Un"real" offense strings

I was recently fighting @MonsieurDerp. He had the input that my offense was too linear. He suggested coming up with various offense strings/permutations of +oB moves into a final command grab trying to trip them up somewhere in the string. Something I came up with was j.HK > L TK > cr.LK > H Influence

One thing that had previously held me back was that I didn’t want to do anything that wasn’t “real” and cut those options off in my mind; another was the conservation of wrath. He was playing Sadira, so very different world.

Anyways, I wanted to know what you thought of this, @STORM179. I also hope Sam (Derp) sees this and will discuss too.

It’s fine to do strings that aren’t tight or “true”, so long as you’ve established the necessary conditioning for the opponent to actually sit there and take it. You can get away with absolute murder so long as the opponent is respecting you (i.e. Thompxson’s patented wakeup overhead with Jago).

The big thing is just getting them to respect you, or alternately, you as a player being able to recognize when and where a particular opponent is going to to disrespect you. Both are punishable - you just need to be able to tell which is which and where they’ll happen.

That’ll work. Even odds though that the opponent just gets smoked by the TK to be honest; you’re following up a jump-in with an instant overhead in a situation where the two “best” options are crouch block and neutral jump. I’d guess most people don’t get to see the full string :-p

A shorter one is just light TK-ORZ->cr.MP, which is what I use when people start backdashing or jumping out of light TK-ORZ->light influence. Will lose to reversal throw or mash jab, but if the opponent is respecting the command grab they’ll get tagged. Feel free to swipe that one, but don’t be afraid to come up with your own ones as well and put your own spin on things - if you did that jump-in into a TK I’d probably get hit by it :slight_smile:

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Well, please feel free to add as many of your clever offense sequences as you like :slight_smile:

Man I havent been on the KI forums in a hot minute.

Storm ia right when he says to use safe/“real” options first until your opponent starts respecting them. This is like conditioning 101. Force your opponent to behave a certain way that benefits you. For example, forcing them to block in certain senarios and then do cmd grab.

Also eventually I think the whole building offensive strings thing should be less of a memorisation excersize and more of an intuition thing. By that I mean understanding your characrer well enough to be able to come up with these strings on the fly. But this is a very long term thing and comes with reading your opponents defence.

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