Combo breaking system revamp

The combo system needs work

First season when breaking a combo the person breaking it was at an advantage and for some characters that was a problem like saberwulf

Second season had a better option on how fast yu wanted to rise so yu can use wake properties or quick stand and retreat

Third season combo breaker results to those who have the best range or is turtling so basically if your gargos advantage on every combo breaker same with glacius cus his forward med punch will hit you in perfect range spinal can’t be rushed so he constantly runs from you until he gets cornered eyedol has range and retreat so he has both and etc.

They need to take a look at this just flipping them out in a neutral range is not going to make it more balanced

Also air combo breakers put them full screen that means once YOU break gargos he can call minions portal punch chip damage

I personally think this one small mechanic can change character tier ranks drastically this is not something to be over looked

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Ive noticed lately that vs Glacius and Gargos Im at a disadvantage with Omen or whomever I use. But Ive also noticed that against some characters Im at an advantage with Omen.

I’m pretty sure zoners inherently benefit the most consistently from successfully combo breaking, since a reasonably safe distance between them and the opponent in neutral is what lets them thrive.

Though the changes to combo breaking in S3 probably helped them a lot on the receiving end, especially outside of the corner.

Getting broken or breaking with Wulf is the worst experience so far. If you go light ragged edge you will be pushed away, but if they break you when doing a back forward LK linker you might end up close, and still Wulf is more negative than other characters so it’s always a risky situation.

But you aren’t talking about the breaking system itself, but the distances in “neutral” in this case. I thought you were going to talk about the breaking system itself.

It was not a problem in KI1 and 2 as far as I remember. The fact that some characters get advantage with this is 100% new. I hope they consider something different for a new game.

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I tend to agree, especially when you consider the fact that Rash is +9 after a break. With some characters it is still their turn even IF you successfully break their combo.

I think that a combo break should reset everybody to 0.

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I have some ideas that could **fix or make a more balance aproach ** in the combo and breaking systems , they are all linked so explaining my idea in this spesific situation (breaking) without the detalis on my views in general on the combo system could be missunderstood .

Basically i think that the player that execute a combo breaker should get a little reward in the position after the combo breaker , similar to season one but not like season one . This little advantage is based on each character tools and resources. With the combo system like it is now this wont work the way i have in mind.

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I don’t understand why the breaker should get an advantage. The only reason they got there was because they messed up on their defense.

The only way to go is to bring it to complete nuetral and that is extremely difficult. The only way i see that happening is if they change the distance for EVERY single MU and even then there is a lot of room for error.

I feel that the combo system for the moment is fine. Maybe adjust some distances. Zoners will obviously get an advantage. Nothing i see that we can do there

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The fairest way would be both players are floored with a hard knock down. But this slows the pace of the game. Soft knock down could work too I guess. But flip out is making it unbalanced for some.

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What does “complete neutral” mean? Opposite ends of the screen at perfect 0 advantage will be a huge advantage for zoners. At close range at perfect 0 advantage will be a huge advantage for rushdown characters and those with 6 frame mediums. Due to the very nature of certain characters wanting to be at certain screen spaces, “complete neutral” can’t be achieved.

Even “both players floored with a hard knockdown” doesn’t change anything. You might as well make them flip out at 0, because that’s the same thing but faster. If you knock them down, then they both just wake up and they’re at 0, but it took 2 extra seconds and we achieved nothing except giving the players a lot of time to think about what they’re gonna do when they wake up. But it won’t really change much about how the interactions after a breaker occur.

I think the idea of the combo breaker getting slight advantage (+1 or +2) is fine. 0 is also fine, but it should not be in the attacker’s favor for what I hope are obvious reasons. The breaking character takes a risk to break – they need to be rewarded with a bit of space and a bit of advantage. As long as they’re out of range of any super risk free attack (which is mostly true in this game) then that’s the best that can be done, I think.

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When i said “complete neutral” i was thinking of a theoretical position where both characters would be at an equal advantage. Of course this is almost impossible and even changing every MU individually wouldn’t fix all of the problems.

I kinda don’t understand why the breaker should be at an advantage. Nuetral state at least. I always thought of comvo breaking as a last resort answer due to a failure in your defense. Your reward should be getting of a combo and some breathing room. I don’t see why the breaker should have the advantage at that point (certain MUs will allow that however, like zoners vs rushdowns)

Being at an advantage can help the defender avoid being immediately smothered again. If the goal of a breaker is “some space and some breathing room” then I think it’s important that they aren’t immediately at huge risk of being opened up again. This is why the attacker can’t be at advantage, for instance.

