How do you deal with Air Juggles?

I don’t have the reaction time to ever predict what these normal will be so I just let them rock and then people like this show up and I just give up. It’s 50/50 when I try to guess break here. I know which one are the heavies but there is no way to predict or time my pull of the breaker.

http://xboxdvr.com/gamer/CRIS178/video/20519202

Look for the easier breaking points. Or you can just let them rock. In that video, I saw lots of heavies and lights and a few mediums.

You can react to the recapture. You probably can’t react to many other normals in a juggle, but you can’t react to ground combo manuals or most linkers either, so they’re kinda the same thing. It’s not clear how that first combo ended up at 40% since we don’t get to see the start of it, but it doesn’t seem like the Rash player is finding wildly excessive amounts of damage with these juggles otherwise. It’s clear that you got beaten twice in the neutral/oki after the first combo, and sometimes lifebars just disappear like that in KI.

Unless a they opponent has or is close to having the meter to cash out (or they have a recapture), it’s best not to break if you’re unsure. The risk of being counter-broken exponentially exceeds the damage of most juggles.

Stick to things you can recognize, maybe get them convinced you’ll break so you can bait out counters.

most jugglers only have a few combos. Its up to you to notice what patterns they follow, then predict the move they will use.

In most cases with Rash players, that sweeping axe kick is the main button they press when they are far away, and looking to close the distance in the juggle. When you see that they are decently far away, be ready to break that kick.

(No clue what strength it is.)

I kinda agree with this. There’s patterns to most juggles and people will stick to it. I’ve learned to alternate between attempting a break and letting it rock just to see the possibilities.
Btw, Rash’s axe kick is HK.

Axe is heavy, mace is medium.

I’m not sure this is quite true. The main risk of guess-breaking in a grounded context, is in the possibility of just being wrong, locking out, and eating a high-damage lockout confirm of some sort. Whilst counter-breaking is a possibility, it’s usually not as good for the offender in risk-reward terms as just letting the defender hang themselves with a lockout. Even against reactable auto doubles where the defender knows what to break and counter-breaking is a threat the offender should represent, it’s still good for the defender to attempt the breaker something like half of the time despite the threat of the counter breaker.

In the air if you lock out then they either get a very similar juggle to what they had in mind before, or they have to confirm with a recap and/or spend meter to get substantial damage. It’s typically a bit harder for most characters to find their lockout damage, so I suspect it skews towards being worthwhile to sometimes attempt a guess-break late (>50kv?) in a juggle.

Of course, that depends on which character is doing the juggling, and I haven’t ran any numbers or studied this in-depth or anything like that.

Well it’s not alwyas about the damage from a juggle. could be a setup and breaking that juggle thwarts the setup. But of course that applies to any combo as well…if you’ve studied your combos that is.

Setups are damage, in an expected sense. You get them after a combo, and you often trade explicit combo damage for expected setup damage in KI depending on how you choose to end a combo. If I felt like this aspect changed substantially depending on the defender’s breaking decisions or whether the combo is grounded or a juggle, then I guess I’d bring it up.