My sister (the button smasher) can deliver way more shadow counters than me, and I’ve spent days trying to learn them. She doesn’t even know how she does them.
Can anyone confirm how much frames or startaup a counterbreaker has?
Yes, you can counter break and catch a break attempt on the exact same frame.
I was watching your breakdown of the Bass v. Thompxson match and you mentioned a weird interaction where in some cases an attempted counter breaker may cause a timing lockout. This seemed to be in reference to Shadow moves, but I am wondering if I came across it myself.
I was playing early today against a Fulgore player. I noticed he was a first-chance guess-breaker. My attempts to try and go from opener to counter breaker immediately sometimes worked, but sometimes didn’t. I was wonder if maybe I was pressing a button and being successfully broken just before countering, but as I really concentrated on it, I stopped doing that. About the third match in it seemed to no longer be and issue, but in the first two matches it was.
I play Jago. I would double roundhouse and cancel into heavy Laser sword. On my attempt to counter break immediately after the opener, I would get a timing lock out. It was really weird. If I am able to counter break after an opener, there must be enough hit stun left that I am still in the combo state, right? And if it is just after an opener with no other buttons being hit, he can’t actually combo break me. Is there some small window here or was it a flub in the rollback of the netcode?
Opener to counter breaker, with nothing in between, should not be possible to timing lock out if you hit counter breaker as early as possible. I know some people don’t do it as early as possible, or they will press a button and then counter break as fast as they can, or maybe in some weird cases they plink MP ~ MK and it gives the opponent 1 frame to do something, but in general it shouldn’t be possible. I would have to see some replays of your interaction to know more about what’s going on.
That thing I mentioned in the Bass set seems to only affect shadow moves, but it does seem like a real thing after more research was done.
I have found the match in my replays, but since I am on a PC recording and sharing doesn’t seem to be as straight forward as on an Xbox. I could look up capture methods, but if you have a program you would prefer, let me know.
There are a few ways to capture PC KI, including OBS (free, use “monitor capture”) and Shadowplay (if you have an Nvidia card). I use OBS myself, it works pretty well. Just download it, set up monitor capture, then a hotkey to start/stop a local recording. The file it records should be uploadable to youtube. Tweak the bitrate in OBS settings so that it’s fairly low, if your computer is struggling with framerate (“good” bitrate would be around 8000, but you could go as low as 1000 and still get a perfectly acceptable recording for the purpose of showing me a replay).
Kewl stuff.
Wow this is my first time reading this post and it makes absolute sense. CB work “differently” in S3 which is what most of us figured. I wish the devs would’ve just admitted to this … but whatever. Great job explains this!!!
Wow. Just…wow. 
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To be honest, they did, about a year ago. This is to help people understand why their Counter Breakers “don’t work.” The changes have already been made a long time ago. 
Counter breakers work slightly differently on one aspect of fights (manuals and by extension juggles), and the devs were open and fully outlined the changes that were made at the start of S3. There were some holdouts of strange buggy behavior that they didn’t intend (which I outlined in the post), many of which have since been fixed and many of which were in the game since it launched. But counter breaking “standard” combos is unchanged since the game launched and any thoughts to the contrary are a placebo effect.
After playing near a billion games w/ @DoobyDude23 yesterday, I can promise you that counterbreaks, especially on manuals, DO NOT WORK!!! - when you hit them too late, that is. 
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I think everything still works with all of the mechanics. I don’t think the Devs are doing anything else with this game. I think they’ve rebalance this a lot already and I don’t think they will be patching the game anytime soon.