This has been in the game since Season 1, and it’s a quirk of the system, fully reproducible offline if you have a few minutes in training mode. Let me explain.
Combo breakers actually have 5 frames of startup. It’s almost always a non-issue, because combo breakers are unblockable and it’s just there for, like… aesthetic purposes I think. Anyway, it’s a quirk that Double Helix put in the game, for better or for worse. You guys have probably seen this when you instinct cancel something and the guy tries to break on the same frame. The freeze frame of instinct happens and you see the guy is already in the combo breaker pose during the super freeze, then when you come out of the freeze frame, you still get hit even though you could block.
This is exactly the same scenario happening with counter breakers. It happens if you break the 3rd hit on the exact same frame as your counter breaker. Basically, all it means is that the game prioritizes counter breakers over combo breakers, should they happen on the same frame, but because the game audio plays the “3!” audio clip also on the same frame as the break attempt (for obvious reasons), you still hear it. I mean, I suppose they could maybe fix this weird behavior by killing any “1, 2, 3” audio files if a counter breaker lands, but the interaction is still the same.
Here’s some video to illustrate my point.
I recorded a clip of Raam doing a short combo into shadow stab, then trying to counter break “right on” the 3rd hit. Then I took control of P1 and broke the first three hits, trying to sliiiightly vary the timing on the 3rd breaker hit so line up either slightly before, slightly after, or right on the same frame as the counter breaker.
If you are slightly AFTER the counter breaker, I probably don’t have to show you video of that. The guy just counter breaks as you would expect.
If you break one frame BEFORE the counter breaker input, take a look at what happens:
http://gfycat.com/HeartfeltEnragedAmericanwarmblood
It looks like the combo breaker actually locks the opponents inputs out, so the game will simply not apply the counter breaker attempt if it happens after a combo breaker. This also makes sense, right? Your break beat the counter breaker attempt (even by just 1 frame), so it comes first and therefore succeeds. The game plays its aesthetic 5 frame animation but it has decided the break wins.
What happens if you break ON THE SAME FRAME as the counter breaker?
http://gfycat.com/AmusingPlasticHyrax
The counter breaker beats the “input lock”, but the breaker is also accepted because the 3 audio clip is played. The game decides that the counter breaker wins 4 frames later when the breaker tries to make contact (maybe this is why there is startup on breakers?). So you end up with this weird “tie” that is awarded to the counter breaker.
This will only ever happen if you input it on the exact same frame, though, which sometimes might happen because of rollback but also sometimes might happen offline. I think it’s very rare, because as the person doing the counter breaking, you tend to want to be early to catch all break timings (ie, if you are going to counter break the 3rd hit here, you will probably do it right before the 3rd hit connects, not after).
But yeah, there you go. They could fix the interaction if they cared by counter breakers killing all existing breaker audio, but maybe that’s hard (I dunno) and it happens so rarely that I don’t think it matters at all. Just know that if it happens, the two actions happened on the same frame and the counter breaker wins.
