u/MFBTMS

I think a lot of Tekken’s soundtracks are really well done, but it’s just a completely different state of locking in when you don’t have anything in the background. It doesn’t get you tired as much during a long session and your overall focus is at its peak, so I just be listening to characters screams and hit sounds for 3 hours straight like a madman

Let's evaluate this in terms of risk/reward.

d3

Risks:

1. Getting the timing wrong and eating any move in the game. Now that's standard for any parry, right? No exceptionally large activation window, also pretty standard.
2. But then, if you did parry, you can still mess up the cancel timing. Yeah, about that. Why do you need to still hit a pretty tight timing on the cancel if you read their aggression correctly? It doesn't even make sense visually. Stance cancel in general is not a "natural" mechanic, and it is usually found by players in order to maximize damage in combos. Many stances in the game can be cancelled, but even not knowing how to stance cancel, you usually have a different option for your combo, which is weaker. So that's adequate risk/reward. If you can't cancel the stance, you get less damage, like with Reina's wra cancel into wr4. You can't do it - you get less damage, seems fair. But for Reina's d3, NONE of the immediate options fit into the 10f window. So you must get that cancel to deal any dmg whatsoever, and if you don't you're not even +, it's just neutral.
3. Another risk here is mashing 112 because of muscle memory and getting launched if you didn't cancel correctly. Now, of course, any decent Reina player will try to hit confirm, but given that both parry and the cancel aren't exactly easy, hit confirming 112 means you need to perform 3 advanced-level actions in a row.
4. Another risk here is getting cd1, which is even more minus than 112. And yes, with good reaction you can probably save it with 3 or 4, but again, requires another timing-tight action. I will remind you that this whole thing started with a successfull parry.

Reward: 112...
And yes, even though it says +10, you can still hit moves up to i13 if your timing on cancel was exceptional, but this is not reliable.

b1+3

Risks:

1. Again. getting the timing wrong and eating any move in the game, fair enough.
2. Only parries the first hit of the string and you eat others.

Reward:

1. You take the damage.
2. Yes, the damage is recoverable, but depending on the move you've parried (eaten), you are not guaranteed to get it back.
3. WRA transition with no frame advantage. No guaranteed option and a good-timing cd block needed to guarantee safety.
4. Yes, you heard it right. You parry the move to eat it's damage and are required to do a good stance cancel to guarantee that you won't eat a 10f string, since your fastest option is wra1 at i12.

I honestly can't decide which one of these parries is more of a joke. For comparison, both Victor's parries guarantee a heat engager/wall splat and don't require any cancels

Many people are saying they don’t feel like they’ve achieved something, even after moving 3 ranks higher than their s2 rank. And the main solution is the following: don’t tie feeling of accomplishment to a png.

Can you say your match up knowledge is on a different level now? Can you say you feel your character better and can move more intuitively with them now, compared to s2? Has your execution consistency improved? Do you have better decision making? If yes, you’ve done everything correctly. If not, don’t even look at your rank. It can show Garyu or GoD5, but what difference does it make if you’re not dedicating time to getting better?

As a rule of thumb, if you’re a competitive player and put time into the game consistently, you should do a small recap by the end of each month. You should be able to say “this month my electrics got better/my staple combo finally stopped dropping/I started sidestepping better/my whiff punishment has improved/I labbed this specific character(s)”.

If by the end of each month you can identify at least one thing you clearly improved on, you’re gonna be okay. Upgrading your png becomes inevitable if you don’t forget to enjoy the game and work on your weaknesses

Picking up Reina as a first Mishima and trying to get my wavu and electrics to a decent consistency. At the same time, I find myself hanging out in practice for way too long instead of playing because it feels like electrics and wavu are fundamental parts of the character and messing them up in matches is gonna feel bad. I understand that even people like IKARI mess them up every now and then, but I'm struggling with understanding what's good enough, and that stops me from focusing on other aspects of the game.

So, do you have any rule of thumb before matches like "when I hit 10 electrics and 10 wavus in a row, I know I'm warm enough". And generally speaking, how much time did it take you to get confortable with your wavu and ewgf on both sides? At what point did you understand they were good enough for ranked?

Picking up Reina, first Mishima, learnt the ws3,4, df4, f2,3f, df1f, sen1+2, wra3,4 combo, but I saw someone say instead of wra3,4 you can do wra cancel into wr4, ws3,4, wall ender. I’ve managed to hit wr4 a few times without ws3,4, but the whole thing with wr4 feels so difficult that it’s not even fun. And that’s me who’s ready to spend several hours at a time in practice. I genuinely don’t see myself pulling that off consistently, given that you also have p2. Is it actually worth it?

UPD: it seems like my issue was largely due to the fact that I thought that the difference between the 2 combos is just the ender (wra3,4 changed to wr4), but it turned out that you need to exclude df1 before sen1+2 in order for ws3,4 to connect after wr4. I couldnt realize why I was going through hell, but now wr4 is so much easier to connect. Thanks for all your suggestions