To be clear, it is pretty beneficial if the player can break the ruin before the wall crash, even if he crashes through the wall; he gets rid of all the white life so the cash out is 0 and the wall crash hurts just a set amount. I just did some testing in training mode, and the difference is quite a bit… about 5% if you just do raw shadow rocks into the ruin setup, and 10% or more if you are trying to land a level 4 combo.
What’s worse, Aganos cannot counter break this setup; you hear the counter break sound but it doesn’t stop any break attempts from being successful. Actually, it’s worse than that; you can input ANY strength breaker and be successful if Aganos tries to counter break it, no matter the actual strength of the Ruin attack (this is not true if Aganos doesn’t counter breaker; you can get a red lockout in this “normal” case).
What this amounts to is that the opponent should literally always guess break the ruin. If he’s right, he’ll save himself some damage (but get sent through the wall anyway), and if he’s wrong, there’s no penalty and nothing Aganos can do to make it hurt worse. If it’s from far away, I think Aganos MUST do heavy ruin to catch, so I think it’s literally a 100% free break in this case.
Oh and by the way, in my testing just now, as a human player, I was able to break the ruin and not get wall crashed. I think if you manage to input breaker literally on the 1st frame possible (like the AI does), you can prevent this from happening, but I think it’s pretty unreliable. But… it’s possible and I suppose you have no reason not to try and hit the window!