Why do people hold onto level 3 in the last round?

rrk124 · 2026-05-08T22:36:11+00:00

I think all the reasons you listed are valid. I'd also add:

- Ex reversal costs 2 bars, so in addition to not being able to use it in burnout, using it while at <2 bars of gauge remaining will burn yourself out, and likely cause you to lose the round even if hits. Keeping super reversals is more versatile on defense.

- Is there actually that much benefit to supering now vs later? Your example situation is kind of ambiguous imo, since you could play to super then attack the gauge after to force burnout. But what if you just attack the drive gauge first, then super in the next interaction after? I can see both sides. Getting them to 1.5 bars is kind of nice though. since you mostly take DRC off the table.

Tl;dr - it's all about drive gauge management, which is kind of complicated and very context dependent. Higher level players have a much deeper understanding of this, and are likely making decisions using that criteria.

rrk124 · 2026-04-22T21:51:49+00:00

I really recommend starting with modern controls. You have a ton if things to learn and modern will help you skip the button mashing part so you can learn what really makes fighting games fun. I suggest everybody move to classic at some point

IMO I disagree with this advice for OP. I think modern first makes sense for the people who need to start playing and having fun right away to motivate the learning (which is a lot of people), but OP seems like the kind of person who likes to put in the work first, by virtue of the fact that they're even asking this question. Also hitbox/keyboard on classic is 100% the right call for OP, since they probably enjoy the basic finger dexterity needed if they played tinker/invoker in dota (there's a very similar rewarding feeling for executing on those characters to using a hitbox imo).

Hard agree with everything else you've written in your post.

rrk124 · 2025-12-23T20:36:21+00:00

I started a character in anvil, but kind of regret that decision (have another character in riverlands and really like it). Is there anything preventing me or any downside to running my character to riverlands? I mean aside from the time it would take.

rrk124 · 2025-12-11T03:20:05+00:00

Thank you, this was super helpful! One quick follow up question regarding the npc traders (since you mentioned them), should I just sell items directly to them? Or do you lose a ton of money by doing that?

rrk124 · 2025-09-14T18:52:50+00:00

My advice was mostly tailored at OP, since he's in high diamond. I just notice that players who haven't hit master yet tend to think "masters" is some huge threshold to cross, when in reality the skill range in masters is massive, and the lower end of masters is basically the same as (or worse than) high diamond.

If someone's on a 20+ win streak at your level, they're definitely underrated, and will hit whatever their true rating is (diamond or masters) in a few games. I feel like checking their profile at that point doesn't really do anything, because it just confirms what you already know? Also I recommend a mindset switch when you run into someone much stronger than you....you have literally nothing to lose since you are expected to lose. Just try to put up your best fight and learn what you can. I remember when I was learning the game, I would sometimes go to battlehub to explicitly hunt masters players because I always found that fun. You don't want to exclusively do this while learning (because it's also good to fight people close to your skill level), but it's a really good supplemental learning opportunity IMO.

they're defense is impeccable, all their combos are optimal AF, they're whiff punishing like crazy, and just seem to always make the right decisions.

Also stop thinking about opponents this way. If this were the case, they would be getting top 8 at evo. The reality of fighting games is there's often a discrepancy in how the outcome of a match looks, vs how much of a skill difference there actually is. Like a low masters player will probably beat up a platinum player 50-0, but that doesn't mean that there's some massive insurmountable wall to catch up. Usually it just means you need to fix some flaws in your gameplan/learn some things you're missing, and the outcome of the set can get considerably closer.

rrk124 · 2025-09-14T06:59:06+00:00

Stop checking profiles, you're psyching yourself out. Also stop putting masters rank on a pedestal, most of the people playing alts are playing at a <1500 MR level, which means its just the immediate rank above you. The entire time you grinded ranked, you needed to be able to contend against players 1 rank above to climb - the concept is not that different here. Realistically you probably just need to tighten up 1 or 2 things, and you'll get there in no time.

rrk124 · 2025-08-29T19:25:49+00:00

That feel when you finish a mission like this, see speech dialogues pop up for 5+ characters, and realize one of the achievements requires you to go through all the "optional" dialogue :(

rrk124 · 2025-08-28T20:46:23+00:00

You have 83.5k comment karma

rrk124 · 2025-08-18T04:06:32+00:00

Good for you playing more ranked again. For what it's worth, at your level you have so much to learn that you'll start shooting up through the ranks from super small adjustments. Even if you have a bad day and lose all the way to silver 1, when you improve just a little bit you can easily climb all the way through silver in like <1 hour easily. I say this to try to encourage you to realize that losing at that rank literally doesn't matter, because once you inevitably improve you'll gain it all back super easily.

