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I see BodyOrgan has already swayed you towards EX Kyo. He runs him point, and pretty well, and the character is not that difficult to play at a beginner level.

On the other hand, I run Andy on point, and while he might not be a better character in general, I think he lends himself very well to a beginner player's needs. He has an easier time getting in than EX Kyo does, and has a fireball for some minor zoning (although you shouldn't rely on it too much, depending on which character you're up against). Executionally-speaking, he isn't that hard, although some of his drive cancels in the corner are not altogether easy. It's a good way to ease yourself into the requirements of the game, in my opinion.

One more thing. You mentioned in your first post that you love EX Iori, but you see so much of him. That's not a very good reason not to play him. Especially if you're a beginner; why hamstring yourself? If you think a character is fun to play, you should use him. Having fun is the best way to not get burnt out on a game, and the more used a character is, the more fleshed out the information for him will be on the wiki, most likely, so you'll have more to work with and learn from.

I used the same layout as BodyOrgan at first, but switched to:

B C D
A

Having a finger for each button made things easier on me after I got used to it. I should probably use macros with how often I get regular DM instead of EX DM, but ehhhhh.

Yeah, great games all around. These are always a lot of fun.

Desmond, you missed a few of mine: vs. Edgeshot, 3-0 for me; vs. thec0re3, 1-3 for him; vs. Crazeh247, 3-0 for him; vs. besteboyjr, 3-0 for him; and vs. Thwack, 3-0 for him.

Ah, a man with excellent taste in Kyos. Glad to have you aboard.

Hey Micky, welcome to site! Always nice to have another Kyo enthusiast. Do you prefer NESTS Kyo or old style Kyo?

Okay, here's my attempt at a voice commentated video tutorial. I re-did the Andy tutorial that I made a long time ago in order to get a comparison from you guys.

Which video style do you think is better for this kind of video? I'm still not sold on my voice, and my mic isn't professional or anything but much better than it was before.

Nope, my xbox died on me. I'm on steam. I usually check here daily, though, so feel free to ask away.

If you're looking for suggestions, Terry is a good character to start with. He does decent damage, and his combos are not too difficult and can be extended with meter. Here's a really good article on Terry and EX Kyo directed at beginners. Ryo is also reasonably easy to use, I think.

Honestly I wouldn't worry too much about team composition until you get a bit more experience under your belt. It's a lot more important to find three characters that you have fun playing than trying to find three that complement each other well. People agonize over which team to start when they're new to the game, when they should just be playing characters that are fun and learning how to play.

Just to be clear, on the button hold trick: You need to do the motion for the special/super, and THEN hold down the button or buttons. You don't hold the button down, do the motion, and then release the button. I'm sure you're doing it correctly, but based on your last post it's possible that you weren't, so I'm just making sure we're on the same page.

Holding the button usually makes the timing pretty easy, but it doesn't completely get rid of the need for timing. You still have to be reasonably close to when you would need to input the move, and it doesn't work for normals. If the moves are not coming out at all, you're likely doing the motion and pressing the button too early, or after the cancellable window of the move you're doing beforehand. Without knowing exactly which cancel you're trying to do, it's hard to tell which.

As for Kyo cancelling his DM into Neomax, you have to be in HD mode, and that one requires 3 or 4 bars to do altogether, depending on if you're using his EX DM or regular DM. If you're in HD and have enough meter, you can do that cancel really fast. The motion for his Orochinagi (his DM) is qcb,hcf+P, and his neomax is qcf,qcf+AC. The timing for this isn't too bad. You should start the neomax motion pretty much right away after the DM and hold the AC at the end, it should come out easily enough. You have a decent amount of time in between, so you don't need to rush it. The Neomax will come out almost as soon as the DM hits. Kyo's Neomax can't be done in the air, so this is all on the ground.

King is a great character for new players to start with in my opinion. I have a lot of trouble trying to do Mr. Karate's more complicated stuff like super-jump cancels, but if you can pull that off then that's great, keep doing what you're doing. He's a very good and versatile character. It's a good idea to try out a few and see who best fits your playstyle and who really "clicks" with you in general.

