Lol I tried a stream about aaaaaall this and then discovered I had no audio!! 
So I talked like almost an hour without nobody really listening or understanding what I was doing. Anyway, I spare anyone hearing my basic English ?XD
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Try again!
@FallofSeraphs76 so I tried it in matches, for the most part, it works where you mentioned as I can just hit CB instead of throwing a normal and get the CB for glorious care-free enders! Bahahaha.
Ahem⊠but it fails in any scenario in the case of an opener. Doesnât matter the timing, I did it before, mashed it, at the same time, etc. Iâll just get a lock-out. This time I captured a video to show what happens.
In the video you will see what happens when I tried to CB an opener, I just get a medium normal. When I do throw in a normal and hit CB (because I cannot CB beforehand) I get a lock-out and punished.
@Infilament and @TheKeits, I have to be missing something here. Would you gents please help?
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You can only cancel openers into counter breakers if that opener could have also been canceled into auto-doubles (ie, it was not a juggle special move).
Otherwise, your post-opener manual (ie, a juggle in this case; a manual is just any combo move that is done from neutral) is subject to the normal manual counter break rules, which means the opponent can TIMING lockout before you can possibly counter break, but if you counter break early enough, you will catch all possible âcorrectâ breaks. Note that this does not apply to autos, linkers, or shadow linkers (those can be counter broken at any time, and can catch even early timing lockouts in the case of linkers if you wanted to).
Basically, if you start with a launcher opener, like TJ or Cinder uppercuts, there will always be a moment where they can timing lockout but you canât counter break it.
As is the case with most fighting games, though, you should only go for tight timings or âadvancedâ tricks if your opponent proves they are good enough to avoid the low-level mixup first. If your opponent is mashing break, this is good for you, because you can just take the timing lockout with only a small risk of being broken⊠you donât need to go for the juggle counter breaker because he hasnât proven himself able to get past the simple act of not locking himself out on juggles.
Note that this does not apply to grounded openers, as I said, so the âtight timingâ rule doesnât apply to those.
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Yeah, the thing a lot of people donât seem to understand about this whole CB missing because the opponent locked out earlier is that if this is happening there are only two possible scenarios:
1- You were effectively too late on your bait attempt, AKA you wanted them to see the move you were throwing out in order to trigger a reaction break, and then youâd CB them, but you went for the CB too late, giving them too much time to react. In this case you canât really complain, you just missed your bait, and thatâs all.
or (and this is what most people complain about)
2 - You were trying to CB a guess break (be it on a juggle or a manual or simply a light AD/linker) and your input was too slow. By too slow, I mean not within the 5 frames after you input the move you are trying to CB (5 frames basically means you have to press both inputs simultaneously, practically speaking, or plink them).
The exception to these situations is for juggles, during which an opponent can get a timed lockout at any time, even before you input a normal.
Generally speaking, Iâd say you should basically never be using CBâs on juggles as theyâre hard to break (which means your opponent is very likely to get locked out anyway, giving you a free recapture or extended juggle) and hard to successfully CB (which makes the CB, IMO, too risky), except for a few very character-specific situations (like some recaps which are easy to spot and hence are a good bait for CB, for example, or some overly long/easy to react manuals). Iâd also say, but this is my personal opinion, that you shouldnât really CB guess breaks. Youâre basically going for a huge risk in order to get a slightly bigger reward than you do if you simply confirm the lockout (which has a 66,6% probability of happening) and extend your combo with optimized KV management.
So, on topic, what I mean to say is: CBâs are good and viable as a high risk high reward option, but you shouldnât just be using them randomly in any part of your combo. You should use them where theyâre actually a viable option. I donât think they need to be changed.
On a stick, Iâve found itâs a lot easier to use the LK+MP shortcut for counter breakers. I always have my thumb on LK, so when Iâm counter-breaking a manual I press LK, LK+MP with my thumb, then thumb+middle finger in quick succession.
I switched to help with Sabrewulfâs feral cancels, but itâs helped me out a lot with breaking and first-frame counter-breaking. At least for me, itâs more precise and requires a lot less hand movement than pressing MK+MP. Also, for many characters (not all, for some reason) the input of LK+whatever will prioritize to a LK, which is overall a better button to whiff in a scramble situation.
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Moral of the story is, you miss a counter breaker, you made a bad read or failed execution.
Sorry, Iâm unable to play a violin. Maybe I could sing a sad song though.
Seems to be the case. No matter how early I manage to input CB, the opponent has a much larger window to input a break, so even if they technically break, it results in a timing lockout. Whereas, even if I read it right, Iâll still end up missing simply because the design allows the opponent to CB in segments where I simply cannot.
I know Max expressed some frustration about the same issue in some past streams where he had the correct read but was punished due to the opponent locking out.
In general, I will just let the opponent hang themselves with an early lockout opposed to taking the risk like I normally do. Itâs a complicated structure for sure, Iâm still not fond of the idea that it doesnât simply work though in any case. But, in most cases CB should be used more thoughtfully where I am in a situation where it can be game-changing and not so much for greed.
So, a few things here:
- This was always in the game (for grounded manuals). Since S1, youâve been unable to counter break timing lockouts on grounded manuals, which means there are gaps in the combo where your opponent is free to attempt an (always incorrect) break and you have to let it rock. Itâs a quirk of the KI system which we have to accept at this point. In S3, this was extended to juggles, since they fixed a S2 bug that made it impossible to timing lockout on juggles, which essentially properly classified juggles as manuals.
Fortunately, there are no correct breaks that are impossible to counter break. If your opponent properly puts a break attempt into an active break window (ie, not a timing lockout), those are always counter breakable in all cases.