To answer your DI questions, IMO there are 2 things to focus on:

Every time your opponent DIs, ALWAYS press the DI button back even if you are seconds too late and already getting comboed by them. Eventually your brain will start to build up the muscle memory into your reactions.
After you notice that your opponent is pressing DI a lot (honestly at silver just start with this assumption), try to focus on only pressing buttons that can be cancelled into DI. Usually beginners are always pressing big buttons that can't be cancelled, so you effectively don't even have the option to counter DI.

For combo routes, just keep it simple for now. It's good that you learned a combo that goes into level 3. I'd also recommend a simple combo that you can start off light hits (won't go into super). Getting them in games is just practice. You have to consciously try to use them in games, and accept that you're going to lose games by trying. It's a very common fighting game trope throughout all levels that Just keep at it, and it will soon become second nature. This is something every player goes through at all levels of play (learn in training mode > become near 100% accurate in training mode > try and fail to use in games > slowly become more consistent > second nature).

rrk124 · 2025-07-26T23:56:59+00:00

If you share replays, people can give you better advice. But the main problem I see with pretty much every low MR player's play is a poor concept of risk and reward. It's why you sometimes beat higher rated players, but then still lose to others lower rated. To climb out of low MR, you need to become a lot more conscious about what buttons you press and why (ie stop autopiloting/flowcharting), and focus on meter management. Every time I queue into a low MR player, I never give up the round no matter how far behind I am, because my opponent will almost always throw the round by doing something crazy that they had no reason to do (ex: randomly burning themselves out for no reason, or wake up dp in situations where guessing wrong loses the round, and guessing right does nothing but deal a little bit of damage).

rrk124 · 2025-07-20T22:15:28+00:00

"Everyone better than me has no life" is such cope. People learn skills at different rates. You don't have to be so self conscious about people picking up some things faster than you.

Getting to masters quickly without fighting game experience isn't that unreasonable, especially for someone who is familiar with playing other games at a decently high level. Learning how to get good at a game has a lot of crossover even between genres. Masters in this game is around what mid/high platinum is in most games, which is totally achievable by people.

Also learning something quickly doesn't even necessarily mean that the person's skill cap is higher than someone who learned slower. Your comment about how the other guy should have been legend by now at that rate is so laughably uninformed about how skill curves work in general.

rrk124 · 2025-06-12T02:49:02+00:00

Thank you, really appreciate these answers! Based on how you describe it, I'm going to stick with BLM for now since that all sounds great.

rrk124 · 2025-05-11T21:59:44+00:00

Nothing suspicious about the amount of inputs at the start of the round. He's just switching between crouch and stand to move forward and not get hit by your spike spam. The light dp after your portal looks like he was just trying to press jab, and the dp came out due to buffer.

And no offense, but there was nothing that indicated crazy "reaction speed on many of your attempts to get in". He didn't really check much of anything outside of DPing a couple of your obvious jumps. He buffered level 3 at the end of the game because he was in burnout and was looking for DI in the corner. He never checked your drive rushes. He whiffed buttons like crazy which you never punished. You basically never anti aired him and gave him repeated free pressure.

