New control scheme and a new character

[bobertbojo2]

I'm a little over 100 hours into the game using nothing more than the keyboard and playing solo fortune, and I've decided to force myself to learn a few things to make myself better at the game, like actually having assists and not using the arrow keys for movement.

My new control scheme still isn't much different. I use ASD for punches and ZXC for kicks (which hasn't changed at all) FV for macros (I currently use LP MP on macro 1 and LP LK on macro 2. I should probably change these, but I'm insecure in my ability to button dash under pressure and I like being able to mash grab when I expect an airgrab reset/incoming setup) My movement has moved from the arrow keys to 789 0 on the numpad, basically making it a left-handed hitbox setup.

On top of this, I'm trying to pick up Cerebella, as she feels really strong when I fight against her and I want cerecopter in my life as fortune. The next character I was considering picking up was Parasoul, since her disjoints + assists are attractive, but I'm not sure if I can handle that many charge inputs when I'm struggling with my new layout. Who knows, maybe I'll ditch bella, or eventually pick soul up as my third character.

At any rate, my goals are to:
1) become familiar with the new layout, which I know will simply come from playing the game
2) feel about as confident in bella as I currently do with fortune. This entails:
a) Consistently being able to use at least a full bnb in a real match setting
b) thorough enough knowledge of how to play aggressively to consistently mix up my opponent when on the offense
c) enough neutral game to feel like I'm actually playing the game

 

[bobertbojo2]

Day 1: Not much exciting to report. Lots of fooling around in training mode; mostly getting a feel for bella's hitboxes at the moment.
To try to learn my new layout in a sort of trial by fire, I played some casual matches as fortune. I can mostly play competently, since my layout isn't actually that different. The only real issue I've had is that because the layout is so similar, I forget that I jump with my thumb instead of my second finger, so I tend to duck when I mean to jump. This makes for awkward moments when I try to approach with an IAD, since pretty much every move I want to IAD (LK, HP, HK) are bad neutral moves on the ground.

 

[bobertbojo2]

Day 2: Fiddled around in bella's trials. Was slightly disappointed by how short all of them are.
So far it looks like bella's combos require just a little bit more thought than fortune's, but I still don't forsee any issues that won't just be solved through brute practice.
Trial 4, which is just a simple conversion off of kanchou, gave me the most issues out of any of the trials. I'm not sure how precise the timing to pick up with c.MK actually is, but I was mildly annoyed when I finally stopped getting OTG hits but then found that the dummy was too far away for devil horns to combo.
On the topic of kanchou conversions, I still don't have much of a feel for charging yet, but I assume that's natural considering this is my first actual experience playing a charge character in any game ever. Once I'm confident enough in the bnb to take to beginner lobbies, I'll see how much I struggle with remembering to charge in an actual match.

 

[bobertbojo2]

Day 3: Played a few more casual matches today. Decided to at least include bella as an assist for fortune so that even if I totally bomb with bella, I'll start learning what to use cerecopter assist for and learn what buttons I can press in neutral as bella while I'm at it.
Over the course of the matches I played (somewhere around 15) it occurred to me that I have no idea what I'm doing in neutral as bella. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to use tumbling run to get in because it has a hit of armor and gives me the option of kanchou readily available, or if I'm supposed to dash jump and abuse the ridiculous hitbox on j.MP, or if I'm just supposed to be patient. At any rate, I ended up just sorta flailing around and whiffing a lot of pokes.
I plan to watch a tutorial (off the top of my head I know dekillsage did a bella tutorial at some point) to try to get a sense of what bella's main plan is. I know she's a grappler, but I guess I don't really have a feel for how that means I'm supposed to play.
On the bright side, the control scheme already feels pretty natural. I still have a few rare instances where I forget to jump after my launcher but I'm pleasantly surprised by how quickly I learned the setup. I guess this is just a thread about me learning bella now.

