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Don't Tech: Surviving as a Solo in the New Patch

Red Witch

Red Witch

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Filia Fukua
The recent changes to prevent undizzy abuse in the latest edition of Skullgirls brought with it some interesting consequences. Namely, as a solo player, if your undizzy bar is full you should... do nothing! That's right! if that green glowing bar is spazzing out and flashing with a warning that tells you to burst, don't burst, don't tech, don't press a damn thing. let your character hit the ground and get up on their own time.

"But Red Witch!" you say, astonished, "You should tech for positioning to get out of the corner"! And you're right! But!!! Never underrate just HOW MUCH SCALING there is when your undizzy bar is completely full. If you tech, you lose half of the bar, and if you get caught, you take full damage. And that hurts! And if you get reset again, you're riding the pain train to gain disdain and feign shame as your health just drops to nothing. That sucks. If you add no teching to your wake-up options, you can still reversal, but if you get caught, you're ok! You take a minimal amount of damage, and any resets from this point on won't really blow up your health bar. If you do this enough, the opponent will have to respect your undizzy bar and either wait for it to drop a bit, or try something tricky for really low payout, and in both situations, you have a chance to make a low risk, high reward momentum shift!


In this clip, look how much work Eliza has to do! But the damage just ISN'T THERE!!! And so Eliza gets used to the possibility that there is little to gain from the risk, this happens:


It gave Filia an opportunity because of the respect Eliza had to show to the undizzy meter; going ham for the mix-up would have paid dirt!


To all you solo players out there, use the new undizzy mechanics to the max and consider just not teching/bursting when you hit the ground. For the rest of you non-solo players, you're gonna have to reset early. You HAVE to. The undizzy scaling will impact you if you go for full combos! And make sure to watch that bar!
 
Who in god's name are you playing such that they pull a full combo on you at that high of life? That was best case scenario before, and now it is doubly so.
 
Don't be rude. It was just as an example. There were several other combos in that set that were not full. And that is this players secondary team.
 
Anything that lets solo's be seen as more than training wheels works for me.
 
GHNeko said:
Anything that lets solo's be seen as more than training wheels works for me.
solos were never training wheels.
 
Receita Federal said:
solos were never training wheels.

I agree, but you still can find that sentiment within and outside of the community from time to time.
 
Receita Federal said:
solos were never training wheels.

I agree. They have such a strong showing in all SG majors...

Red Witch said:
Don't be rude. It was just as an example. There were several other combos in that set that were not full. And that is this players secondary team.

I wasn't being rude so much as I was indirectly evaluating your video. I agree with your assessment that stacking full undizzy on a solo is now even a worse idea, but if anything that just makes it more clear to people that they need to stop doing max damage on solos and change up their gameplay. This was always the case before (as a solo player I get pretty excited at the amount of meter people pour into me with max damage combos), but now it is explicit. That's not a good reason to keep the changes (as a solo player I am mostly in favor of the changes though also mostly indifferent since it doesn't seem to affect most people who are going to beat me anyway), but it is also not a good reason to do away with them.

If this is just a PSA, I'll second... don't max damage solo characters unless it will get you close to killing. Now you do stupidly low damage, and you also feed the solo a ton of meter... meter they *need* for various and sundry things that are often already covered by an assist on a team.

Editing to add that I wasn't actually asking "who you are playing". I know who midiman is. He's a great player. This wasn't meant to be insulting toward him at all.
 
Spencer said:
I agree. They have such a strong showing in all SG majors...
does that mean they are training wheels? i've seen fenster get top 8 in tournaments with solo para. sonicfox also won one with solo fukua. i'm sure there are more
 
Receita Federal said:
does that mean they are training wheels? i've seen fenster get top 8 in tournaments with solo para. sonicfox also won one with solo fukua. i'm sure there are more

Yeah it means for the most part that they aren't viable at high levels. The gap is close enough to play them (and with this change maybe it is even closer), and even occasionally win.

But let's face it, the people with the greatest incentive to continue doing well in this game consistently avoid playing solo.