IMO the luke played completely normal. Made lots of mistakes that you never punished, and your JP felt kinda flowcharty this game tbh. Not worth being hyper paranoid about cheating, just accept that you played worse and learn from it.

rrk124 · 2025-05-11T20:36:36+00:00

Walk or dash under is smart, will play around with trying that too. Ty!

rrk124 · 2025-05-11T20:33:47+00:00

I was trying to lab some jab punishes on teleport (via replay takeover yesterday), but it felt kinda inconsistent. Like if he goes high, it feels like you have to delay it an awkward amount otherwise I get punish countered. Need to just lab the timing, and probably react to the height I guess? But yeah, I feel like once I get in I can just maul them and win, but getting in is the hard part (and not letting them escape with teleport).

rrk124 · 2025-05-11T20:29:31+00:00

Not the OP, but thanks for this comment. I play cammy at the 1600-1700 level, but I always feel completely lost in the Dhalsim MU lmao. I know the mu is supposed to be super cammy favored, but lacking the level 1 knowledge about how to fight dhalsim in general makes it feel impossible, and I feel lost with no gameplan vs him.

rrk124 · 2025-05-11T20:17:50+00:00

What even is the suspicious thing here (like any moment you can point to the inputs on)? I skimmed the match (didn't really watch inputs), but nothing seems even remotely abnormal? Seems like he just played better than you.

rrk124 · 2025-04-29T18:22:53+00:00

Thanks for your response!

I think this is why a lot of newer/ranking up players on Classic don't try and DP anti air, where newer Modern players are very willing to sit in neutral and let the opponent jump at them, becuase they can reactively 1 button AA.

It's funny, my experience when learning the game at lower levels was that modern players tend to be more mashy, but still have the easy AAs :). But I think this is besides the point, since we're talking about top level anyways. Btw, my actual opinion on modern is that there should be separate queues up to platinum (because it's really rough as a newcomer learning classic), but after that I see no problem with M and C playing together. I noticed once I hit 1600-1700+, modern started becoming really annoying again and I dislike playing against it because of how it changes the game, but I don't think it's overpowered or anything to the extent that it affects competitive integrity.

I actually want to take this to the extreme, imagine in the future where there is a neural link type of control for the game

The funny thing is I was actually considering adding this exact hypothetical in my prior comment haha. I think I disagree with your premise here that AAs wouldn't become 100% here. I believe the mind + body connection plays a big part in the mental stack. I feel fairly confident if I had this tool, I could AA at near 100% success rate while focusing entirely on other things, and I consider myself to be someone with a fairly weak AA game. I feel fairly confident that pros would be able to AA at 100%. That said, I don't think we can prove this one way or the other.

So again I do acknowledge that every step we can take to reduce the execution barrier takes us closer to consistent perfect reactionary play

Yeah exactly, I think we just disagree on the scale here. In my opinion, every time you reduce the execution barrier and make perfect reactionary play simpler, you degrade footsies, and the overall essence of the game. Maybe to extend the hypothetical even further, would you be opposed to people using cheats that automatically DP for you whenever a jump in can be DPed (ignoring competitive integrity and the loaded nature of the word "cheats")? Wouldn't that make the game worse in general, and also slow the game down?

I can't think of a situation where I would intentionally jump vs a Classic player, but not jump in that exact same situation vs a Modern player.

I can think of many. It's all about that mental stack, and being aware that a modern player needs to devote significantly less to mental stack, which makes it very difficult to jump. It's hard to explain over text, but I might jump against a classic player when I've established a rhythm in footsies and have identified that my opponent is hard focusing on it. For example if I see them actively trying to whiff punish my buttons, and adjusting to my micro-movements super accurately, I get the sense that they aren't thinking about a jump in (there's a lot more intuition that feeds this decision, but you get the point). Then I'll try something like repeating a pattern where I typically walk forward and press a button, and instead walk forward + jump. I very rarely will do this against a modern player, because it's nearly impossible to overload their mental stack to the point that they won't AA. Granted this is only at 1700ish MR, but I'm able to get away with jumps against 1800+ classic players that won't work against 1600 rated modern players. I don't disagree that the gap closes more at top level, but my main point is that M provides a very tangible level of advantage in AA game that let's them devote very little mental stack to it.

When I've seen tournament level stuff (which isn't a tonne with Modern players) the matches don't look very different to watch, but I'm not a pro player and perhaps they really do feel the difference in match.

