Raphael Top Ten Moves

Raph should be played differently depending on he's current rage from his opponent.

22B is pretty sick at certain distances.
I would say that depending on how you play Raph, defensive or offensive you will use different moves. For me I play him defensive looking for opportunities where I can counter something or punish it...but never really engage the enemy first. Maybe bait him. And offensively when I am close, I use safe moves on block for a chance to sidestep and whiff punish with 33KB. That's probably the biggest risk I ever take with Raph. But sidestepping also opens up for throws.

And Raph step is very good. However if you're constantly playing Raph one dimension you won't see many options for sidestepping and whiff punishing.

Because I never directly pressure the enemy first with lets say 3B stuff, I don't get punished a lot. Instead I space let them come to me, and use raph's speed to interrupt and whiff punish. 22B, BB, 236B, 4B etc all work well until they get close. Up close I use 3K 8A+B, 6A, 2K, A+BA, 33KB, 44K, 8K throws in conjunction with stepping.

Block punishing with Raph, is mostly when I use 3B and 6B prep options.

My most damaging options are 33kB and 22B, with throws.
 
The question I mentioned from before is this:

Are the importance of moves "dependent"? By that I mean the following: If 22B is taken as the best = most important move, is it not true that a strategy which applies this assumption, is now inconsistent with some number of possible move-value-rankings?

For instance, one could say in a vacuum that 44K is better = more important than 6K. Or one could say the opposite. This pronouncement would be true or false. But the question is, does saying a statement like that, force you or constrain you into particular ranking-schemes for other moves, just by logical consistency (or something like logical consistency, where 'truth' has some analogue in "it works")? Does a strategy that maximizes 22B involve playing in such a way that, say, 6K is used more and 44K cannot be used a lot? What I have in mind as the reason, is that, what valuing 22B in play looks like, and what valuing 44K looks like, have dissimilarities or divergences which make it impossible for both of them to describe one instance of a playstyle. Or possibly not those two moves, but some two moves you might pick.

So: Is that the sort of thing that can be true, for some character, inserting the right move names in the appropriate places above? The utter most important move constrains what everything else is?

I had gone and convinced myself of the answer in writing this out, but I'm still gonna ask. Thank you for any further insight.

EDIT: I played around in training mode again recently, and started looking at B's hitbox stupidness. I uhh... I have some bad news. And Raphaels might want to keep this to themselves, so I won't say anything yet.
 
To mandritti (didn't quote)

No the concept is definately not based on an assessment in a "vacuum". 22B being ranked so high includes both the stance transition and regular versions. Similarly, 3B is ranked so high because of it's ability to go into prep. If you refuse to go into stance, then their value quickly plummets.

AND:

If you're spamming 1 highly ranked move, it should only affect the other moves ranked lower if something is redundant: which is a very rare situation. Considering it's an overall assessment of worth, you're going to have to generalize a lot of different character's matchups and raph's playstyles, and therefore it's improper to neglect the above assumptions. I suppose if you mixup 44K and 8K enough, the opponent could get the frames mixed up slightly on block and you could possibly sneak away with a side step, but you're really stretching that one there.

To King ace:

I think i make the first offensive move as raph about 95%. It's pretty absurd, but its an online thing I suppose. And yes, I realize that making them come to you makes winning a lot easier, but its less gratifying.
 
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