Being 0 after a breaker is largely fine, but I think +1 or +2 is also fine because it helps the defender keep a bit of the breathing space. I would only really complain if I had a combo breaker that was minus on hit, or if the advantage was + a ton (enough for a heavy to beat out a jab, for instance, like Rash’s +9, although Rash’s breaker sends the offensive character almost full screen away so he can almost never make use of these extra frames in any meaningful way).

I understand the point of view of breakers being a last resort for failing on defense, but I think it’s not quite that simple. Clearly a lot of the character balance in this game is designed around expecting people to get hit and sometimes combo break – it’s not a last resort, but rather an expected course of action in most matchups. So when thinking about the system, we shouldn’t believe you played bad and getting out of the combo is reward enough, there has to be more consideration taken because it happens 10 times or more per match, even between skilled players. That’s why the lockout system is so important for the game; that is your true punishment for failing on defense.

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Is Rash also positive on flipout though? Of late if I do a flipout on Rash, the same I do on every other character, I’m generally grabbed out of my own flipout, or a shadow ram is performed even before I hit the ground. I only see this with Rash. In most cases if somebody is expecting a grab it techs… with Rash I lose 100% of the time.

Not sure if Rash flips out faster than everyone else (there are some character flip-out differences, but there are definitely lots of flipout setups he has to hold just like everyone else), but flipouts in general are very space/time dependent. Hisako’s flipouts can very often lead to the opponent landing before her, for instance. It happens almost all the time in “accidental” flipout scenarios, and can happen on occasion even when you did mean to flip someone out while you were airborne.

I’ll address the OP more fully after I get back to the hotel. Long story short though - Infil is right.

I thought about writing a big, long breakdown, but instead I’ll simply say that there really isn’t any version of the breaker system that will not favor some character or style over another. Any form of hard or soft knockdown will favor the character who broke (as they get to better reestablish their preferred spacing), and any form of flipout reset to neutral will necessarily favor one archetype over another. A closer reset will favor rushdown characters, while a further reset will favor characters who zone or are stronger in the midrange. Even individual tooling of spacing and frame advantage would not guarantee that the spacing is not what either player wants or prefers at a given moment in time, and would add an unnecessary bit of MU arcana to boot.

Basically, there is no clean answer to this topic, and I think the relatively simple system we have now is probably as close as you’ll get. No one remembers breakers granting any particular advantage in KI2 because all the characters had functionally the same toolset, not because the breaker system itself was tuned particularly well.

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The other under lying thing about how the current post-CB situation works out is that it truly affects the meta of how the combo system works. In S1 and S2 since breaking a combo led to either a hard or soft knockdown respectively, it was always the smarter decision to go for short, harder to break combos since you minimized risk vs a successful CB. With it now resetting things back to neutral, this finally allows players to start doing longer combos without having them be put into a knockdown situation, thus completely shifting the combo breaking meta. I think the devs really wanted that emphasis on longer combos so resetting to neutral was the smartest thing they could have done to finally enforce that onto the players.

Like others have already stated, there’s literally no way you could ever make a post-CB situation truly neutral as it will always favor one character over another. The fact that post-CB even allows both players to be standing is great.

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What if he breaks when the opponent is close to the corner? Is that a different story?

Yeah, that’s the only time it would really come into play, which is why +9 is too good of a number. But that doesn’t happen too often, so most of the time it won’t matter that much.

For me im fine with breakers favoring zoners. There arent many full on zoners in the game and the characters that can zone don’t always want to depending on the mu. I’d rather breakers favor Kilgore than favor thunder or raam.

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Don’t know what you are talking about but breaking combos while airborne still causes a soft knock down like in season 2.

Also, reverting the breaker system to season 2 would be horrible for keep-away characters like Kilgore, Kan-Ra and Eagle.

Ra needed that high damage output and hard to break combos in S2 because of how dangerous breakers were for him. Since they took that away from him he would be trash in S3 with S2 breaker rules

I dunno what characters the OP plays, but Jago/Shago/Omen’s air breakers send the opposing character full screen instead of just slightly horizontally like every other character. Maybe he’s talking about that. Admittedly, it does suck for Jago (because he almost never prefers to be full screen) but it doesn’t suck too bad for Shago or Omen because they’re usually okay with that position.