To be honest, playing more Third Strike has made me realize that oki is a lot more about making reads and knowing your opponent's options than guaranteed setups. If you're fighting Ken in that game, his 3 F DP is amazing, it's meterless, and it will mess you up bad if you get hit by it. So let's say you throw Ken and are scared of his 3 frame DP. You could always just wait and block/parry the DP and punish it, but in doing so you're potentially giving up WAY more damage you'd get off of meaty cr.LK or cr.MK into super by being scared. So WHAT do you do off a knockdown? Do you keep going for meaties? Do you bait the DP and try to parry/block it? Do you throw? The answer is there isn't a guaranteed answer, it is all about testing your opponent and making reads! Yay!
This may be common sense to a lot of you, but I was having an existential crisis about oki recently that I was able to get over by just thinking about how to use hard knockdowns in this game after spending more time with other fighting games. I was telling myself before that "there's no reason to go for anything besides safejumps!" There's always risk trying to do a meaty c.LK or overhead setup on a rising opponent in Skullgirls, because it is a game where reversals are good and in certain situations you can even make them safe with full DHCs.
It didn't help that before Skullgirls I played SF4, which basically teaches you all the wrong lessons about oki in fighting games. This is probably why I went in thinking you should never ever go for oki ever unless it's a safe jump or unblockable.
You really need to evaluate risk/reward and your opponent options your opponent has before going for a mixup on knockdown. Hard knockdowns are good, and Skullgirls' oki works pretty much the same way every other game's oki does: safe jumps are guaranteed, oki setups that are lows/highs/meaties what have you are not if your opponent can reversal them, but they potentially give you a much better reward if you DO land them. So if you get a hard knockdown (and if you're a Big Band player, you will get a hard knockdown in neutral) you really need to be super aware of what your opponent can do. If it's a solo character that has no meter (and all their good reversals are metered ones) go ham! What's the worse they can do? On the flip side if they're sitting on enough bar to just reversal you in the face and DHC into Double you're just going to have to hold that shit. HOWEVER in this situation you might be able to find something to bait the reversal out and hit them out of it before they can DHC. On the super duper flip side, if you're Big Band and your opponent is Eliza with 3 or more bars....you can't safe jump anymore or really go for any type of oki without assuming HUGE risk. You just gotta bait. And as
@mcpeanuts said, don't even bother safe jumping Bella, it's not worth it.
There's definitely a hierarchy of how good the "oki/setplay/whatever" is in Skullgirls, air resets generally are gonna give you your best options and are better and safer than techchasing and hard knockdown oki in almost all cases. However you aren't always in a situation where you have the opponent in a combo and can reset them whenever you want. You're going to get hard knockdowns sometimes, and you're going to land throws in neutral sometimes that you can't get full combos off of, it's good to have setups you can do off those.
To bring this all around and try to make my thought process clearer, Fortune has some good setups off of nom that probably cross into the realm off oki. She has an anti-reversal setup that can beat every option Bella has. This same setup will beat everything except Daisy Pusher against Squiggly, HOWEVER you can easily do another setup off nom that will beat everything Squiggly has. So I started messing around with nom setups to see what they would and wouldn't beat on different characters. Then I got around to thinking "I really should just do this with Big Band's hard knockdowns too".
