< Thrill Kill | Cleetus
The Basics
Since his un-counterable combos tend to lack in damage compared to the rest of the cast, Cleetus is a character that relies on abusing the invincibility that some of your special moves offer. Use the great advantage that some of your normals provide to stagger your opponent to death and keep them guessing how to defend against you, and try to get the most amount of damage you can off of your Over The Barb and Dashing Elbow launchers.
Useful Moves
- Dashing Elbow: One of Cleetus's best moves. Great range, good startup, and while it has bad recovery when blocked its treat of activation will make your opponent more hesitant neutral as a bad string on their part will be met with a charging hillbilly.
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- Backwoods Beating: While you might think this move is only good as a juggle ender with its fair damage (as long as all three hits land in a corner) and horrendous recovery time, it's active frames give you near-invulnerability during the whole animation in which your leg is able to deal damage. This means you can attack directly through your opponent's strings and even some wakeup attacks. As easily abused as it is punishable.
- Over The Barb: While 6f sounds like it's not fast enough to be your go-to mid starter, the move immediately causes Cleetus to hop which gives him very powerful normal invincibility. It can phase through a lot of attacks and launch your opponent, which makes it very good against players waiting to attack you after a knockdown. Leads to fair damage, too.
- Low Outhouse: Using this move in neutral is laughably bad, but while you may be tempted to string into one of its counterable combo enters for great damage, remember this move has crazy advantage on both hit and block. At -4f on block and a massive +3f on hit, strings like 
become very useful tools to mix up your opponent and stagger them into another low/mid mixup. You can use the threat of Low Outhouse's launching strings to cause opponents to high counter, and instead use the advantage the move provides to punish their defense with a low string.
- - Lip Lunch: By far your best grab. It has good damage, but for some inexplicable reason your opponent lies on the ground for so long you have all the time in the world to follow up with a re-stand combo afterwards. Your opponent can counter your re-stand, but you have two great options to go with:
- --> - You can axe kick for 39% damage.
- --> --> Stagger - You can get right to your stagger game plan by landing a crouching kick string. If your opponent doesn't hold crouch, you have a tiny window to land a rear grapple.
Standing Strings
- -->
8 hits, 32 damage.- This combo requires you to buffer the follow up juggle string in order for every land to hit. Start inputting it just as Moonshine ends.
Crouching Strings
- --> -->
- 8 hits, 37 damage.
- The launching sweep attack does not combo, meaning it can be crouch blocked or low countered. You have to condition your opponent by either staggering the first leg sweep into a mid combo (an Over The Barb, perhaps?) to get real value out of it.
- 2 hits, 13 damage.
- You can use this combo to help your stagger game plan, since it ends with Low Outhouse's great advantage. Since Low Outhouse also ends with you standing, you can then go into an Over The Barb without also factoring in the frames it takes to uncrouch.
Corner Combos
- Launcher --> --> --> --> /
- 7 hits, 40 damage.
- The tornado! As long as you start your juggle up against a wall, you can use this after any launching hit.
- If you're really close to the wall when you begin your juggle, you may be able to replace the first single Moonshine with an Over The Barb -> Moonshine string instead.
