What is more Important. Offence or Defence.

It depends one your character when defense weaknes will start to losses, but true me you start playing the right people, you'll learn defense is important regardless.

 

I have recently been playing the keep out game, and it works. bait game works wonders.

 

Depends on how you define both terms as far as style goes. In any case, its an oxymoron to just go with one or the other, intelligent offense can serve as a great defense while intelligent defense serves as a great offense. I believe doing them both at the same time is key. I wouldn't quite call it a "balance" either, when there both going at the same time its something entirely different...

 

Balance between offense and defense is a personal playstyle thing. VF can be played in many ways, and doesnt require to play either heavy aggressive or defensive (compared to like VF4 in which heavy abare was imo better than it is now)

 

No but you can get thrown.

 

Uhm defence =/= blocking. Defence includes defence against throws.

 

it also includes punishing

 

Punishing is in the gray area. It's "offensive" but it's created by good defense. Punishing is a little of both coming together.

 

I peronsaly put punishment in the defense category in my mind just because it requires knowing that after a given attack your opponent is going to get hit if they don't start changing it up. I.E. (something I learned a week or so ago) Your opponent keeps ETEGing after all their moves from -7 to -9 thinking that it'll beat out a lot of options. Someone with strong defense sees this an uses FC's or delayed attacks to beat it out.

Defense to me is knowing to correct response to your opponents tactic. Offense to me is knowing how to keep your flow going once you've gotten some sort of advantage already. Hence offense really can't start if you don't have defense.

 

let's not get into semantics

 

yeah, semantics is another word for flamebait

 

Dealing with ETEG and defensive tactics requires offensive skills. Knowing what attacks to use to beat fuzzy guard and ETEG is an offensive skill. Defense will not help you in this situation. You're going to do an attack so it's offense, it's that simple.

A good offense requires the correct response to your opponents defensive tactics. In addition to having a flow (flow-chart) like you mentioned. Offense could be used to determine how your opponent defends, and vice versa.

VF (probably other fighting games too; i never played other fighters) is a constant exchange of defensive and offensive choices. To be a great player you really need to excel in both.

This exchange begins in the beginning of the round. You can start out defensively or offensively. How your opponent react to your choice could give you the route to victory. Conversely, your choices in the beginning will give your opponent hints on what you're capable of.

 

I think VF5 puts more emphasis on defense than any other fighting game I've played. Defending is entire skill in and of itself. Never played a fighting game where good defense can shut your offense down that badly. I like that concept a lot, much more realistic to actual fighting than games that overly reward pure offensive. The defense in VF5 is just another important skill to practice and perfect on your journey to mastery... /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

 

i agree well said plague

 

Slightly related: I find myself saddened about distinct lack of defensive techniques in online. I mean, Im not sure how many of the new players are aware of the existence of 'advanced' defensive techniques like Fuzzy or ETEG. Most people, even those above beginner level usually just opt to attack from disadvantage with low punch or something similar rather than try something more complex. (Fuzzy isnt even complex but you gotta know its there)

I think lot of this stems from the fact that these techniques are NOT explained or even mentioned in the training mode, like they were in VF4. I think this is major bad move from Sega and I hope they will return to VF4-style training mode in VF5R... All we can do is hope.

And hope that this was not intentional attempt to 'dumb down' the game.

 

^True Maji,

You've got to go way out of your way to:

1.) Figure out that Fuzzy and ETEG exist...
2.) Figure out what they mean...
3.) Go practice.
4.) Learn about frames cause it's not working...
5.) Learn when to do it...
6.) Practice more.
7.) Do it in a fight.

There's many, many barriers to learning these techniques. I don't even think they are too well explained in the strategy guide, which is probably the first line of info for most players.

Plus, I think most player's, when they see it done to them, just don't realize what's going on. They might think you are getting lucky or don't see you ducking quickly and standing back up so they just think, "why can't I hit this dude?" But they never put two and two together to learn the technique.

 

defense is overall harder to impliment than offense. When learning the game it's a lot easier to just throw another punch to stuff a throw than it is to guess the correct direction and use ETEG's.

 

VF used to be a much more defense orientated game then it is now. Why? Cause every situation attacking led to nitaku and a do or die situation. You could wait and counter more. Also, evading led to gtd launchers from most situations. VF5 is much more attack orientated then earlier VF's imo with the advantage given to the attacker. There's a huge number of crazy setups you simply have to learn by heart or you'll be slaughtered. Much more variation can be applied in attack patterns then before. Also there's 0 frame throws etc (and offensive throwing is also "protected" now due to clash). Learning to fuzzy is much easier then learning to ETE also which used to be the overall response.

That being said; being strong in VF has always been defined around how strong you are defensively. VF has a huge number of tools for defense that most games are lacking. It's core was built around it. Defense is also here where most of the hardest things to do in VF comes into place just as Tricky says above. VF hasn't got much input skill in offence (try playing tekken and doing Kazuya df2 ch > ewgf launch in comparison or GG combos). Offense is more about understanding situations and applying maximum damage / punishment all the time (which most people think they do but don't) - with VF's growing movelist this certainly isn't an easy thing to do, but you can learn and adapt over time. Many people will go through VF without ever implementing ETE properly in their game ever. If you can do stuff like ETE of 2p hits, fuzzy on P on your guard, fuzzy attack, boxstep, delay rising, throwescape etc you simply are strong in VF and will get awed - not many are praised for their attacking prowess. The old generation of VF players hate the new attackbased one cause of this, thinking they're hiding their "flaws" by overcompensating in attack and feel that the game has betrayed them and all their dojo training - the truth is that they simply have not / refuse to adapt to a new game.

 

I've always liked the option of being able to use all the defensive tools at my disposal but I don't like being forced to do that. I like that there is also the option to beat your opponent down if you can read them well enough.