While I don't doubt that Fenster got top 8 and Sonic at one point apparently beat Sage with solo Fukua (both videos I would love to see), those are tiny data points in the sea of top 8s that didn't have a single solo in them. Solos are massively underrepresented in competitive play and for good reason.

I've reconciled with it and jumped off the "buff solo" train, but I don't know why we have to constantly scramble around to pretend they are something that they are not. It is possible to get quite far in this game as a solo, no argument there. But if you are taking the game seriously and hoping to take on the Sage, the Foxes, or Elda... pick up a team.

But hey, it is early in the season. Maybe we'll see a top 8 solo player in NEC, EVO, or CB... but I do have some pretty serious doubts (and I am sure you do too).
 
Spencer said:
Yeah it means for the most part that they aren't viable at high levels. The gap is close enough to play them (and with this change maybe it is even closer), and even occasionally win.

But let's face it, the people with the greatest incentive to continue doing well in this game consistently avoid playing solo.

While I don't doubt that Fenster got top 8 and Sonic at one point apparently beat Sage with solo Fukua (both videos I would love to see), those are tiny data points in the sea of top 8s that didn't have a single solo in them. Solos are massively underrepresented in competitive play and for good reason.

I've reconciled with it and jumped off the "buff solo" train, but I don't know why we have to constantly scramble around to pretend they are something that they are not. It is possible to get quite far in this game as a solo, no argument there. But if you are taking the game seriously and hoping to take on the Sage, the Foxes, or Elda... pick up a team.

But hey, it is early in the season. Maybe we'll see a top 8 solo player in NEC, EVO, or CB... but I do have some pretty serious doubts (and I am sure you do too).
You do know that SonciFox has been running Solo Fukua for a while now, right? He might have added more to his team lately, but that solo does a fuck ton of work.
 
Running for a while but you don't really see it in tourney, if at all. Which means its not common/frequent enough to convince people of something other than how they feel about Solos.

Which is why I said what I said.
 
Red Witch said:
You do know that SonciFox has been running Solo Fukua for a while now, right? He might have added more to his team lately, but that solo does a fuck ton of work.

And when arguably the best FG'er in the genre starts opting to go solo in top 8s vs the Eldas and the Sages ofo the world, you'll be able to rub my nose in it.
 
And thus the stigma continues.
 
Yes, SonicFox beat Sage with a solo in 2016 CEO. That was 8 months ago. One instance is hardly the smoking gun you think it is. And though I don't doubt that there are others, they make up a fraction.

Meanwhile, there is 4 years of tournaments the vast majority of which don't have a top 8 solo. Further, top 8 solos actually got more rare as the game developed which says to me that as the game became more understood, solos fell behind. The glory days of the Zids, the Skykings, and the Muffins are past by about 3 years.

That said, you don't have to respond. All you have to do is wait. Will there be a competitive solo at CB? I think you and I both know that the answer is "highly unlikely". But if there is, make sure to tag me in an "I told you so" post.

Also, does anyone have video of the CEO side tourney? Because I've looked for a few months now, and whatever google bubble I'm in has me turning up naught.
 
Spencer said:
Also, does anyone have video of the CEO side tourney?

i dont recall it being streamed so there probably isn't video anywhere unfortunately

there is decent amounts of footage of sonic playing solo fukua vs sage when her shadow etc. changes were still in the beta, i dont know of any with the final version of fukua though.

(ironically i dont think the topic of solos has much to do with teching vs not teching anyway; regardless of ratio, teching is riskier now that it lets your opponent do damage again)
 
Spencer said:
Also, does anyone have video of the CEO side tourney? Because I've looked for a few months now, and whatever google bubble I'm in has me turning up naught.
Nope, unfortunately not:
https://twitter.com/x/status/805937666332229633
And I think solos are viable but I've spent so long arguing against variations of "if my team isn't garbage, why don't the best SG players happen to use it?" or "if my team is so good, why do I lose?" that I just don't see the point any more. My Peacock is 100x better than my Bella but that doesn't mean Bella is a worse character. And if my Peacock loses to Taluda's Painwheel or whatever, that doesn't mean Peacock loses to Painwheel.

