Important question about Hadoken

[Knee Against the World]

I was basically always under the impression that the input hadoken was better. It's stronger, has a larger hitbox, and travels ever so lightly further.

However, when I watch actual professional Ken play like Takera and Venom, they always seem to go for the regular hadoken.

I'm assuming this is because you mostly use hadoken for pressure and getting in, on top of the fact that you can't mess up the input and it's a bit more controllable, but do you guys have any idea as to why one would never do the input hadoken?

 

[Swordmaster102]

The input hadoken only has slightly more damage. Around 1% from what I remember. You pretty much nailed it on the head with what you said. Unless you are buffering out of a d-tilt for example, performing the quarter circle forward just takes slightly more time and at the high level of play where everything is so fast paced, you probably will sometimes see neutral-b instead of an input. It’s not like you’re losing much.

As far as my knowledge goes, outside of shoryu, Ken just doesn’t benefit much from inputs. Tatsu will have less knockback if not input (which can be a good thing). Ryu on the other hand benefits much more from inputs with shakunetsu and trutatsu’s greater damage.

 

[Knee Against the World]

The input hadoken only has slightly more damage. Around 1% from what I remember. You pretty much nailed it on the head with what you said. Unless you are buffering out of a d-tilt for example, performing the quarter circle forward just takes slightly more time and at the high level of play where everything is so fast paced, you probably will sometimes see neutral-b instead of an input. It’s not like you’re losing much.

As far as my knowledge goes, outside of shoryu, Ken just doesn’t benefit much from inputs. Tatsu will have less knockback if not input (which can be a good thing). Ryu on the other hand benefits much more from inputs with shakunetsu and trutatsu’s greater damage.

Ah, cool, thanks for your input. I think sometimes, input is actually pretty important in neutral vs some characters that can slide under normal Hado with their D-tilt like Simon/Richter, for what it's worth.

I just noticed that you can tell in replays which version of tatsu (input or not) he does based on his voice line. Yea, it actually seems like the less knockback of tatsu is better. Whenever I hit the input tatsu, I almost feel like I'm in disadvantage state by the time the move ends..