When's Melty on Steam?
ahaha that's no--wait, what?

Author Topic: What's frame advantage, and how does it give you an upper hand?  (Read 2465 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Alfonse

  • Vigilant Pink
  • Magus
  • *****
  • Posts: 1762
  • Magic Circuits: 22
  • Azu-nyan~!
    • View Profile
I understand what are frames all about, but I got a little lost when I noticed certain moves for each character was, as written, +frames, or said to give frame advantage (C-Akiha 236C, for instance). How do you capitalize on the frame advantage acquired?
Keyboard crusher who couldn't pull off a proper BNB.

Offline ikeTATARI

  • Jr. Spellcaster
  • **
  • Posts: 54
  • Magic Circuits: 2
  • Sometimes, you only need 1 word.
    • View Profile
Re: What's frame advantage, and how does it give you an upper hand?
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2010, 09:45:11 AM »
Frame advantage means that you recover that many frames before your opponent comes out of blockstun (aka before they can do anything).

What that means is that you can use another normal and catch an opponent mashing out, or throw out an anti-air move (for example, Akiha's pillars, though I don't know how many frame startup they have) and catch jumpouts. Some characters can also use plus frames to have save "frametraps" revolving around dashing back in and throwing out a 2A almost right after they leave blockstun, catching attempts to mash. Additionally this means if you're close enough to your opponent and you have +frames you can use them for tick throw setups, especially if you've gotten your opponent to respect your blockstrings. What this also means is that if you're really close to your opponent and you throw out a move that's safe and block, you have time to block if they try to reversal/shield bunker/mash out of your blockstring.

And of course on the other side of this is that if you use a move that has -frames on block you give all of these benefits to your opponent unless you cancel the recovery into something that is +frames on block or whiff a 5A.

Offline Zaelar

  • Magus
  • *****
  • Posts: 1460
  • Magic Circuits: 70
  • 236c
    • View Profile
Re: What's frame advantage, and how does it give you an upper hand?
« Reply #2 on: July 24, 2010, 07:09:16 PM »
It simply means that you can do something before the other person.  In most situations this just means that if you both do an attack you'll win since yours will come out first.  Frame advantage doesn't translate into guaranteed damage, it just gives you an edge in the guessing game.

If you want guaranteed pressure, you need to hit them before their blockstun ends.  You don't get any instant rewards from this since it's guaranteed to be blocked, but you don't give your opponent a chance to get away, which can frustrate them.
If you want a standard counter-hit setup, you need to hit shortly after their blockstun ends, but before their fastest attack can come out.  If you have +4, and their fastest attack has 3 frames of startup, you need to hit them on the fifth or sixth frame after you recover, which means either using a move with four or five frames of startup or waiting a little bit and using a faster one.  It's generally good to use moves that cover common escapes in this situation, such as jump, backdash, and reversals if possible.
If you have a lot of frame advantage you can also use it to safely set something up or for positioning.

While those are basically the only ways to directly take advantage of frame advantage you can also use whatever mixups you have for those situations to indirectly take advantage of it, for example if your opponent knows you have frame advantage and doesn't want to get counter-hit they are probably going to block which means you can grab them.  Anything further than this is character/situation dependent.  It's like if you're playing rock, paper, scissors, frame advantages means you win if you both pick rock.  While this doesn't improve your scissors, it does indirectly help since your opponent doesn't want to play rock as much.