Breaker System Overhaul?

I’ve been hearing some chatter about making tweaks to the Breaker system in some KI streams. Apparently the pros are fed up with guessing games but the casuals love the current system. What do you guys think?

  • Leave Breaker system unchanged
  • Breakers should be tied to Shadow or Instinct Gauge
  • Breakers should be tied to a new Breaker Gauge

0 voters

The pros are fed up with it because they don’t want to change. They want to be able to do the same thing time after time and never have to change, then whine when they get broken and claim it’s a guess.

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None of those options - I opt just to remove instinct cancels after breakers.

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As a lowly “casual” scrub I’m going to say leave it alone, it’s basically rock paper scissors. How can you whine about that being random? You’re not going to tell someone to memorize the way your opponent throws out paper so they can counter it are you? If top tier players are sick of “guess breaking” they need to up their game and make their combos harder to break, not complain and try to get the system changed to cater to their tastes. Again I’m not by any means a professional player so whatever.

KI is meant to be an easily accessible game, newbies can drop in and still enjoy it but its deep enough for hardcore players to really sink their teeth into. That’s why we have manuals, counter breakers and all that jazz. If you can’t handle some people mashing buttons and breaking your ■■■■, do something about it. I mean when someone guesses wrong and gets locked out and you pound them with a 60% combo that’s the trade off for supposed guess breaking.

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Most of the breakers people do are more educated guesses. I feel the only stuff you can react to Genuinely, is Heavies. But, that’s my Opinion, and I’m not a pro.

#YET

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Just in case of this actually becoming true, as I feel like it will, I have to learn new setups for Jago’s Instinct. I really think Instinct Breakers will become obsolete.

I never really understood why Jagos chose to IC breakers instead of waiting and ICing a lockout lvl4 combo, fireball ender, into fireball juggle. You get more out of it that way

If it has to change, I say have it cost a 1/5th of instinct meter.

I’m mostly fine with it though.

Because it’s a bit harder to do that, and If I’m getting beat and I’m about to lose, and I see the medium, i’ll try to hit it and get some health back to stay in the game. But this is why people call this cheap, as it’s an unblockable setup. And it’s not fair to the person to not be able to do anything, while i get 30%+ health back. Then, A combo or 2 later, and I’ve won.

I usually do that too, but sometimes it’s hard to lockout somebody If they know what they are doing. Now, I’m gonna have to place more emphasis on this, as IC from Breaker Nerf might become a reality.

If you’re going to make a post like this then it must be backed up by an educated thought process in which examines all angles of the argument.

Most of the casual audience is fine with the way combo breaking currently works in the game because they can just mash buttons or guess all the time and get lucky. Then at a very high level Combo Breaking is a powerful tool that can also be abused to a great extent. In my opinion Season 2 just promotes constant breaking and or guess breaking because of how much it devalues the combo system. I finally opened someone up and commence to perform my combo that instantly gets broken thus resetting everything back to neutral all because of that lucky guess break on my light or medium manual. Then you have the problem of being rewarded on top of that combo break by canceling into instinct which characters like Jago or Spinal are so devastating. The manual system in season 2 is also contributing to this problem because it encourages more guess breaking. Opposed to Season 1 where I had a 33.3% chance to break this manual which lead to a much high risk to get locked out and now in season 2 I know that if I got hit by this medium linker I now have a 50% chance to guess correctly on this next manual.

The counter breaker game was suppose to combat all of this because the person doing a combo now has to play this 50/50 mind game on each linker or double on whether or not my opponent is going to break or not. This all goes back to high level play where most players don’t want to take that risk and would just rather continue my combo and do my best to mix it up. Speaking for myself I almost never play the counter breaker game because I don’t want to risk the 50/50 instead of getting guaranteed damage; for example if me and my opponent are both in danger and I confirm into a shadow linker (my mind is telling me that he has to break this or he loses the game) so I counter break. I whiff the counter breaker because I had the wrong read and then I lose the game. For me at a high level I will always just let the shadow linker rock and go into ultra because at the end of the day the worst that can happen is he combo breakers and everything resets back to neutral again (again unless of course you cancel the breaker into instinct which is complete BS to begin with).

High level players don’t like the fact that guess breaking is being encouraged in this game and it needs to be toned down a bit. Going back to the old days of KI1 and KI2 combo breaking was very rare because it was extremely hard to do and had to be done on certain frames of animation; In today’s KI I just mash and get rewarded.

Combo breaking at the end of the day should be simple to understand which Double Helix did a great job of translating from 90’s to 2013, but now we are facing the consequences of that simpleness. I would not be a fan of making combo breakers cost shadow meter however I am a fan of giving combo breakers their own potential resource; just call if the breaker meter. Every time you hit with an attack you build a little of breaker meter and then you can use it later down the road to break manuals when you really need it. You could still break auto doubles and linkers as usual. I really like how Shadow Jago has been designed where he will be the first character in the game that doesn’t have to spend an entire meter to create a shadow move and he can choose to spend parts of it for more mini powerful version of his specials. Perhaps this design philosophy can carry over to other things as well. Another idea is to make combo breakers cost a small amount of instinct meter.