I think this is the way I need to start approaching oki in this game. Just have setups for different situations against characters that are either in or against your favor. Once you have those setups, evaluate the risk/reward of using them based on your opponent's options and habits. Sometimes, all you can do is sit there and block to prevent risking dying, but that's not always going to be the case. Some categories of situations you would encounter (that are either IN or AGAINST your favor) would include:
IN your favor:
-Opponent does not have good reversals
-You've conditioned opponent not to mash on wakeup
-Opponent CAN reversal, but the reversal gives them nothing substantial if it hits (Double with no meter, etc)
-You have enough team life to potentially eat a reversal
-Your opponent's character cannot deal well with a particular type of setup off knockdown (low, rising jumping attack, command grab, throw). Peacock is a good example of this, throw will beat most of the things she wants to do after being knocked down
-Your opponent can't DHC if the reversal is blocked
-You have a specific setup to deal with that character's options
Against your favor:
-Opponent has strong, metered reversal that will beat your oki and they get a full combo off of
-Opponent has a metered reversal that cannot be safejumped
-Opponent has enough meter to reversal, super, safe DHC
-Opponent can reversal and call their assist at the same time to be safe
-Opponent is playing Cerebella and all your setups go out the window
You should have a way of dealing with every situation with both your team and your solo characters for oki. You're not always going to be able to an assist on knockdown, because sometimes your other character will be dead. "100% safe play" isn't always going to exist, so sometimes you're just going to have to consider your options versus the opponents options on knockdown which is how pretty much all fighting games work. You're at an advantage after knockdown, because you just did damage and now are in a situation that is 100% in your favor which is doing nothing and blocking. It's a safe option with potentially a lot of reward. You can attempt to take risks beyond that point for significantly greater reward, but you have to weigh your potential gain against the risk involved. Finally, sometimes you're in situations where if you get hit it is not the end of the world. If you're sitting on a full team with full life, you should probably not be THAT scared off Super Sonic Jazz. If Big Band hits you with it, so what? He can't get a full combo off it, he just got out of the corner, and you still are in a good situation. He now also no longer has the meter he needs to reversal again, so you're next oki setup will be that much stronger because you're not scared of reversal SSJ.
It is also probably good to have setups to deal with specific things. When I played
@Skarmand , he was doing reversal Napalm Pillar and calling Hornet Bomber at the same time off any hard knockdown I got with Big Band. I was safejumping it and blocked, but he got out for free every time. After the match, Skarmand pointed out that if I backedashed and did HK Giant Step, I would get BOTH characters and potentially even get a double snap! If I didn't get a double snap, I would at least hit both of them and could immediately go for a reset without worrying about assists. I think people need to figure out more stuff like this. Getting a hard knockdown against Bella with Big Band doesn't really put him in a situation where he can go for a safejump, but maybe there's another setup he could attempt to go for that would potentially get him something useful on hit and be relatively low risk on block/whiff. Once again, what Big Band could and should go for here depends on the opponents team composition and how much meter they have. I had never even thought of this. The only thing I had in my brain was "I just have to block and hold this" but realistically, I had another option with a HUGE amount of reward if it worked! There are probably dozens of other situations in the game that I think are helpless but I actually have options beyond just "wait and block".
Honestly I see hard knockdowns and techchasing no differently than reset points in combo routes. Every good player has that "super good reset point" that lets them go high, low, crossup, throw or wait and bait a reversal. Most players, when they get a hit, go for a reset that the opponent could reversal through if they know it's coming, so just like oki, in theory should you just always bait reversals after your reset point? Of course not!
While it may be true that it is easier to reset out of a hard knockdown than it is to escape an ambiguous reset, you're going to get hard knockdowns in neutral, and when you get hard knockdowns you DO have the same options you would have in a combo route. If you simply just safejump/bait off reversals every time out of the utmost respect for your opponent, then you're going to win a lot slower than you would otherwise, and possibly lose. The same applies for hard knockdown. It is all about knowing your opponent's options and what they will/won't get hit by.
Finally, I believe a good part of oki in this game is to condition your opponent NOT to mash first, or go for an initial test on knockdown to see if your opponent DOES mash. The former is a better idea than the latter, because this is a versus game and one hit could potentially be way worse than SF where you take a DP and are just out a bit of life. If you go for safe jumps/anti mash setups and they WORK, you get a counterhit combo and have now conditioned your opponent not to mash. Once this has happened, you could start going for proper oki because your opponent will be scared to reversal. The other option is to simply go for oki out the gate. Again, this is the riskier of the two options. But if they do mash, you get hit and you know to bait a reversal next time, which you will block and punish.
Hopefully I did a decent job gathering my thoughts on this topic. This is something I wanted to post in my training dairy for awhile, but we were talking about oki in here so eh. There was also a really inspirational movie quote (read: from a dumb action movie) that perfectly summarizes oki in fighting games, but I forget what it is. It was something along the lines of "sometimes you just gotta take risks" so keep that in mind I guess and pretend Keanu Reeves said it or something.
