Edit: Goddamit! Why does this thing always make me double-post??
Landing a Gief focus outside of a dizzy???
Anyway, check training mode. U1 without the focus actually does slightly more damage. Not sure by how much. Scaling.
It happens, more so after I learned to bait with it or you just punished any whiffed attack with a Focus.
Yeah, actually his ultra/super end up at about the same damage if you focus into it. The reason I like Focus is because I don’t like them jumping out of my range, in which case I do zero damage. This is obviously low tier play, but I need to start somewhere and I’ll use what works.
Using U2 on reaction to a jump-in seems quite a pain to get consistently. It’s primarily about threatening their escape with it, making them nervous to wall-dive out or whatever. With blizzard you have to be suitably fearless. Jump right into their face and become a big swirling hit-box of doom. It’s hard to land blizzard if they’re running away, but you shouldn’t be thinking about blizzard at that point. Keep up your standard gief game. There are 3 main places where I look for blizzard:
- Once I have them cornered.
- Aerial attempts at wake-up pressure (e.g. cross-ups, Akuma vortex, fuerte mixups)
- Threaten DP style reversals to allow me to pressure more with cross-ups, etc on knock-down.
There are other situations where Blizzard can be landed but they are more dependent on habits you observe in the other players (e.g. akuma fireballing at full-screen will sometimes try a demon flip to punish your lariats and things)
Don’t obsess over landing blizzard every round. It’s really good even if it’s only once in a fight if you can land it at the right time to prove you can threaten them with it. Then after that they’re a lot more reluctant to escape the corner which makes it hugely more dangerous for them since they can’t effortlessly wall-jump out for free anymore. At this point can play a standard pressure game on them where smart players really don’t want to jump, since all versions and wall-dives leave them open for blizzard which is a corner situation is generally easy to land.