I’m back with another useful chart~ I was curious about just how much damage enders are worth using overall, so I decided to make a chart comparing each character’s strongest ender (usually a damage ender) vs their second strongest. The results were very interesting! The damage is measured in actual points of damage as opposed to percent for greater accuracy–just keep in mind that 4 points of damage = 1%.
Notable things:
Some characters have a pretty significant damage difference between their best and second best, especially at higher ender levels. For the most part though, it still seems like high level damage enders aren’t that much better than just going for HKD or launcher.
Thunder, Fulgore, Kim, Tusk, Mira, Raam, and Eyedol’s warrior body should almost certainly stick to damage ender at higher levels.
Shago’s exchange and HKD enders do exactly the same damage at all levels.
TJ’s damage ender does 72 damage (plus PD) at all ender levels.
Riptor’s damage ender does no damage on the last hit. Funky. In addition, her groundbounce ender overtakes her HKD ender in damage at level 4.
Omen’s carry and exchange enders do almost the same damage at all levels!
Aganos HKD ender actually outdamages most of the cast’s damage enders!
Cinder’s enders are extremely weird; at level 2 wallsplat and battery do the same damage, at level 3 battery overtakes it, but at level 4 wallsplat once again is the more damaging of the two.
Once kim hits level 3-4 this massive damage divide emerges between her damage ender and her other options, at which point it’s really her only good option.
Rash’s wallsplat ender outdamages his exchange ender. Weird!
So, holy ■■■■ Raam. Please calm down man, your damage ender is too sick. Like rash, his wallsplat ender outdamages his HKD ender, I imagine because of the kryll on HKD ender. Also noteworthy that with kryll on the opponent damage ender will outdamage the others by an even greater factor, as it has the longest animation.
In instinct, Eyedol’s launcher ender does more damage than his damage ender at lower levels because the lightning fully combos afterward now.
Updated the chart to also have sheets comparing the damage of shadow enders vs meterless enders. Characters that get a followup after their shadow ender will be highlighted in green. The most notable thing, I think, is that Mira actually does less damage on level 3 shadow ender. Ouch!
Reset damage would be very interesting I think, if difficult to collect. How much damage does a character’s one-chance->common reset do? So Wulf manual->dash thru->cr.LP->magic series->one chance combo->ender.
It’d be a beast to collect (because what does a “common” reset look like?), but I think it’d be very interesting to see. Could potentially give a feel across the cast for how viable resets are vs pure damage attempts.
If it were just one reset per character I think I could do something like that, but it would be a fair bit more effort to do it for every ender level. And if we’re looking at meterless vs shadow opener, that opens up more messiness…still, these sheets took a couple hours at most. I can’t imagine it’d take more than a few days to do it for resets.
Fun trivia though–if your goal is to do shadow opener > one chance > ender, there’s actually no reason to use his magic series, as it’s less damage than crouch LP x3 and becomes negative on block. The only advantage is less KV.
I’ve been meaning to take the discusson of Jago’s current damage figures to the Jago 3.4 thread, but I’ll make a few points now:
I agree that it seems correct to go for the launcher instead of the damage. You pick up the 2-3% difference with a tiny juggle followup, maybe even just with sweep or button into flipout, and obviously you get better oki afterwards.
Shadow damage ender on its own is…terrible. Don’t do this unless you’re cashing out a juggle, or you think an additional ~5% will clear a bar.
Jago’s 2-meter shadow fireball, fireball xx shadow DP cashout is…surprisingly not terrible. Often it’s worth an extra 20% over damage ender. The damage fulcrum here is the shadow fireball, which deals a neat little grip of damage and raises the ender level, but even if you’re already at level 4 it seems to manage around 15% extra damage most of the time. Really, you need damage scaling and/or guts scaling to kick in to pull the extra damage down to something like 12% where it’s definitely not worth it unless you’re finishing off a lifebar.
That said, I doubt that focusing on filling two bars for the 2-meter cashout is a valid goal for Jago going forward. Previously it made sense to forego damage cashouts in favour of meter ender to accelerate meter gain for the big damage cashout, but foregoing that damage on the premise that you can turn 2 bars into 20% and then play the subsequent neutral without meter probably doesn’t make sense – just go for the launcher or the wall splat every time and take your mixup. Some might think this makes Jago less degenerate, but I think this makes Jago a little less thoughtful: Jago leans on meter in places in neutral, but using that meter detracted from the goal of cashing out big, so you had to balance those concerns a little. Now you just use the meter.
Meter ender suffers from all of this. Jago makes enough meter in neutral to have a bar on standby to get through fireballs or punish unsafe stuff or make a DP safe most of the time without resorting to meter ender, so it probably only makes sense to use meter ender if you end a round mid-combo.
On a petty note: it’s a bit weird that Fulgore, the shoto with the better neutral, also cashes out a little harder right now. (No pitchforks, I swear!)
Putting all this together, it’s basically launcher-sweeps, launcher-flipouts, and wall splats all day for Jago now. That’s good if you’ve labbed up Jago’s oki I guess, but it’s not really my thing, so I might not be playing Jago as much lately. That’s probably okay, because I’ve been playing Jago for a long time now, so I should probably take a break.
Never noticed this, but I did notice that, if the Practice data is to be believed, Riptor’s medium and heavy linkers advance the damage scaling by one hit per hit, as opposed to one hit per linker which (I think) is the intended behaviour. It amounts an extra one or two hits of damage scaling to most moves in a combo on average, I guess.
