Fix Counter Breakers In Patch 3.7 Counter Breakers Sucks Hard In S3

I Just Can’t Stand Doing a Counter Breaker & getting Late Lockout Then I Get Punished I Just Loss My Rank from 200 all theway back to 900 Because it :poop::rage: What Are You Doing IG.I’m Surprised It Wasn’t In the Patch Notes Counter Breaking Doesn’t work Properly Anymore

There isn’t anything wrong with Counter breakers right now. the are multiple threads on this topic that also have advice on how to get it right.

If you CB on a juggle hit, use the CB as the juggle hit…dont push a button and then go for the CB.

Same if you are going to CB a medium AD…just use the CB as the medium AD and if they break you will catch them

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This has been in KI since the beginning. Take it or leave it, but it isn’t going to change for you.

With the exception of manuals, where you’ll need to buffer the counter during the startup rather than anywhere during the attack, nothing has changed for counter breakers between seasons. Adapt.

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If you want to learn how counter breakers work in S3, read this post: A complete exposé on counter breakers: why they work, why they don't, and what you can do

If you are doing CBs too late, they won’t work. If you are trying to counter break the startup of manuals (including juggles), such that you are trying to catch timing lockouts before an active break window, they won’t work. But this rule applies to only manuals.

They work just fine in every other situation.

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I stopped using counter breakers online. With the rollback and p2p lag, they rarely ever work unless done from a raw, hard read. They were changed at the start of s3, simply put, now your timing has to be on the exact frame they press buttons. Anytime sooner or later and it fails, hence why mashing in certain situations as defender is viable, as you can cause a timing lockout.

The counter breakers functioning differently are the reason alot of people dropped the game at the start of season 3 and stopped streaming it. How fun is it to continuously open people up and have them yolo break everything, only to get the right read, counter them, but your CB won’t work even though you had the read because you were a ms behind.

This isn’t street fighter or 3rd strike. It’s nearly impossible to get a counter break in some situations due to the speed of the game. I think it was a bad change overall and alot of people do to. But the “combat designer” thinks it was a great idea, but can’t seem to figure out why the player base numbers keep plummeting.

Let me ask you something

If I use an attack and you don’t block it because you reacted a Ms late… Is it fair?

Yes, it’s fair. As fair is that if I use a CB a ms late, then it shouldn’t work

You may be getting the right read, but you are not getting it on time.[quote=“anon26401541, post:5, topic:21153”]
It’s nearly impossible to get a counter break in some situations due to the speed of the game
[/quote]

This is false. You don’t have the timing, simple as that. You can CB in every situation before any masher could break you. And if the other person is a masher… then it’s pretty easy to bait into a CB

IMO you are confusing missplay with bad design. You are not understanding how CBs work. Infil provided you a thread that may help you to understand and use better this mechanic

Also, most people insists to punish CBs with ±10% throws, when a CB is a minimum 35% combo for any characters, up to 50/75% depending of character and resources. If someone punish my failed CBs with a throw, I could fail 3 and succed in one, and I would be still getting more than my opponent

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I hope you don’t actually believe this is true. It’s maybe the most inaccurate thing I’ve ever heard about counter breakers.

I mean, you could read that long post that I linked right above you but even if you don’t, it is, like… super super easy to just go into training mode, or play VS with a friend, and verify in about 3 seconds that this is patently false.

Apologies for the slight thread necro but I had to say something. What the heck is up with so many people in the KI community who can’t (or don’t want to) get very basic information correct about how the game works? This isn’t even a matter of whether you think they are a good strategic idea, it’s just literally talking about how the mechanic works, things that are easily verifiable in training mode by every player. I’ve seriously never seen anything like this for any other game.

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I honestly don’t have issues with CBs unless that match is super laggy.

They work fine to me. Honestly if people are having issues pulling them off then it’s on them. I hardly use them, but when I do, they work. :slight_smile:

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I agree. CBs are fine. I just feel the window is too long cos I’ve gotten CBs that feel like they should have gone away by the time I actually catch the opponent. I’ve been on both ends of the late-CB point I’m making.

My only issue with counter breakers are the lengths of catch windows varying depending on when they are triggered. You could have forever or a frame to catch someone depending on what attack you use it after. I just wish there was a set number for every CB trigger.

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I feel the same way sometimes. Sometimes it’ll last virtually no frames or it’ll be around for an eternity. It legit feels weird there isn’t a predetermined value.

There is supposed to be a predetermined range (as small as 25f and at most 30f or something like that) but yeah, for some weird moves the range doesn’t seem to apply. But it’s relatively rare for that to happen (only a couple moves in the game, in my experience), the vast majority of moves have very large windows.

Whatever. BS like this in the video below is what I base my opinion on…

: Can someone review this video and explain why my counter breaker failed?

The post where someone explained what happened and gave you a solution for it? GGs :thumbsup:

For the record you do have to press the counter breaker before they break, so there is a restriction there, just like you can’t block a frame or two after you get hit. Doesn’t mean you only have a 1 frame window when you correctly counter breaker before they break. You were late in that video.