Okay, I got a new mic so I'll be putting together an Andy comparison vid so people can tell me which style they prefer, whether it be all text and edited together or minor editing and voiced over. It should be done sometime this week/weekend, depending on how long it takes to edit together.

Linking in this game is, for the most part, not as integral as it is in street fighter. Combos are generally structured as normal -> command normal -> specials -> optional super. Buffering moves is much easier too, you can hold the button after the motion for a special and it effectively repeats the input for a while afterwards, so timing specials is really easy.

Who are you using and what are you having trouble with, specifically?

[It does have a point, and poses a question at the end, so go ahead and skip to there if you aren't interested in rambling points about spreadsheets and resource analysis.]

Alright, so this is going to be a long-winded and somewhat odd post, bear with me. It does have a point, and poses a question at the end, so go ahead and skip to there if you aren't interested in rambling points about spreadsheets and resource analysis.

When I was coming up with combos for some characters when I first started this game, I became somewhat obsessed with the efficiency of a combo with regards to meter usage. I did this because I was having fun sitting in training mode for hours on end trying to come up with the most damaging combo for any given amount of meter and drive, and also it was a low-stress way to work on execution that didn't require any winning or losing, etc. It was basically how I figured out how to play the game, and as those of you who play me regularly know, it was undoubtedly the WRONG way to figure out how to play the game.

But I digress.

When I was coming up with combos and how best to use resources with a particular character, I wanted an easy-to-use method of figuring out if a combo was "worth it" and gave a good amount of damage for it's resources. Being somewhat proficient with spreadsheets and statistical analysis (but far from an expert, more on that later) I came up with a simple formula to express the amount of damage a combo does in terms of resources used and measure it against a statistical baseline. I called the number that this formula produces the "efficiency factor" of the combo, and calculated it for every possible combination for meter and drive, corner and mid-screen, for my three characters. I used this number to determine which combos would be useful and which are a waste of meter. It also provides some insight as to how to best utilize a character, for example, Andy does a ton of extra damage when he's got someone in a corner, and has meterless options to get the opponent there. Kyo does more damage in the corner, but it's not as drastic a change, and Shen doesn't really care one way or another, he just does big man punches for big man damage.
Obviously this doesn't take in to account silly things like "normals," "mix-ups," and "pokes." I did mention this was the wrong way to learn, right?

Anyway, my "efficiency factor" (EF for short) is calculated as follows: Develop combos at each level of meter and drive for corner and mid-screen that start from the same normal. Mid-screen combos and corner combos are calculated separately, as there isn't much point in lumping them in with each other; it's almost universally better to do corner combos if possible and it would dilute the results from the mid-screen. In my case, I chose close C as the combo starter for my characters, which seemed logical. It might not be for other characters. No jump-ins, because you want a simple baseline that's common among characters and different characters have different usable jump-ins for combos, etc., and you want to keep changes to a minimum.

Your meterless, driveless combo will be your baseline. For each combo in that category (mid-screen or corner), you can take the difference in damage between that combo and the baseline. If this is done for each non-drive combo, you can calculate the amount of damage added per unit of stock by taking the "above baseline" value and dividing it by the amount of meter used. You can do this for drive as well, by comparing a combo that uses drive to the combo that uses the SAME amount of stock but NO drive. From these numbers, an average amount of damage added from stock and from drive for that character is simple to calculate.

Still with me? Probably not. I'd be surprised if anybody read all of this, honestly, but I'll keep going anyway.

Okay, so now you have the average amount of damage added to a combo per unit of stock and drive. The more data points you have, the better the average will represent your combos.

From our average numbers, we can calculate the "expected" amount of damage a combo will do by taking the baseline and adding the average numbers for stock and/or drive. To use Andy as an example: For the combos I use, mid-screen Andy does 237 damage baseline, adds 79.2 damage per stock and 66.0 damage per half-drive. If I wanted to know how efficient Andy's combo for 1 bar and half-drive was, I could look at the "expected" value based on these averages:

Expected Value = (Baseline) + (Average bar damage)*(# of bars used) + (Average half-drive damage)*(# drive used)

In our case, to plug in numbers:

Expected Value = 237 + (79.2*1) + (66.0*1) = 382.2 damage, or 382 after rounding.