- Iâve detailed in the past the difficulty in fixing this issue and that I actually donât think it will really improve things that much.
Essentially, in order to fix this issue, you need to be able to counter break purely from a neutral pose. Right now, the game either assumes that you are in a combo state (autos or linkers), OR that you are canceling an existing move after an opener (ie, a manual during its hitting frames, just like you would do a special move cancel). If you want to be able to catch all possible timing lockouts, you must be able to do a juggle opener, press MP+MK while doing nothing, and somehow enter a counter breaker (even if there is no active break window yet). While theoretically this might not be a problem, Iâm fairly sure it would require a wholesale rewrite of the entire breaker engine, since this is a case that DH did not anticipate when building the game (even for grounded manuals in S1). I think it is too late in the game for that.
But perhaps most importantly, I actually donât think it really solves that many problems. Against âreasonableâ opponents, no matter how early you let the player counter break, there will still almost certainly be a gap where the opponent will have a chance to break before your input.
Consider the case, for example, of Gargos doing launcher ender and then juggling with light portal, and letâs say the entire time the opponent is floating through the air, it is possible for him to timing lockout, and you as the Gargos player want to counter break him. Is⊠this actually reasonable? Unless you yourself are mashing counter break right after your ender, there is still a very real chance you wonât get him (because there will be SOME time, however small, between the ender and the counter break attempt). But if you are mashing counter breaker when there is still like 30-40 frames before a move can possibly hit your opponent, what are you even trying to hit? You are not even inputting counter breaker anywhere near a move that could reasonably be broken⊠does that make sense as a long term strategy? Would people reasonably take this risk often, or would they just try to let the opponent hang himself here?
I guess what Iâm trying to say is, I think changing the breaker system to support this would be a super high-risk, but actually very small reward scenario for the devs. People love to complain about counter breakers whiffing in these super oddball scenarios, but good players actually donât mash breaker (they try to time breakers to hits), so the amount of times youâd even be able to take advantage of a theoretical change to the engine are minimal and still very risky. Sure, you might be able to slightly more easily beat players who are doing SPDs with the right analog stick every time they get hit, but the best strategy for dealing with them already exists in the game (use grounded openers and delayed linkers, or heck just let them break and beat their terrible neutral), so providing another suboptimal strategy at the risk of rewriting the game engine seems like a super hard sell to me.
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Wow, I didnât know that to be honest. It may very well be because of the heavily emphasized juggle combos this season opposed to previous seasons where characters were expected to have a much more grounded approach simple due to the KV meter.
I wouldnât ask them to change it, truly the issue stemmed from unfamiliarity. Though, I appreciate this response opposed to the typical, âget gud, your reads suck!â response. I would understand complications of attempting to allow breakers in the neutral simply because it would be high-risk, like you mentioned.
I suppose I just wanted an explanation of why it would fail in most cases, not providing a video before created the assumption that I simply wasnât CB correctly. Though in the case of strictly manuals into CB off an open would make sense that the opponent can âbreakâ though it would fail.
Ultimately, I wanted to catch someone because I KNEW they were going to attempt a break, which is correct in that sense. But, because of the juggle manual to opener scenario it seems completely impractical considering I could just let them lockout and have a care-free combo.
Anyway, thanks a heap dude, I am a stubborn fella with the tendency to try something that doesnât work for the sake of wanting to fully understand opposed to being ridiculed for it. Glad you took the time to go through a thoughtful post.
In other words, mystery solved!
To be honest, I think itâs mainly the fact that we werenât good in S1 (and most of S2) and didnât know how the game worked at all. KI is a really complicated game (and it got more complicated as S2 and S3 came along), and for many KI players, this is their first serious fighting game. They didnât know how to break down a game engine, look for border cases, etc. Heck, Iâm pretty good at that but it even took me like a year of guide writing to come up with all the scenarios in which stuff whiffed and worked (and there were inconsistencies missed by the devs too, because itâs just a very complicated problem).
So yes, the problem is exacerbated a bit by juggles (ie, there are now more cases where it can happen), but IMO some people are really freaking out over nothing. KI has, like, 100 different optimization problems going on at once, and instead of focusing on this one aspect, they should be looking to improve in all the other situations.
By the way, letâs say the devs somehow rewrite the combo engine to support âany time counter breakersâ like I outlined. The reason I know this wouldnât really improve the situation is because we already have this in the game for auto-doubles! And yet, as youâve no doubt seen, it is possible for you to do a heavy auto-double, âwait a bitâ, and then counter break but your opponent has already strength locked out on a guess 1 frame earlier. That is to say, allowing âany timeâ breaks does not really change this â1 frame too lateâ scenario at all. In fact, people have been discussing possible fixes to even this (such as making all counter breaks during lockouts return both players to neutral)! The situation still exists even with any-time counter breakers. A theoretical rewrite of the game engine to attempt to solve the problem for manuals actually doesnât really get us anywhere.
The only way to dodge this in the current game is by doing grounded opener â counter breaker, right? How often do you do that? Against people SPDing the right stick when they get hit and⊠probably nobody else, because itâs a very specific strategy to deal with a very specific type of (bad!) player, and as you improve and the overall player base improves, the strategy becomes less and less important. And at least for grounded opener â counter breaker, this does have some rare but practical use against good players (for example, people being forced to guess a quick light AD in low-health 1 chance scenarios)⊠that doesnât extend to the Gargos example in my previous post because no good player who understands the game will be breaking 40 frames before a move can hit you, so your âdo ender, then mash counter breakâ, which is the analogy to opener â counter breaker here, actually falls apart.