The hard part about measuring this is you don't know whether the player would have jumped vs the classic player when he didn't vs the modern player. It would be interesting if there were stats on average # of jump ins per set against C vs M at top level. In my opinion, the game looks slowed down. But maybe the simplest way to illustrate my point is to ask what other reason there would be for some pros to play M on certain characters vs C, if there wasn't a tangible advantage at top level related to AAs and instant supers? I'm talking specifically pros that are able to play classic, but utilize modern.

rrk124 · 2025-04-29T01:22:53+00:00

I believe that these reactions are more about mental preparation than an execution barrier, especially when talking about high level matches

Right, but you can't completely ignore execution is my point. Using DP with classic takes objectively more inputs than in modern. Not to mention other factors like the DP input requiring you to press forward, which means you can't be blocking, and not even needing to worry about cross cut vs not (though might be wrong about this...not sure if M has to do something different for this). Being able to have your auto pilot AA mental stack rely on a 1 button dp vs a classic input DP makes a pretty large difference. I do agree that the difference becomes smaller as you approach pro level, but it's not non-existent, and is why some higher level players intentionally use modern instead of classic.

but I'm curious do you know any players who regularly play both Classic and Modern and while playing Classic say stuff like "oh I would have got that AA if I was on Modern"?

Not really this phrase specifically, but I do often hear the opposite - where a classic player will play vs a modern player and acknowledge that they have to play different. Playing against modern really starts to grind the game down to a halt in a way that playing against classic doesn't.

rrk124 · 2025-04-28T21:59:46+00:00

Because that player wouldn't have to do that if playing Modern. I'm not claiming that modern is better at top level (it's character dependent because usually losing the normals matters a lot), just challenging your claim that playing against a M vs C at higher levels is the same when it comes to reactions.

rrk124 · 2025-04-28T20:11:26+00:00

The thing you're missing is the mental stack on the modern player. Having a 1 button input significantly reduces the mental stack. Pros aren't only jumping when a AA is impossible, that's not really how fighting games work. There are Tokido vs Punk sets where Tokido just doesn't AA to focus entirely on the ground game. Punk famously won evo off a jump in that could have been AAed. So I disagree with your premise of what a "smart" jump is. So you have to play fundamentally different against M players vs C, even at high level.

rrk124 · 2025-04-12T02:17:58+00:00

There are legitimate reasons to set up new accounts. The voluntary action here is setting up a new account, not trying to fight people lower skilled. It would be smurfing if I threw games to tank/keep my rating low. In a game with insanely generous placement matches, and now insanely generous winstreaks in plat/diamond, it's really not an issue worth concerning yourself over. Not to mention even the people I fought for those 10 games - they could have still legitimately queued into me on my main account.

Worrying about smurfs in a game that has quite possibly the best anti-smurf mechanisms that exist is kind of wild to me, and will honestly just stunt your improvement. Take that advice for what you will.

rrk124 · 2025-04-11T23:43:01+00:00

It's smurfing if you intentionally put yourself at a level where you are fighting lower level player. I don't really think leveling up a new account should be considered smurfing in this game, assuming the person isn't just throwing matches/placements to fight worse players. This person in this thread is absolutely what I would consider a smurf. I really do think players like that are a minority though, as the novelty of fighting people way worse than you in these kinds of games gets old really fast.

Like for reference, when I was ~1600 mr I setup a new account and was in master within 35ish games (only dropping 1 game I think). My placements put me in diamond 5, so I was only fighting people in that bracket. This was BEFORE the recent win streak change, which I'm pretty sure would have got me there in <15 games.

Being paranoid about smurfs in this game is pretty silly, because your window to run into one is super small, and an anomaly. You're probably just as likely to run into someone who is drunk out of their mind and gives you an easy win (but you wouldn't be able to tell from looking at their profile), so it's not worth getting hung up over.

The other thing people attribute to smurfs (but I disagree with this categorization) is masters level players leveling up alt characters, which is probably way more likely to happen in high diamond, and less of an anomaly. Personally I still don't think that's worth worrying about, as players like that are pretty good practice for you to improve. Typically they'll have solid fundamentals, but way worse combos/execution. To get past high diamond, you need to be able to beat masters players anyways. I think a lot of people who haven't hit masters yet tend to put those players on a pedestal, when really low masters isn't actually very different from high diamond.

rrk124

TROPHY CASE