Dark Shackles seems useless to me. It think they should make the shackles never break once connected. That would give you more incentive to use them instead of always going for the OP super move. I do think the move isn’t as powerful as you believe seeing as how its power diminishes the longer you wait to use it when in Instinct. If you don’t do it right away you may only get 15% damage with it. An immediate hit though is huge.
1 Like
You know I know this, why you say these things? I was only comparing Naked Read punish vs Creating your own Situation punish. Even though Horn-Breaker techs into S.CotE pretty well. Just need to read the frames on the characters movements.
@Infilament But you say it as if everyone is always thinking that. The key to getting your S.Clutch is making the Opponent forget about silly things like holding up and make them believe they are about to Punish something else. A simple one is Using Kan-Ra’s wall bounce, use Lp+Lk twice and of course the person 87% of the time will try to tech a third grab instead of holding up so you just S.Clutch them in response to that predicted reaction. If you Use down Heavy Kick on an opponent with Kan-Ra they will try to block your following pressure but instead they receive a S.Clutch. Next time they jump out of a similar moment they just land on top of Scarabs.
i think fulgore is fine cause he uses the same ressource that lets him do his special into special cancels.
And if you use the beam you lose more than your meter - u lose the ability to special cancel special moves, u lose godlike mobilty and the abilty to shadow counter for a fixed minimum time. The tradeoff is much higher than shagos imo.
Does it destroy the two way interaction - i personally dont care but at its core yes it does though 32% is the only guarenteed damage. The rest you have to earn.
shrug Not really. Your post (the Thunder portion anyway) talked a lot about whiff punishing, trip guard punishing, etc with command grab, but the only mention of tick grabs was about how tricky it can be to tick with S. COTE. So, trying to be helpful I simply suggested what is likely to be a more effective/less finicky tick throw setup with Thunder. I don’t really know anything about you beyond your posts in this thread, so given what you’d posted I figured you simply might not know that, at least with respect to tick grabs, normal COTE is probably better than shadow COTE. No insult intended.
With respect to the other argument going on here, I don’t think you’ll see some massive backlash about the ideals of the two-way interaction being betrayed by annihilation. As much as the community likes and defends it (in general), we tend to be pretty accepting of its absence provided that we feel the setup and/or payoff counterbalances the guarantee.
Aganos is a character who in many ways eschews the two-way interaction as well, but you don’t hear people complaining about his unbreakable damage because his workarounds are a pain to set up, and require stellar play in other ways. Kan-Ra is the opposite, where he also largely avoids the system, but the community feels the way in which he does it is too easy, too self-sustaining, and too out of proportion with what it costs him.
Annihilation will be fine so long as the community doesn’t feel that it deals excessive damage, or that it is too easy to obtain. He’s pretty much guaranteed it twice a fight, so all that’s left is whether or not people feel the payoff (damage) is commensurate with the cost (full instinct). On that point there seems to be a discussion, but at the least I haven’t seen massive outcry regarding it.
This may be a bit out there but what if we put this into a different context? What if Shadow Jago could never earn Instinct, at all, but the opponent always started a match down a life bar? Of course the real-life situation counts on SJ landing Annihilation twice, but assuming he does, there’s nearly an entire life bar of damage gone for a single input.
I haven’t faced the move too much in matches yet, but I think this is an interesting way to look at the damage itself.
A single input that is VERY easily avoided. More on that soon.
I’m mainly just questioning the amount of damage for that single input.
Meh… at worst it’s 2 inputs (HK+HP for instinct, and QCF+LK/LP for Dark Rollerskates), and that’s to say nothing of the beatings received and combos broken to gain the instinct meter.
The funny thing, Yesterday, I jumped over a guy’s Annihilation move 4 times.
#FOUR WHOLE TIMES. POINT BLANK.
While I hit a light button too!
To the point he started Tbagging. So I gave him one. Everyone was happy. 
1 Like
Hm. I think it’s certainly an interesting way to look at it, but I don’t think it is a particularly accurate way to do so. Annihilation is not a guaranteed hit on anything that is not very negative (I believe @infilament said -6?), so even instinct cancel->punish is not possible unless the opponent decides to do something quite unsafe, knowing that Shago has instinct (and thus annihilation) on deck.
I think Shago with instinct to a certain extent mirrors Fulgore with full pips or Aganos with walls behind you - he will force you to change the way you are playing. You don’t jump when Fulgore’s sitting on hype beam, you don’t throw fireballs at Aganos when two walls are behind you. And you don’t do things that are punishable by instinct cancel->6 frame command grab when Shago has full instinct.
Shago is not landing annihilations in a vacuum - the way you play and the decisions you make will make it possible for him to hit you with it.
Absolutely true, but since people think that having to use all of your instinct to get the 48% is balanced I was curious how they would feel about it if they never got any Instinct at all but started the fight with the damage. It’s not the best comparison but I’m curious what people would think.
Ah. In that case, I for one would call broken 
I don’t consider getting hit with annihilation to be an inevitable conclusion to fighting Shago, so I’d be pretty pissed to have to just eat that damage on something I was pretty sure I could avoid in the first place.
1 Like
Whereas it’s a neat perspective to take, I think this is the problem inherent with it - starting the match down one health bar would mean that getting hit with Dark Rollerskates not once, but TWICE, is a foregone conclusion…
…which it most certainly is not.
You don’t always get 48% even if you use annihilation, though. Sometimes you kill someone who only had 30% health left. This is actually a pretty big deal compared to other instincts (which last between rounds and can lead to more damage in round 2), whereas with Shago, it’s always just the raw 48% right now, even if they only have one pixel left.
How often do you get instinct on your first health bar when your opponent has 50% life left? If you’re playing people of equal skill to yourself, maybe half the time-ish? You can always save it for round 2 and “guarantee” that you’ll get the full 48% if you land it, but then you might not get another one.
It’s definitely not as cut and dry as “take off 96% of my life”, even if you assume that annihilation is so easy to land that we can talk about it in this way.
This is my testing, yes. I can punish TJ’s light tremor but can’t punish Shago light slide, and I’m fairly sure those moves are -6 and -5, respectively.
It would be nice if someone could verify my punishes to make sure. You don’t get a reversal message for activating instinct but I tried punishing Shago light slide 20 times and couldn’t do it.
1 Like
Love this name you’ve given it. I’m compelled to call it that from now on.
1 Like
This is probably worthy of it’s own thread. My opinion on this is that the two way interaction is here to make KI a fun fighting game. It’s not a commandment or a divine principle. So if some pieces of the gameplay that are fun and challenging eschew the two way interaction, then people are not going to worry about it. It’s only when things are not fun or not balanced that people start to wonder “where did my two way interaction go?”
1 Like
This, this, this!! My most common use of annihilation is when I am behind (on life bar 2) and the other guy is still on life bar 1. Rarely does he have half a bar left for me to take, so the damage potential of Annihilation is not the important thing. .
1 Like
Killer Instinct Season 3: Everything is OP
Technically everything is already OP in this game, if it weren’t for the breaker system KI would be worse than Marvel!