I’ve brought this up before in the bug thread. It could be that the devs looked at it and figured, “well yeah it’s incorrect behaviour, but changing it would technically be a buff and we don’t want to shake balance up.” It’s not ideal, but it’s not enough to deter me from playing Riptor or considering her one of the strongest characters in the game right now, so I can see why it might not get changed.
The thing is, fulgore’s damage ender cashes out more relative to his HKD ender, but it’s still not actually that strong. Functionally, it means he’s giving up more damage to go for setups. Do keep in mind he’s also generally worse at raising the ender level than jago is, and has less meter available. Overall he still hits a lot less hard than jago.
EDIT: So actually, I was totally wrong! Fulgore’s damage ender actually does more than jago’s at higher ender levels. Even so, he’s still a low damage character for the reasons I mentioned.
Just realized the way I did the chart could have been much simpler to read just by raising the ender level to a certain point then doing opener>ender for a combo that doesn’t cash out any white life…I’m gonna update the chart to work that way so the information is easier to parse.
Will also be correcting some mistakes–for example, fulgore’s second strongest ender is actually launcher, not HKD.
EDIT: Using the opener>ender method to test damage is turning up really different numbers for shadow enders, which makes me think that the damage calculation for that is different from just cashing out PD + ender level damage. It seems like the amount of PD actually modifies the total damage of the ender beyond just calculating ender level; thus, in heavier combos (e.g. counterbreakers) they’ll be doing more damage. So…I’m not sure if I should even leave those sheets up, what do you guys think?
I would argue this is how jago should always have been played; pre-season 3 you had launcher into unbreakable sweep, now you have the flipout/sweep mixup. It would have been even better in season 2, actually, because launcher ender did more damage. Even with jago’s pre-nerf level 4 damage ender (which we can assume to be 7 points stronger) it’s still only doing around 4% more than current launcher ender–in practical terms, the difference is even less due to the damage of the followup. It’s true that since his neutral is so good it was viable to lean on damage ender and make up for it with wind kicks and whiff punishes, but I don’t think you could really argue that it was ever the better way to play.
Very useful information, thanks for compilling it and sharing
Some of the values in there seem a bit at odds with what IG said their goal was for ender types and damage associated. Hopefully it gets tweaked to be a bit more consistent.
Well, I agree some of them could be tweaked (BOY Raam’s HKD ender is weak, and what’s the deal with rash) but at the same time, when I see fulgore with his weak HKD ender compared to his launcher all I can think is…yeah, good. It makes sense that he should sacrifice more damage for setups than most characters, because his setups are just so good for a character with his neutral. As for aganos and maya, with their powerful HKD enders, I think it’s important to remember ender damage isn’t the only factor in a combo; it might seem off that maya is doing more than jago when doing normal > opener > heavy double > ender, but you have to keep in mind that jago has better options to raise ender levels in a lockout, with around the world and shadow laser sword.
Honestly on the jago point I have to say, I don’t really think he needed the damage nerfs. I think what really needed tweaking is the level of unbreakable damage/healing he gets in instinct.
Okay, HUGE update to the sheet! No longer does it only compare a character’s strongest enders to the second strongest. Now it compares any of their enders to any of their other enders! (excluding TJ’s damage/advantage enders )
How does it work? Well, at the top right corner of each of the ender boxes you’ll see a small triangle pointing down. Clicking this triangle will open a dropdown menu that allows you to select the ender to be compared. When you select an ender, the damage values in the table will change using the magic of NESTED IF STATEMENTS! Then, the chart will automatically take these adjusted values and recalculate them in the difference column.
With this, if you’ve ever been curious about ANY ender value in the game, not only can you view it, you can compare it to any of that character’s other enders. Technically, I could also make a table comparing every character’s enders to every other character’s enders but…that’d be a lot of work. Maybe a job for another day.
Nice work, dude. I love these educational posts people make almost as much as I love news about new content.
To kinda branch off from an earlier tidbit in this thread about juggle enders:
I know this was probably already factored into a lot of people’s gameplans, but if I’m in a position to do so, I think going for a wallsplat (or Tusk’s Stagger ender) is almost always one of of the best enders to go for. They usually have okay damage (not great, but okay) and lead into a myriad of cool things. Throw for a free ~10% and hard knockdown, sweep for a similar but less damaging effect, a nice fat counter breaker to punish people for trying to break your sweep or throw tech, or even just a happy little reset. As the chart says usually worth sacrificing some damage at lower ender levels, and some characters aren’t too far off as far as damage on a wallsplat anyway.
I agree for the most part, though I think it’s worth noting that for tusk’s stagger ender you can’t combo a sweep and actually landing the throw outside the corner requires a microwalk before the throw.
I think that’s fair. Lose some of the innate utility (especially now that you can’t do 4 or 5 of them in a single combo) for the ability to do it anywhere you want.
It’s been a bit, but I decided to update the spreadsheet to look a bit nicer. Now, the number in the box will change background color depending on how much damage the ender does for its level; the lowest will be red, the highest will be green, and the midpoint will be yellow. When you change the ender selected in the box, the chart will automatically update the background color of the cells. Hopefully this will make it so the number in the cell means a bit more without having to compare it to all other enders of the same level.
