Stagger, Guard Crush, and You
S3 has added some new staggers and guard crushes that are going to be happening in places where they might not have been possible before. So you might not know everything there is to know about them. Here's a PSA for you.
STAGGER
Stagger differs from ordinary hitstun in that it is throwable, and its duration is variable. When you are put into a stagger state, a bar appears above your fighter and drains, and once it drains it's possible to press a button to recover. Your objective is to press a button the moment the bar fully empties, allowing you to recover as early as possible. If your timing is perfect, the button icon on the bar flashes gold; red indicates less than perfect but still relatively fast; blue is slow; grey means the stagger timed out entirely before you even pressed a button, so you were stuck in the stagger state for the maximum amount of time. There is no penalty for early or multiple presses, so you can mash buttons as the meter approaches empty to maximize your odds of getting the perfect timing.
Now, in previous games, it was a little different. You had to mash buttons and/or wiggle the stick to empty the bar, and once emptied you would recover instantly. Attacks that hit you if you failed to recover in time to block but could have recovered in time if you had mashed better would cause the combo counter to turn blue (a "blue beat"), indicating that escape was possible. I bring this up because blue beats from staggers don't work that way in Strive.
See, in Strive, rather than recovery being instant once triggered, you enter a special stagger recovery state for a brief time before you regain full control of your fighter. This protects you from unintentionally starting an attack because you were mashing, and thus getting counterhit for your trouble. During this recovery state, you can block, but if you want to block then you must hold back. If you fail to hold back (or block high when you should have blocked low, or vice versa), that is when the blue beat occurs. Not when you fail to recover in time to block, but because you recovered in time and didn't block.
This means that, when labbing what combos you can get from a stagger, you should set the training dummy's stagger recovery to the fastest possible. Otherwise you may get combos that appear true (no blue beat) but are actually escapable.
GUARD CRUSH
Guard crush differs from normal blockstun in several ways.
Normal blockstun is throw-invuln for its full duration, plus 5 frames afterwards. This allows you to mash out of tick throw attempts, since every character has an attack that hits on frame 5 or earlier. Guard crush is throw-invuln for its duration, but does not provide the 5f grace period afterwards. This means that to avoid a throw after a guard crush, you must use an action that is throw-invuln from its first frame (jump, backdash, or an invincible super).
During normal blockstun, you can use YRC as an attempt to get the opponent off of you. During guard crush, you can't. (You can still burst, though.)
During normal blockstun, you continue blocking for the duration of the blockstun, regardless of whether you continue to hold back or not (though you still have to worry about high or low). This allows you to buffer motions for reversals. Guard crush does not have this effect; if you stop holding back during guard crush, you are no longer blocking -- you can get hit. As with the stagger recovery, getting hit in this state results in a blue beat to tell you that you could have blocked that.
Posted Aug 25, 2023, 3:14 PM UTC
Guard crush also gets rid of crossup protection
This is a myth and most people who say this do not know what crossup protection in Strive actually is.
While that's true it's still important to know that when you're in guard crush you're susceptible to crossups compared to regular blocking, not because of "crossup protection" but because of how guard crush works.
This is important for things like Faust items, specifically Meteors which you have to block each meteor depending on where faust is. If you block the first one and he teleports behind you for the second, you have to block the other direction, this isn't the case for trumpet or minifaust.
This is true. Guard Crush does remove Absolute Guard (the mechanic that lets you block truestringed mids without actually holding back) and as such means you have to block crossups properly during it. Note this is distinct from the game's actual crossup protection mechanic, which lets you block attacks in either direction for 3 frames after a sideswap (this mainly to prevent weird interactions like attacks hitting crossup but not actually switching sides and the like.
If you cross someone up in normal blockstun and hit them before they leave it, they'll autoblock as if you hadn't crossed them up -- high/low must be done manually, but not left/right. Guard crush doesn't have that function because it doesn't automatically block.
But that isn't crossup protection, even though it technically protects from crossups in certain circumstances. Crossup protection is that, for the purposes of blocking, you aren't considered having crossed someone up until 3f after you physically cross them up. It's also somewhat of a misnomer, because it doesn't exist as a mechanic to protect from crossups, but rather to prevent unblockable crossups that can happen as a result of animation and collision data issues where, even if you block in the direction that should be correctly, the blocking animation causes a shift in your collision boxes that causes the opponent to re-crossup so that you get hit anyway. (Street Fighter has had a number of infamous unblockable setups because of that.)