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Painwheel Gatling game, an alternative style of offense to keep your opponents guessing on block

Dime

The power of BEAT EXTEND
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Painwheel Big Band Fukua
Please forgive me for what will more than likely be a very long winded post of dubious quality, and an exceptional amount of both grammatical and typographical errors. Normally I would just put this into my training thread and be done with it, but I'm hoping to spark some conversation and get some general ideas going.



Ever since watching airdash academies excellent blockstring tutorial for guilty gear, I've wondered if the same can apply to SG in certain ways, after all both games have chained attacks so on the outside at least they have that similarity. However many of the similarities stop there.

Differences:

Most characters in SG can't chain mediums into mediums or even attacks of the same strength (besides weak attacks) into one another like many attacks in GG can.

GG doesn't have to deal with pushblock as a primary defense. They do have to deal with a weaker form of pushblock, but there is little comparison between them from each game.

SG doesn't have jump cancelable on block moves.

SG doesn't have special "counter hit only" effects that affect the opponents state of hitstun, unlike GG, so fishing for CH in SG is less rewarding on the attack itself, but still somewhat rewarding on the combo since ch does more damage and gives a slightly longer combo option.


Many of SG's normals have relatively the same amount of range for some characters (this especially applies for painwheel, who's cr.lk has near as much range as her st.hp) So playing range based Gatling game like on GG would be much harder.


GG doesnt have to deal with invincible assists that hitconfirm into full combo and/or kill any momentum the attacker had.



And more things I'm probably missing or not aware of.


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But despite all that I kept coming back to the airdashers episodes. There is a real need in SG to be able to pressure the opponent well. This is because pushblock and invincible assists are STELLAR defensive tools. The combination of the 2 gives a lot of problems to the would be attacker. And that's before one thinks of things like autoguard and pbgc.


In airdash academy it basically states to start looking at moves as instead of 1 separate attack, look at moves as pairs of attacks. This was a sticking point for me when trying to apply it to SG. It was obvious in the airdash academy video as to how to apply the thinking, but how could I apply the thinking to SG with all the differences there are from SG to GG? Well at first I couldn't.

I knew there was value there but I couldn't figure out how to theory fight it up. I kept running into various problems like pushblock and assists and lack of range on certain normals.


So anyways, enough with the long winded explanation as to my thinking, it's time to get into the meat of the actual subject... The tactics and patterns as I think they could apply to painwheel. This is all still theory fighter and will need to be fact checked with play. But seeing as to how I have little time at home or to play and my not toaster doesn't arrive for another 4 days... Well I'm putting this up now instead of later.



The reason this is needed is to increase pressure on the opponent outside of using assists, when you know the opponent will just be hard to confirm (they are sitting in down back and have the ability to reactively block the fly over head and even have some option selects to break throws while still blocking fly stuff correctly for the most part.


There are 3 main problems to get by:

Pushblock
Invincible assist
Blocking opponent

Now we don't necessarily need strings that get by all of these at once. We just need strings that passed some of these when we anticipate these things. So from here on out I'm going to be posting certain things and how to get passed them or if not how to get passed them, then at least how to play against them without losing initiative.


Opponent pushblocks first hit of your chain:


Cr.lk xx mp stinger (opponent has less time to avoid the stinger and has limited options as to what they can immediately do after they recover from the pushblock)
Cr.lk xx fly down forward and land (moves you closer to the opponent so you don't lose as much space, but unlike just flying in this is safe if the opponent pushblocked and can still work for land into grounded pressure if the opponent didn't pushblock)

Use a multihit move instead such as st.mk or cr.mp so you don't get pushed away on the first hit


Use an armor move to delay your attack and allow their preemptive pushblock to get absorbed by the armor.


Opponent blocks first hit of your chain and calls invincible assist:


Chain into armor move to get around invincible assist (cr.hp overhead works wonders here if it catches the point because it's an easy happy birthday)


Charge armor move before the chain to get around armor assist and put the grounded point into blockstun, locking out the assist and putting the point into pressure.


Opponent has the ability to reactively block most fly over heads yet can also block low on wiffed flys in the same situation creating an opponent that is very hard to high/low mixup:

Use a slowverhead such as cr.lk xx fly 5jhp,jhk for an overhead that is slow and hits twice increasing the total amount of time needed to block high.