As for teching vs not teching, I also think it's just a new undizzy thing rather than a solo thing. People have to optimize how they manage undizzy in the new patch, along with the best ways to let it drain without giving their opponent too much space (e.g. end a combo in a launcher, or find slow air resets where your opponent will still get punished for trying to poke out)


edit: actually I'll just paste my response from the last time the solos argument came up, because I didn't put it somewhere public. It probably won't change anyone's mind, but it's worth a try!

Regardless of how strong solos actually are, I think there are a few other factors that make some people think they're weak:
  1. Even if you want to play a solo, you still have to learn how assists work so you can exploit their weaknesses when you play against teams. Lots of solo players have traditionally been very bad at this over the years. It's one of the reasons why I'm not surprised that the two players who do the best in tournaments with solos, Sonicfox and Wing, both have lots of experience using teams. This is pretty much the same reason why some mid-level players think easy-to-use assists like updo or drill are overpowered; they haven't yet learned how to deal with them.
  2. Teams are fun. I'd happily play solo Peacock and try to make it work and maybe even do well with her in a tournament, but locking people down with Peacock+Beam is super fun for me so I play a team. This is basically what fenster said in the beta thread.
  3. You need a lot of confidence to stick with a character/team/solo if you don't see other people making the same thing work. You see people underestimate their own characters all the time in fighting games, e.g. zidiane thinking that Cerebella sucked in the previous retail SG patch when she was probably a top 4 character, or lots of people arbitrarily deciding that Filia was weak in late 2015 until Sonicfox proved that she was one of the stronger characters in the game, so if someone genuinely believes that their solo is weak and there's no one else proving them wrong by winning tournaments with that character, they're going to give up and switch. On the other hand, if someone plays Valentine/Filia/Double and starts to wonder if their losses are due to their team being too weak, they just have to look at Cloudking and Duckator for reassurance that it can do well in tournament.
 
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@Mr Peck

Thanks for updating. That's a bummer.

I actually agree that they are "viable", but it depends on what "viable' means. Can they win? Absolutely. They might even make a solid though rare counter pick. You have to play against solos differently, and that can almost certainly take people by surprise who are only used to playing teams. Anecdotally, I can actually fraud a few early rounds against some pretty solid players until they adjust their game (well... I used to anyway. I'm rusty). But in that sense solos are more like a low tier specialist that occasionally pops into top 8. Just because Infiltration counterpicked PR Rog with Hakkan doesn't make Hakkan viable. It makes him niche... occasionally viable.

The problem with your comparison about your Peacock losing to Taluda, etc. is that if a character were in the same position that solos currently are, it would actually be a concern. If there were almost 0 Peacocks in top 8s (I read Zid's bit about CEOtaku and it mentioned how surprising it was that a solo made 9th place, so can I assume that solos don't typically even take top 16?) over the last 4 years, there would be some concern, no? Right now (and over the last 3 years) the game has pretty solid representation in top 8s between all characters and all team types *except* solo.

In any case, I am going to probably end the conversation here. Like you said, I don't think minds are going to be changed, and this thread has been derailed by me for long enough. But I will add that I am not an advocate for solo buffs (even though that ship sailed long ago). As someone pointed out to me, how can we expect them to be on equal footing when they effectively give up half of the game's mechanics (DHC, assists, BAC, faster meter gain). Basically just buffs to their health/damage which is undesirable or new mechanics which is unrealistic. I am just tired of the "solos are totally fine" argument when they are clearly and demonstrably under-performing and have been since just after the glory days of Zid and Muffin and Skyking_J (so 2013?).
 
Spencer said:
As someone pointed out to me, how can we expect them to be on equal footing when they effectively give up half of the game's mechanics

They have their own unique mechanic in the form of life regen so that precedent has long since sailed.

That aside, just like how duo's lose options vs trio, you'd expect solo's to be compensated more than duos. Which they are, but whether that's enough or not is not worth debating now.
 
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