Practice hundreds of hours of practice. will take you 10,000 hours to make top 8 at evo. minimum.

People get good at this because they always keep playing against other people. They start off small of parrying a regular fireball and slowly progressively take more advance situations where they feel more confident in that they wont hurt themselves. They don't learn how to parry SA2 Chun-Li or red parry a fireball super art from the start; they constantly practice themselves to those situations. Timing feels easier after getting used to it.

With 3SOE being an HD based game, I have to add a technical aspect. If you are running this on a HDTV where it lags, parrying is too hard to use. If you do parry under those conditions, they will not likely translate very well to other environments including a tournament using the original arcade build. So either play on a HDTV or monitor that barely lags frames or get a CRT TV or monitor for 99.99999% lagless situations.

Fighting Gill is about not having him have a super bar before the round ends. Either beat him faster or time him out.

Also Alpha Counters from Street Fighter Alpha are much more challenging.

They don't learn how to parry SA2 Chun-Li or red parry a fireball super art from the start; they constantly practice themselves to those situations. Timing feels easier after getting used to it.

@ThePhantomnaut said:

Also Alpha Counters from Street Fighter Alpha are much more challenging.

Even as someone who is bad at Street Fighter Alpha, I can tell you that Alpha counters are much easier to do by virtue of the fact that you are blocking when you do them and simply have to remember the motion. It's the same reason why Mark of the Wolves' Just Defense system is easier to do than parrying, despite being a very similar concept.

Join the club. I'm dogshit at parrying but you get there in the end.

@ArbitraryWater said:

@ThePhantomnaut said:

Also Alpha Counters from Street Fighter Alpha are much more challenging.

Even as someone who is bad at Street Fighter Alpha, I can tell you that Alpha counters are much easier to do by virtue of the fact that you are blocking when you do them and simply have to remember the motion. It's the same reason why Mark of the Wolves' Just Defense system is easier to do than parrying, despite being a very similar concept.

Oh yeah because when Alpha Countering, you do an attack afterwards. Maybe I was thought it was more situational.

I'm with you guys as well. Parrying is very foreign to me in this game but I'm slowly learning.

I can parry fireballs alright but pretty much nothing else. I don't feel there's much incentive to parry either, the options are: block the attack taking minimal damage if any at all or make an attempt at a parry risking taking full damage and possibly being knocked on your ass with the upside being that you might get a small amount of ultra bar and look awesome. I just don't feel that I would get considerably better if I spent time getting better at parrying, surely I'd be better off using that time in other areas.

I can parry fireballs alright but pretty much nothing else. I don't feel there's much incentive to parry either, the options are: block the attack taking minimal damage if any at all or make an attempt at a parry risking taking full damage and possibly being knocked on your ass with the upside being that you might get a small amount of ultra bar and look awesome. I just don't feel that I would get considerably better if I spent time getting better at parrying, surely I'd be better off using that time in other areas.

@scarace360: Frame advantage sounds advanced, I take it you also can't combo from a block in the same situations? 

I guess the difference here is I never really wanted to be EVO good or even close to that. Back in the day it was all about just being better than the group of people you played with and over time you would get better from playing a lot. Playing random games online isn't quite the same and there's no camaraderie to make up for the fact that you just got your ass handed to you. 
 
and the whole frame advantage stuff just seems way too meta for me.

The thing about parrying that I think escapes most people is that it's prediction, not reaction. It's not like combos where, no matter how complex they get, you can buckle down and grind them out in training mode. To become good at parrying you have to instinctively know when an attack is coming not only based on the character you're facing, but the player. This is why I love SFIII, my predictive skills are significantly better than my reactive skills.

I had similar thoughts on instant blocking in Blazblue, but it came by pretty naturally after I just threw in some occasional IBs during matches. Now it's just a matter of knowing how the other person attacks.

Instead of earnestly going for them, just play as you would, just plain blocking, and go for parries on rather simple things, like fireballs. As you play, you might start catching up on what attacks might be coming, and you can try parrying those too. This is just by my experience, though...

You aren't gonna be able to parry most things on reaction unless you are a robot. Hell, some moves in this game are so fast that you literally need to input the parry before their attack comes out. Most parrying is done through anticipation and option selects. Watch for your opponents habits, is he always sticking out poke at a certain range, always jumping in with a certain attack, always trying to anti air you with the same move. If you can figure out what your opponent is likely to do in a situation then attempt a parry.

Edit: Also, the parry window is much larger than a lot of new players realize. You can input a parry much earlier than you may expect and still parry their attack.

All the best SF players in the world only got there because they loved the game so much that they kept on playing day after day. If you put so much time into a game you will definitely become very good.
I for example have always since the beginning loved playing Super Smash Bros and things like L cancel or wavedash are no problem anymore for me because I know the mechanics so well.

@Raineko said:

All the best SF players in the world only got there because they loved the game so much that they kept on playing day after day. If you put so much time into a game you will definitely become very good. I for example have always since the beginning loved playing Super Smash Bros and things like L cancel or wavedash are no problem anymore for me because I know the mechanics so well.

Definitely. New players shouldn't expect to parry Corkscrew Blow entirely from the start.

@Raineko said:

All the best SF players in the world only got there because they loved the game so much that they kept on playing day after day. If you put so much time into a game you will definitely become very good. I for example have always since the beginning loved playing Super Smash Bros and things like L cancel or wavedash are no problem anymore for me because I know the mechanics so well.

Definitely. New players shouldn't expect to parry Corkscrew Blow entirely from the start.

I just finished a ranked match, I had no life and parried the entirety of Q's punch super art then went into tyrant slaughter as Urien, winning me the game.
 
Hells yeah! Parrying is kinda cool, I'm glad I can switch between SFIV and 3S, though. This is just a fun distraction.

I just finished a ranked match, I had no life and parried the entirety of Q's punch super art then went into tyrant slaughter as Urien, winning me the game.  Hells yeah! Parrying is kinda cool, I'm glad I can switch between SFIV and 3S, though. This is just a fun distraction.

@StarvingGamer said:

The thing about parrying that I think escapes most people is that it's prediction, not reaction.

Pretty much this. Once you get to a certain level in this and pretty much any fighting game you start to realize that there's usually two or three moves that will be the best choice in any given situation against any particular character. Obviously this isn't something that is instinctive to new players (hell this game feels completely random to me right now), and it can take hundreds of matches against decent players before you figure out the match-up.