I swear I don't know how to play this character anymore. It's either everyone is getting better at this game or I just plain suck :-( all of stryker's bad matchups are beyond frustrating for me. I think I just need to go back to the drawing board and see if I could get rid of my bad habits. (sorry rant over)
I have two really good csz players on my friend list. I tried my best today to absorb as much as I could from this matchup but it's just too freaking hard. Sorry K. but I'm not gonna waste 3 bars just to counter a dive kick. Do you know how many dive kicks a csz player does in a match? I guarantee you it will be 15+ lol well I'm exaggerating. But it's definitely gonna be a lot (depends on the player's style). If grenade had a zero frame start up similar to kabal's blade, Stryker would've been able to deal with csz with no problem. But since it's not the case (and will never be), here is what I've been dealing with
1. Forget you have a gun. The fact that wide range dive kick goes over the bullets, it stuffs every attempt of shooting from 3/4 of the screen and the obvious jumping distance. I don't if I need to delay the bullets at that range tho. That's something I'm going to have to look into.
2. Grenades are useless. Any read or attempt to counter the dive kick gets stuff due to the slow startup (again from jumping and 3/4) . Oh and don't forget the trade with iceball if you guess wrong. I can't remember how many 43%+ combos I've eaten today in my futile attempt to use grenades.
3. Roll toss gets stuff and EN version whiffs after absorbing the damage. Not to mention it also gets stuff by slides. It's pointless against parry... Well except the EN version
My main issue with this matchup is that there is nothing I can really use to make csz respect my options. His strings are faster up close and if you don't know how to deal with his nasty bomb setups, you will spend 80% of the match blocking and giving away meter.
Things I discovered today
1. To my surprise, standing 4 beats dive kicks but the timing is ridiculously strict.
2. This one depends on the csz player's playstyle. 3/4 and full screen (good luck on the latter) are the distance that you want to stay at. From 3/4 you can easily punish bomb and iceball on reaction. It also gives you a decent amount of time to block the slide.
3. Since you will rarely get a chance to land full combos. I suggest you go for heavy punish (finish with roll toss) instead of reset all the time. That way you can force him to come at you and you'll get a chance to abuse gunshot until you lose zoning advantage.
I still have a lot to learn and hopefully someone with better experience can comment on that matchup. So far I'm not getting any luck making a decent csz player respect my Stryker (T_T)