As it turns out, my combo for Andy mid-screen with 1 bar and half-drive is exactly equal to 382. This means that it isn't a particularly efficient combo, but isn't inefficient either. The Efficiency Factor of this combo is 1.

EF = (Actual Combo Damage) / (Expected Combo Damage)

The higher the EF, the better off you are using that combo in terms of resource efficiency. To go back to Andy, mid-screen, his most efficient combo (of mine, anyway) is for 2 bars, no drive: Cl.C, f+A, hcf+BD, qcb,hcf+P. (You can get exactly 1 more damage by doing kuuhadan-break into EXDM, but I screw that one up more, so eh.)
The expected value here is 237 + (79.2*2) + (66.0*0) = 395 damage. The actual amount it does is 409. The efficiency factor, then is (409/395)=1.09.

This is still not a great number, but that's why Andy's so much better in the corner. His corner combos range from an EF of 1.02 on the low end to 1.38 on the high end. Shen's 1-stock no-drive combo has an EF of 1.93, which is the highest I've got so far (outside of HD, that is).

Looking at all of the numbers, I can see where characters are best and with what resources. Andy, on average, adds almost 100 extra damage for half-drive in the corner. That's a lot. Kyo adds just under 5 (Yes, 5) extra damage, on average, for half of the drive meter mid-screen. From this we can conclude not to use Kyo's or Andy's drive meter mid-screen if you're aiming for efficiency.

Universally, for the characters I've tested (All four of them, admittedly not a large sample size), combos are structured in a front-loaded way with respect to meter, by which I mean combos using 1 or 2 bars are more efficient than combos using more than that. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use heavier combos; a kill's a kill, and if you can forego another set-up in order to take them out now, losing out on conceptual efficiency is not at all important. You can also use these numbers to "decouple" drive and meter, that is, figure out the best combo to use if you don't care how efficient you are with drive but want to maintain some stock efficiency, etc., but that's probably not a useful metric.

It's important to note that HD combos were left out of all calculations, or calculated separately. They're kind of a statistical anomaly, in that they do a ridiculously large amount of damage compared to the non-HD combos, and EF values of 2-3 are not unheard of. I'm also bad at them, so it's harder to do calculations because it takes me a lot longer to get the data. 

Okay. So that's WAY more words than I had intended to write about this possibly useless concept.



TL;DR - Unemployed guy with a wordy disposition and a background in science got bored and figured out what constitutes resource efficiency in combos.

My question to anybody still reading this; I'm new to fighting games in general, and resource management is a pretty foreign concept to me. This was my way of trying to make some sense of it. How do "good" (or at least experienced) players think about meter management? Is it just something that you glance at now and then and do whatever you want? Do they just use as much as meter as you can every time if it won't kill, and tone it back if it will? Do you plan ahead and go for specific combos/set-ups that use pre-planned amounts of meter? Save everything for HD combos? I'd love to know.

If anybody has questions about this process (as if I haven't typed enough about it) I'm willing to answer. Honestly I'd be impressed if anybody read the whole thing, but maybe somebody will get something out of it.

Thanks!

Quick question for any claw (or flame, I guess) Iori players:

I'm currently drilling his cross-up taco move on crouching opponents because I'm HORRIBLE at hitting it, and am still having problems with it. It seems like half of the time the b+B comes out as a regular hop B, so I'm guessing that my timing is a bit off and it's crossing up before the command normal comes out, so it looks like f+B to the game instead. I can sometimes hit it by pressing f+B, lending some support to my theory above.

My question is, when good players are doing the cross-up b+B, are they inputting it as f+B or b+B relative to the side they start on? I'm very inconsistent with it either way, but both do work occasionally, and I want to know which I should be practicing or which timing is easier.

I've just started delving into some of his resets this week in training mode, they seem interesting. I think I'm still a ways off from being able to exploit them to their fullest, but it's nice to know they're an option.

Thanks!

Well, there goes any hope of the first trailer being early alpha I guess. The models don't look any better, and they're all oddly shiny. Very strange.