A scrub has leveled up! I found out how to do Heavy Linkers HaHa

For 2 years I’ve been playing this game, learning matchups, learning manual combos , learning set ups, watching streams of KI tourneys, and keeping up with the recent news… But I never learned how to do a HL until today.

I knew they existed, I just never bothered to learn it because my perumations of Linkers and Auto-Doubles were good enough at the time to lock my opponents out.

Well it turns out all you have to do to perform a Heavy Linker is HOLD THE BUTTON DOWN! Man, I regret not learning this earlier lol

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ya the OG killer instinct had combos that could only be done holding the button, stick input then release button. TJ’s roll linker could be charged with back to forward or forward to back. the results were just cool looking rather than big damage. but back in those days breakers were hard anyways.

If I remember correctly fulgore season 1 version had to hold buttons to execute triple ADs. good times.

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I’m gonna be fair with you, I learned heavy linkers like a couple months ago and I had this game since around launch :laughing:. I even completed the dojo lesson about it too on launch but forgot it immediately after.

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Fret not OP, I went through the same thing - I played this game for months before realizing that myself. Believe me when I say, though, that it’s a complete game changer. Don’t you agree?

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It’s probably for the best that you only found this out now. Light and medium linkers should be your bread and butter, people can get really comfortable with the breathing space afforded by heavy linkers and then struggle to transition to light and medium linkers when they need to.

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I too didn’t realize it at first lol luckily I wondered why I got broken so easily at the time too smh. Well, live and learn friend :grin:

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:confused:

Two years? You never asked someone how to do them?

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Well, for me, I just assumed that if you tried, it would just end the combo, since that’s generally what would happen when you pressed HP/HK with a special move. Also, I just figured you could only use heavies as an opener (as opposed to a linker) and that added to your combo damage.

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wgat do u mean heavy linkers…like heavy auto doubles???

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When you perform a special move mid-combo it’s called a linker. When you do this, you can choose different strengths for the linker - light, medium, and heavy. Naturally, heavy does the most damage, but is also the slowest, whereas the lights do the least damage, but are the fastest (with the mediums being squarely in the middle). These allow you to extend your combo and get more damage as well as potentially lockout your opponent if they guess wrong as a reward, but at the risk of giving your opponent more chances to combo-break your own combo. However, because of the way the game is setup, heavy attacks, when performed as part of a special move, often end the combo creating a combo ender, which cashes out damage. So to counter this and to allow you to still do heavy linkers without ending the combo, the game allows you to hold down the light or medium attack buttons to do a heavy linker. :wink:

So as an example:
light linker - QCF + LP
medium linker - QCF + MP
heavy linker - QCF + hold LP or QCF + hold MP
combo ender - QCF + HP

Nah. They mean performing heavy linkers by holding the button down when you execute the linker. Normally if you used a heavy with a special input, then you’d get the ender. So in order to allow you to do heavy linkers mid combo, you perform the special with a light or medium, but you hold the button instead of tapping it.

do all characters have this?

Yes. It is a core gameplay mechanic.

Someone’s you have to discover it yourself. You could show someone how to do it but sometimes the ego keeps the info from staying.

I use CAM. I didn’t know that was how HL were done. I’ve been playing since mid S2. I do kind of remember wondering but in these games nobody ever has a microphone so its so hard to get info.

wait till you get shadow counters down… im just learning those and i got this game when kan ra came out…

I’ve understood shadow counters from the beginning. Theyre great for dealing with people who like to jump in too. Heavy linkers was the last piece of the puzzle for me.

If you had run into me, and I noticed you were new, I would’ve been talking. I’d point out your mistakes and how to fix them, offering advice. In many cases, the people that I play with show an actual interest in learning and will stay and listen; our playtime then becomes a pseudo online-session where, over the course of a few hours, they learn a lot as I take them through the game’s concepts step by step, and they most often thank me at the end and friend me as a result. This occurs at least once a week for me if not more. It’s always a wonderful experience.

I remember midway through season2, heavy linkers are done by holding the light or medium button. Lulz yeah it’s not obvious outright at first.

I only learned them to maximize my damage versus the CPU. They’re too easy for humans to break and in lockout heavy doubles do more damage per time spent than heavy linkers.