Use a pattern such as cr.lk xx fly (land) 5lp,cr.lk as a pressure reset... If the opponent can't be hit because of extreme focus on blocking, then maybe he can be hit by pressuring him with pressure resets and counter hit setups when he gets tired of infinite pressure and tries to jab/pushblock out.

Cr.lk xx fly (wait) 5jlk (this is magic, I use it all the time and it works wonders against people that have good reactions that like to allow assist and pushblock to do most of their defense) works because most people autopilot a low block timing after a fly and if you just delay an overhead a bit it will catch them slipping, I tend to also fly downwards a bit when doing this to really sell it and the downwards fly makes the delay timing easy to hit.




(All in all the key thing to remember here is whatever NON HITCONFIRM into fly cancel, then LAND into pressure, this is a 2 move pressure reset gap and could actually become a bnb pressure reset for pw not unlike the the "real gap" strings that airdash academy talks about. What painwheels tend to do right now is blocked hitconfirm into blocked aerial pressure or much more than likely, an aerial back away to get out of the opponents offensive danger zone once weve given up frame advantage by doing a predictable autopilot confirm.)


None of this is safe of course. But, really, that's the point. Read your opponent and destroy them.


If anyone has any alternative strings to combat various things pls feel free to post them here :)
 
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Some more strings from @ClarenceMage:

1.cr.mk xx fly df jlp (or fly 9jlp,jlk) omg, I've known about this string for some time, but now I rate it much higher. Previously my string in this situation was cr.lk xx fly df jlk. My opponents caught on though and can reactively block the jlk, not only that though, but in cases where my cr.lk hit, the j.lk wouldn't combo. Well the string Clarence mentions here actually combos on normal hit while also being a low into a high.

This string can basically be thought of as powerful as Parasouls f+lp,cr.mk string, only for pw it works opposite to Parasouls string. Parasoul does high then low, whereas pw does low then high. Pws string is also a much faster starter than parasouls. And if it can directly be combined in a mixup fashion with st.lp,cr.lk,cr.mk creates a mixup that has to be reactively blocked rather than timing blocked... This gives more teeth to the previous posts "fly, land into 5lp,cr.lk pressure" pressure resets.
 
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Something I realized was by cancelling from normals into fly, Pw gets even more 2 hit attack sequences than a normal character.

At that point things start to get really interesting cause at first look she has many different applications for stuff like:

St.hp xx fly 6jlk as a hitconfirm with a lot of range. Or she can do a "real gap" st.hp xx fly 9jmp as a way "in" we all know how important making our opponent block a jmp is, so that string can be powerful to get us some pressure from afar.

Alternatively she can st.hp xx fly jmk, mixing up the point at which she can be pushblocked out, yet leaving a much smaller gap for the opponent to bust out of than doing jmp.


For ranged pressure on her first attack, pw can rushdown with f+hk which has to be pushblocked late and when canceled fly gives many combo options on hit or pressure options on block.


Lots of stuff to experiment with here.
 
I haven't really been playing that much since this post, though it hasn't been a year. That original post was November which is around 6-7 months ago.


Still, I basically stopped playing the game around December or January. There are few people to play in my area anymore and TBH I just got bored and wanted to play something different.

Feel free to pickup where I left off though if you feel it is worth it. In my findings I found that I may have been onto something but that it was very esoteric and I probably didn't have the skill to fully realize it in my own play, so I can't sit here and say it's good when I can't even consistently do it myself. Some things like cr.lk,cr.hp full charge to beat invincible assists though, worked wonders, at least the first few times I used them.


I check back on this forum periodically just to see what's going on, but I haven't read a tier thread or watched a match vid in 3-4 months. I figured out the game enough for me to be happy with, in the end. Sf5 is my new game to complain about. I'm sure if Mike knew that he'd be kinda happy.


So yeah, explore it if you want.
 
It's been a year.... a new data on this?


Most of the stuff I said in the original post works, you just have to have a good enough opponent for it to work on. The most powerful pattern that was found was cr.mk xx fly df jlp. That is REALLY GOOD.

I haven't had time to really experiment with the pressure resets to much but my primary opponent didn't fall for them much when I did use them.