Fighting against a Naginata

I'm going to expand on my comment here about the naginata in C:SI.

First, I'll just post the comment here:

Things have changed with the naginata since I started C:SI back in February. It used to be generally believed that someone with a sword fighting someone with a nagi would usually win, unless the person with the nagi was much more experienced. Now, though, people seem to think that the nagi is stronger in general. I’m not sure why this is. It could be that people such as Mayan and Jane actually advanced the art of the naginata, so people are better with it now. But it could also be that people just aren’t taught how to fight against it. It’s been awhile since I’ve fought a nagi, so I can’t say which I think is true, but I used to be able to fight pretty well against nagis. You definitely can’t win if you do the exact same thing you’d do against a katana, but if you adapt I don’t remember there being any advantage to having a nagi.

The two main strengths of the naginata are range and power. Its weakness is speed. A basic idea that can be applied to any fight is that you want to try to take advantage of weaknesses while trying to eliminate strengths. There really isn't a way to take away the power advantage of the naginata, but you can take away the range advantage easily. As long as you stay within katana range of your opponent, then it doesn't matter that they have a longer range. Once you are in range, you can easily use your speed to get in strikes whenever they lower their guard. Unfortunately, most people won't tank against a katana if they are using a naginata. Still, you can catch people off guard by trying to stay close. I think they expect the opponent to try to stay away from them, but doing that would allow the range advantage to come into play.

I think I'll stop here and try to fight against some nagis when I can get back on SL, then post a follow up here of what I learn. Most of my experience fighting naginatas was a while ago, when it was more a sort of novelty. I don't think at that time anyone used it as their main weapon or considered it their specialty. It was more that people were just trying it out for fun because it was different.