I hope no one minds me posting like crazy around here. With the amount of hours I’ve been putting into TvC, there’s a lot to talk about. I definitely think this journal improves my game a bit as it “irons out” my thoughts into concise, actionable ideas. For instance, yesterday I was talking about how removing a hit from my experimental Saki combo was well worth the sacrifice as it increased the range of the combo a bit. That got me thinking, there’s got to be a sacrifice I could make in Ippatsuman’s combo so that it wouldn’t be so damn hard.

It took a bit of playing around, but I am happy to say I came up with the appropriate sacrifice! To recap, his combo I’ve been trying is:

[Standard Combo]->Launch->Jump(AA,BB)->Jump(B)->DP->(wait)->Hyper Grab

All I’ve done is removed the double-jump(B) right before the Dragon Punch near the end. This small change has made it so much easier (I would have to estimate at least 10x easier in fact – as in, I can execute it 10 times more often). In exchange for this ease of execution the only drawbacks are:
-The damage is slightly less. Slightly being the key word here. Even though it’s at double-jump height, it’s also only one medium-strength hit near the end of a combo. Very negligible.
-The timing of the hyper grab at the end is very weird now. But not weird enough to make it tremendously difficult.

All in all (these are my extremely loose estimates), my combo is now about 50% more damaging than it was before and about 10x easier to execute than the “ideal”. I haven’t played with it enough to be sure yet, but I think my success rate is a bit over 50% with it (failed attempts are just less damaging, not punishable). By contrast, if I were to execute my ideal combo, it would probably be about 53% more damaging as opposed to 50%… Great sacrifice.

In retrospect, it almost seems foolish that I spent so much time chasing such minor additional gains. But I can’t blame myself. I wanted to maximize my efficiency and I put forth a lot of effort trying to achieve it. Only after a true effort did I come back and make the decision that a slightly less efficient combo was well worth the sacrifice. I’m quite pleased. Of course, this will all disappear in a few days when my fightstick arrives :) Actually though, I’m very glad to have this issue under wraps before it comes.

P.S. It has occurred to me that in my last post I misused the term “mixup”. What I meant to express was just a highly different attack plan.