive pressure and mixups to win, since she doesn’t have great defense or a lot of safe moves. So the wild, jumping around pace of this match really favors Riptor over Hisako. That’s a mistake on your part, but it seems like a pretty good way to play Riptor in this matchup. So maybe the guy knows what he’s doing better than you think.

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Not much to add at what @BigBadAndy and @Infilament said.

IMO the problem here is not the Riptor. It was your strategy.

As Infil said, you should abuse Riptor on wake up
As Andy said, you should be more careful about countering Riptor J.HP

IMO your biggest mistake was the jumping. Hisako doesn’t refill her warth Meter while jumping. As Hisako, you should not jump so much. Refill your warth meter, fish a MP/HP/c.MK into QCF+P for a combo, use dash into command grab on neutral(and don’t touch anything afterwards to refill your warth), use teleport on reaction of a Mortar, not on neutral…

At the end, just try to avoid long periods without full warth, and don’t jump(at least not so often). These are my advices.

And about the video title… well, as Andy pointed, not a good idea usin a title like that.
At the end, mashing buttons until something happens with a character won’t work against aware opponents. This Riptor didn’t won because Riptor is noob friendly and mashing buttons is an easy win. He won because you didn’t counter that. But since you came here for help, you are in the right way :slight_smile:

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Thanks guys. Besides aganos, rash and (to a certain extend) kim wu, riptor is one of my toughest MU’s regardless of the character I’m using. There’s much I have to learn I guess. I might edit the title later.

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Btw did anyone catch that at the end I was still alive after the ultra instinct cancel? What was that all about?

I saw it. Pretty weird. Maybe it was something related to rollback.
Post it on the bug threads

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Not a rollback. Some characters can instinct cancel an ultra before the 1st hit goes through. The 1st hit kills the opponent so without the 1st hit, the opponent will be alive.

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Yeah I saw it. I think Wulf can do this too.

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Not a terrible one, but seems like a bug to me. It’s easy to avoid: Don’t use instinct after Ultra until the first hit, but still sounds “broken” to me.

I mean, I can’t find a way to justify it

When I’ve seen Wulf do it you are alive but just standing there, you can’t move or anything.

That sounds even MORE buggier.

I saw something similar with Hisako some time ago. Was part of her infinite Ultra setting

Asked Keits about it at some tournament and he confirmed they don’t consider it a bug - you just have to make sure the first hit of your ultra happens before you instinct cancel. If you don’t hit them, they don’t die, even though you get the ultra flash.

About the match video, I think most of the bases have already been covered. Light buttons don’t combo with Hisako w/o using meter, don’t jump so much, don’t let the opponent get up for free, and don’t teleport in neutral with Hisako unless you’re reacting to something. Riptor’s flame normals are also not counterable, period, so you just have to hold those jump+HP’s until you have meter for the shadow counter. If you have a bar, I also recommend reacting to run with shadow ORZ - it moves far enough fast enough that it’ll usually hit her before she gets armor on headbutt, and it’ll blow through it she tries to do a flame out of the run.

The Riptor didn’t win because he was playing “noobishly” - it seemed to me he won because he knew the MU better than you and knew how he wanted to approach it. He played at extreme ranges and then dashed in with stuff. That’s all pretty punishable mind you, and backing up that much meant that had you just walked him down he would have been SOL, but in that set he was able to pretty solidly impose his will on the fight.

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I wrote a big Jago guide post recently that people seemed to appreciate, which seems to be on-topic, so check that out if you want.

I don’t really think it’s so much about “faking it”, so much as having an idea of the core mind game in each situation (e.g. poke/block/advance in neutral, attack/block/fhrow in pressure/oki situations), as well as at least a basic option of each “kind” that you can use to participate in that mind game against opponents at your skill level. As you get better (and get matched against better opponents) you’ll find that the basic option you’re leaning on gets you into trouble, or that you otherwise need to find something more advanced that’ll give you more openings or damage or breathing room or something. The Jago post I wrote tries to fill in those basic options in each situation, as well as offering some more intermediate and advanced tools to chew on in places.

I could probably write a similar post for Riptor and maybe a few other characters.

I’m not so sure about this. Run-forward HP is -3 on block, shoulder charge is +11 into predator stance, even run-forward HK is -2 (!!) I think. I actually think Riptor has a great approach, it’s kinda reminiscent of TJ’s powerline options.

Actually, I think playing runaway is probably a good strategy against Hisako, and really against any character that can’t put a projectile on the screen. It allows Riptor to impose the run-forward mixup on Hisako, which I think is pretty powerful. The big problem with playing runaway is if you’re facing a Fulgore, Glacius, Kan-Ra, Gargos, even Jago, basically any character who is going to obstruct your path back in: since Riptor has a long hurtbox and average walk speed and a big dopey run instead of quick forward dashes she has a tough time making the nuanced movements needed to claw back that space against a zoner.

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Eh, it’s less good than you might think. The problem with run is that it’s actually a pretty big commitment in active frames. Riptor can’t really start or stop on a dime, so descent is surprising good at punishing it. If I have a half decent read on your run timing, or I manage my space well, I can more or less punish flame carpet, any more than a single mortar, or run->most options out of run. And if Hisako has meter, run at anywhere outside of max distance (or min, but running point-blank isn’t great either) is punishable with shadow ORZ. Hisako in general is pretty tough to zone, and I can’t say I think Riptor does it particularly well.

Godlike option selects, bro

Hm, I’m testing some of this. My reactions aren’t the best, but I don’t think run-forward HP is reactable. (EDIT: even if the HP is slightly delayed and Hisako reacts with descent, the startup of descent gets punished fairly often as far as I can tell.) To my mind the move is better than wind kick in most regards: hits from further out, the projectile properties are usually an asset, and if you’ve trained your opponent to expect it then you have a variety of alternative run-forward followups to go for instead. You’re not going to get as good a combo off it as Jago, though: Jago gets a manual of choice, whereas Riptor probably wants to OS a linker, and well, linker scaling “bug”…

I also can’t react anywhere near fast enough to punish run-back HP or flame carpet with descent into anything, nor can I find a meterless way of punishing either of those options outside of maybe possession. I might be mistaken, but these seem like things that Riptor can incorporate into her gameplan without worrying about a hard punish from a patient Hisako, and if the Hisako player feels like going for the read with a descent then she gets punished if she’s wrong. I could be way off because I’ve looked at this for all of five minutes and have no high-level matchup experience to speak of here, but I think talking about half-decent reads risks overstating the strength of the character whilst minimizing your own ability to make those reads.

Shadow ORZ does do the trick, though. Man, that’s a nice move.

Yeah, shadow ORZ is more the hard counter I was talking about. It’s great for punishing run and all the zoning flame attacks so long as you’re not full screen.

Descent works, but you need to have a definite feel for the “flow” of how they move and lay out their flame attacks to be effective. I manage it with some regularity, but it’s admittedly as much art as science.

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