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A guess is a guess no matter what. If anything, S1 was worse than S2 because unlike the medium and heavy autodoubles, you can’t react to them - EVER. That means you’re guessing 100% of the time with only a success rate of about 33.33%. With S2, it takes less guessing since you can’t use certain manuals after certain linkers. The developers have brought this up in the past.

This idea is terrible because it means the 1st player to get a combo basically gets a free pass. So, I hit you 1st at the beginning of the fight, start my combo, and because you have not yet done a combo and completed it yourself, you can’t break mine that I’m hitting you with, so I automatically win the game (or at least the 1st health bar). Basically, 1st hit wins. That’s not a competition - that’s luck, and I thought luck was something you guys wanted to remove from the equation… sigh

Luck will ALWAYS be a part of fighting games (and really, any game in general). Guessing in fighting games is here to stay, and those of you who want to get rid of it or make it harder, well, too bad for you then - you’ll have to learn how to live with it, because it’ll always be here, whether you’re a pro player or entirely new to FGs - it matters not…

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I worded this terribly but breaker meter would only be used to break manuals. Everything else can be combo broken as usual and counter broken as usual. None the less it’s just a idea and obviously it would have to iterated on. At the end of the day the game needs to reward reaction breaking instead of constantly guessing everything and as of right now it’s not accomplishing that.

Okay, but as I said, if you can’t react to manuals (which is something the devs have already said isn’t humanly possible - like with the light ADs), you’re always (and still) guessing regardless of whether such a meter is implemented. Even worse, what happens if you guess wrong? Do you lose that meter? Does it stay? What?

Manuals make the game harder because no matter what, you’re guessing - the community expressed their distaste for this (and apparently still do with the ADs), so the devs changed it up so that you could only do certain manuals after certain linkers, taking some of the guesswork away. What’s next? Only being able to do certain ADs after certain linkers? Please…

If anything, and this is just off the top of my head, I think the devs simply need to speed up the frames for medium and heavy ADs so that they’re harder to break, but still able to be broken via reaction.

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Since the complaints seem to stem from the the lack of a true way to punish someone that is guess breaking since counter breakers are just a 50/50 why not introduce a new combo mechanic? Something specifically designed to get a lock out from guessers like Hisako’s delayed doubles. Feint manuals or something of that sort.

Interesting. Can you imagine what it would be like if everyone had Hisako’s ability to hold ADs (of course, it wouldn’t be good for her, but that’s besides the point)?

How about we stop acting like we absolutely have to do manuals? Why is it such a big deal to do a heavy AD after that medium linker to catch a guesser?

If he’s guessing, he’ll lock out and you’ll get a free combo. If he’s not, you’ll get broken and you know he’s not guessing. If you get away with it, you can go back to your manuals because your opponent will be wary of the heavy AD and not want to guess. It’s not a hard concept.

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Sorry, whether a break is a guess or a read, if the right buttons are pressed at the right time, it’s a legitimate break.

The high end players who are complaining should be using more Counter Breakers, as the entire reason for their existence is to punish someone’s break attempt. It seems they don’t like CBs because they are risky - but yet they have no problem complaining that someone is taking a risk by breaking their combo. It is super confusing.

If you want breaks tied to a meter, feel free to go play MKX. Leave these unnecessary changes out of Killer Instinct.

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Exactly.

I realize that my skill is moderate at best, but in my humble opinion as it pertains to the breaker system, the complaining about guess breaking and all that really comes down to bruised egos. Complaints can be made all day long about risk and whether it is worth it or not, but ultimately it falls on you. You either win or lose based on a series of choices of the course of the fight, and those choices must take place inside the gameplay system.

Both players are constantly taking risks. They’re taking a risk by “guessing” and possibly extending your combo due to lockout, or worse extending and resetting your KV by counter breaker. You’re taking risks by either performing the manual, using an easier to break AD, or dropping a counter breaker. However, if there is a pattern of them consistently breaking your stuff, and you aren’t willing to drop in a counter breaker to punish them, then aren’t you just letting them punish you for not be willing to risk one aspect of the system? You’ve closed your game off from one aspect of the system, and your opponent has probably realized it and is punishing you for it. Why should he stop if you’re not at least going to show him that you’re willing to try and stop him.

Also, if you are unwilling to use a system that the developer has put in place (one the core gameplay is designed upon), then what exactly motivates them to create a new system that you may or may not use?

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give a chance to play the game, without beeing forced to play the breaker game too much.
untill they dont do that, nothing gonna change.

The breaker game is the identity of KI, if you don’t like it, KI isn’t for you

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