 

[bobertbojo2]

Day 4: I watched most of the slapfest tutorial and some matches from dekillsage's channel. The biggest thing I feel like I need to work on in neutral is abusing the range of Bella's normals. I thought I would do this more naturally coming from fortune since she confirms from pretty far away, but I either need to push buttons sooner if I'm going to push them at all or play patiently so I can just punish things using diamond drop or the like. I also don't grab nearly as much as I should as a grappler, so I feel like I should work on some setups to lead into command grabs (i.e. blockstrings, land cancel setups).
Played some casual matches as fortune/bella, and I still don't quite feel like I know when I should be calling cerecopter assist. In my matches, I feel like I tend to overcorrect between never calling my assist (or calling it too late and just giving a free happy birthday) and calling copter while I'm midscreen and trying to push forward, where it does literally nothing. Every once in a while I actually take advantage of the lockdown, but I feel like there's way more to the assist than I'm getting out of it currently.

 

[bobertbojo2]

Day 5: played a casual ft10 against outlaw_spike's solo val. I got pretty thoroughly bodied, and fell for the same resets in the same order an embarrassing number of times. Not sure if it just happened to be this particular day, but I got tilted way too easily. Even when I blocked his resets, I had a really difficult time actually making anything out of it; my pushblocks didn't seem to help me at all, yet still pushed val far away enough that I couldn't go for a PBGC, and every instance of neutral was me not being able to reach the valentine 50 feet above my head, and then me eating a shuriken whenever I tried to do anything. Not sure if I need experience in the matchup or if it was just me letting the tilt get to my head.
At any rate, going 0-10 so cleanly was upset me. I feel like I can never get my reversals out in time, and I'm dropping my combos just enough that I don't feel like I can justify trying to learn new resets since I'm not even getting to that part of my combo all of the time anyways. The current plan is to take a little bit of time away from netplay. I'll take tomorrow off of the game completely (since I happen to have a paper due in 2 days) and one I get back in the game I'll spend time in training mode practicing fortune rekka loops and bella's standard bnb (i.e. not the kanchou one). If the bella training goes better than expected, I'll work on learning c.MK runstop, since it looks extremely powerful and the bnb has two c.MKs where I can use it.

 

[bobertbojo2]

Day 6: Back from my day-and-a-half-ish hiatus and it seems to have helped more than it had any right to. I'm having way more fun with the game than I have in a while, which may or may not have just been because I played matches against people closer to my skill level. I played a fair number (somewhere around 25) casual matches with a group, where I still usually lost but I still felt like I was actually playing the game rather than just getting setplayed for 30 seconds.
My Bella neutral is by no means great right now, but I at least have some sense of when it is and is not a good time to press what button. I've noticed I use glide as a crutch to get in from about half screen or more, and when I'm that far away I never really actually do anything other than throw my face at my opponent. I'm finally using command grabs more than once per match, but I still feel like I should work on actually learning setups to play to the strengths of the command grabs, rather than just using them in place of a normal character's grab.
In the bnb, I'm currently struggling the most with j.MP delay j.HK. I'm pretty sure the delay varies between characters, because even when I spend time in the training room and then jump on to quick match, I immediately drop it again. Because of this, I've actually tried working c.MK runstop in so I never have to worry about that chain, which actually has been easier than I expected, since my grab macro actually works as a runstop button when I have charge. However, I quickly realized that I don't actually know any followups to the runstop, which often meant I awkwardly waited for the opponent to fall to the ground for me to just c.LK them again.
Immediate plans for now are working on the bnb and learning followups for c.MK runstop (at least how to convert on the ground so I can do left/right mixups for the time being).

 

[bobertbojo2]

I only now realized that I went almost a week without updating this thread. Oops.
I've mostly been playing causal matches, which have gone alright. As bella, I still need to use throws as mixups more often, and my tumbling run use is mostly happening from full screen, where anything other than runstop is easily punishable, so I naturally don't use runstop ever. Still haven't spent enough quality time in training mode to actually learn the full bnb or proper resets, so that's something I need to block at least a few hours fairly soon to work on.
I also feel I should start discussing how I want to improve my fortune play, since that's still pretty far from perfect. I consider my neutral as headless fortune to actually be pretty decent, but I still struggle to deal with zoning as either form of fortune (and often as bella, now that I think of it.) I also don't know enough resets for them to be especially successful.
I've started to use cerecopter assist decently, which I consider a milestone of sorts. I am trying to use cat slide assist on fortune, but I don't tag or DHC very much right now, so I rarely even get the chance to try to use it.

Goals are solidifying bnbs and learning resets, as well as learning to beat zoning.