To be fair, the video in the link you posted actually was a bug that I reported and got fixed in a patch somewhere along the line (might have been the last patch, or the one before). It only seemed to happen to a few characters (mostly S1 characters) that you could go directly from opener to counter break and if they just happened to break on the exact same frame as your counter breaker, they would timing lockout. It only happened in the transition from opener to counter break, though, not if you did it mid-combo on the same frame.

It was a 1 frame window and it was incredibly difficult to reproduce in training (probably 1 in 10 tries I got it to work), and like I said it only happened for a few characters, and now it’s fixed.

That said, you shouldn’t base your entire presumption about how counter breakers work on these one-off, hard to reproduce setups. In general, after you counter break, you will catch roughly 25 frames of break attempts. You must be early, though… if they break 1 frame ahead of your counter break, then it won’t work (as has been the case since Season 1 launched for all auto-doubles, linkers, and shadow linkers). This of course makes sense, because if they input a correct break before you counter break, they will obviously just combo break you and no lockout will happen. Can you imagine the uproar if your successful combo break was rolled back and a counter breaker happened in these cases? There would be no other option if you wanted counter break attempts to be successful after a break attempt.

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One possible “solution” you might think about is receiving the combo break input, but then the game delays resolving it for a few frames, giving the opponent a chance to counter break. However, this has numerous problems:

  1. It doesn’t really solve anything. Let’s say you implement a delay of 1 frame (so if you break on frame 3, you can counter break up to and including frame 4). But now, if you counter break on frame 5 (ie, you are still 1 frame late, but just shifted), the exact same situation happens, and it doesn’t look any different to the player.

  2. So, ok, let’s say we increase the window to something big, like 10 frames, hoping that if we put it farther removed from the input, it will somehow feel better. But now we have a huge problem… how do you resolve situations where an opponent breaks less than 10 frames before the end of a combo? The 10 frame delay will apply, and the opponent will start doing his ender. Do you interrupt the ender and award the break? Or worse, what about on a reset? Does the opponent randomly get broken while he is sitting in neutral, perhaps during the start of his overhead reset?

And that’s not all, what about the feedback for the user? Let’s say you try to break a medium auto-double really late, but you accidentally input heavies. In the current game, this is a lockout and a big M will show over your head. What happens if the opponent cancels medium double into heavy linker? There’s two bad outcomes here: a) you will get a lockout indicator during the heavy linker AND you input heavies, so you will feel massively cheated, and b) there will be an M icon that appears over a heavy move, creating immensely confusing visual feedback.

So there really is no option other than to resolve breaks on exactly the frame they are input, if you want mid-combo lockouts to be possible.

And I will immediately clarify that the above is not quite true, because S1 and S2 applied a unique rule for manuals (perhaps it was even a bug); both break and counter break inputs were “stored” during all of hitstop and then resolved the first frame after. With this system you could counter break slightly late and it would be okay.

Could such a system be implemented for auto-doubles and linkers as well?

The answer is yes, but at a huge cost.

If you think about how the system worked, it basically queued up the break/counter break inputs until the end of the active break window, then applied them both simultaneously. For that to work for autos/linkers, you would have to queue up the inputs for the entire duration of the auto/linker. So for a move like Thunder’s heavy Triplax linker, it would be something like 80 frames of queuing. You would input both a breaker and a counter breaker “somewhere” in there, and then you would resolve it at the very end of the move.

Such a system has a big flaw that doesn’t show up when applied to manuals; you will be unable to confirm lockouts mid-move. Imagine trying to bait a guess break by doing heavy auto-double. In the current game, you see the lockout immediately, and maybe you do a light linker to buy yourself some extra confirm time, but then you go straight into the big juice. In the proposed system change, you won’t see the lockout until the end of the heavy auto-double, making confirms very difficult. You will run out of KV faster (since you will have to commit to more hits until you get the delayed information) and be unable to punish bad guesses nearly as much.

Basically, it would make counter breakers much better, but it would more or less force you to use counter breakers to overcome guess breaking, since it heavily nerfs a very legit, low-risk strategy for stopping guess breaks right now. And I can’t think of a change that would be more complained about by the community at large than “you must use counter breakers to stop guess breaking now”. It would make the current complaints about counter breakers look microscopic by comparison.

And that is why the breaker system is the way it is.

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counter breakers don’t work, this game is such a spam fest its ridiculous. I’ve never seen so much brain dead ness in anything ever than in this game, literally 95% of online players just come online to mash and that is it.

Just played like 15 games with a guy, he was playing pad and I only play on stick literally doing everything I can to counter break as fast as possible on juggles because they are non openers and not once did I get one. He broke first chance first frame(holding the break pad) on every combo, not once did I get a single juggle counter break, this game is completely broken in so many ways. People know it is and that is why it is such a oasis for mashers.

Whatever is awesome in theory about this game is completely nullified by the endless broken bs in it and the endless mashers online, literally have like a 5% chance to get a game where somebody isn’t mashing every button they can find endlessly, and even if you get a decent to good player, they could literally just insta break everything on pad, and on stick you can’t do anything about it.

How could developers who had all this bs in front of them for 3 years ignore it completely? WTF?!

Yeah, I’m mad, and I don’t care anymore, I’ve held my tongue for too long on this community and this game design. I’m an extremely chill guy but this is just insanity to try to enjoy for somebody with a brain, you literally have to ignore 95% bs to enjoy 5% beauty, amazing.

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