I don't understand what to do

I’m a level 50 glacius but you could not tell by how I play. I want to like him but I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong at all. Not even a little. I’ve watched a million videos and nothing helps.
How are you suppose to zone with him?? All of his attacks taken forever to start and end. Everyone I play against just blocks and moves in either with an attack or projectile that hits me before I even recover from a move. I try to use hail but it’s just so slow and obvious it doesn’t stop anyone. Shatter is a death sentence. Forward M for ice Lance just gets punished every single time. And when someone’s on me I cannot get away…my normals are always slower than theirs so they just keep spamming combos and if I try to move or hit then I just get hit. I have zero idea what’s going on. Whenevr I watch a video people have no problem getting the tools to work but every move I throw out is instantly punished. I loose to bronze,silver, gold killer (I’m gold) it doesn’t matter. I have over 400 maches with glacius and most of my wins are from beating brand new people or disconnects. Any advice would help because I’m about to quit the game. I understand fighting games are different, but at 3 hours a day playing with zero ground gained its a massive waste of time that I don’t have fun doing.

Maybe what you need is try a sub character against someone who is proficient with Glacius, so you can approach the match from the opposite side. This has helped me in the past when it comes to figuring out stuff like “How hard is this really?”

You could even use the CPU, turn the difficulty up high and try to rush it down with your best character and see what it does to stop you.

This may help.

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I actually saw this the other day…I can’t emulate anything in the video…for instance my hails are useless…everyone’s projectiles are faster and just destroy the hails or if I’m medium distance they block and move in. In the video opponents seem to just eat the shatters…but when I shatter even at closeer ranges people see it coming and hit me. My opponents just sesm to deal with everything I use with ease. Ranged combos get broken EVERY time because of how easy the tells are even when I mix it up.

Then maybe you’re making it too obvious what your game plan is. Perhaps you’re not making your opponent scared enough to block your hails. Whenever you do shatter, you have to make sure you have a hail ready to cover yourself. When you’re opponent is right in front of you waiting to block your hail, maybe you should try a mixup. Try a throw, a low, liquidize under and let the hail cover you on the way up, or use a jump lance into the hail to get an overhead. Once you get your momentum going, the opponent can start feeling helpless.

Also make sure you have good fundamentals. Use your AAs well.

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I guess my first question is, do you really want advice or do you just want commiseration? I think many of us who have played a lot of Glacius have shared moments of frustration with his slow moves and reactable gameplan. I share your experience of having lots of lopsided fights. I tend to win big or lose big - based on how well the opponent understands the matchup. Glacius has powerful strengths and terrible weaknesses. So you have my complete sympathy.

At the same time, you’ve already indicated in your first post, and then when @SonicDolphin117 tried to share with you some advice an unwillingness to accept that advice. If your attitude is “I can’t do that stuff.” Then for sure you are not going to get better. So we can all just agree that Glacius can be tough to use and move on. And I’m not being critical - there are things that would improve my gameplay that I just don’t want to put the effort into. So I don’t.

But I will also say that, if a slow, old, not very competitive fighter like me can get into Killer rank using Glacius, then you probably can too if you are willing to make a few adjustments to what you are doing. There are lots of good Glacius players (and @SonicDolphin117 is a great one) who would be happy to help you - but they can’t do anything if you aren’t interested in doing anything to improve.

Give yourself some credit. If you are in gold you likely know a thing or two and just need to improve your timing and make a few strategic changes to how you play. There are no magic bullets to winning but the key to Glacius is knowing what your opponents next move is likely to be and then countering it until you throw him off his game - then you can start doing what you want. You aren’t going to win fireball wars, and you aren’t just going to win throwing raw shatters out there. By far the most effective place for hail to be is above your head. Don’t think of it is a fireball. It’s a crossover blocking get out of jail free card. Light is the best for this because when you get hit it comes down and has a good chance of knocking your opponent out of his combo.

For more specific advice, maybe you could record some matches and throw them up for people to see. I did this years ago when spinal first came out and I was having a ton of trouble. I got some great advice that I still use today.

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Who the heck punishes ice lance? :open_mouth:

Sounds like what you’re probably missing most is the proper use of hail. As Andy says, the best place for it in a lot (a lot) of situations is right above your pretty alien head. People don’t just get caught by shatter - they get caught by shatter while they’re looking at hail and wondering (1) how they’re going to get past the bloody thing, and (2) whether or not an ice lance or yolo shoulder is about to come out.

Also, if someone’s pressure is wildly oppressive, don’t be afraid to puddle punch them. I actually think a puddle punch the very first time someone is sitting on top of your wakeup can be a good idea - it’ll give them something to think about whether it hits or not, and force them to think “maybe this guy isn’t free on wakeup.”

And yeah, maybe you might want to try out another character? Glacius has a very particular and unique gameplan - perhaps you’d have more fun running with someone else?

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Can you post some of your gameplay so we can see what’s going on? It’ll be easier for us to understand how to help your game plan.

First off sorry for not responding very promptly after all of these helpful posts, final exams are upon me. So it seems like I’m not using hail properly. Makes sense to me. Now my issue is don’t I have to hold a button down to keep the hail above my head? As storm points out, it should be the guessing game of my hail that allows my shatter, but I would have to release my hail to begin the shatter input. What stops my opponent from simply jumping or moving backwards out of shatters range? This is often what happens to me. Now I did take some of this advice as: use hail more often which netted me my first win vs a killer the other day. However I still fall short consistently.

Lastly I was’t shunning dolphins advice or saying I literally cannot replicate it. I was saying that currently when I attempt those strategies I leave myself open because I have to spend too much time thinking instead of doing. Which I understand requires simply more games played, but it feels like very very very slow progress.

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There’s some forethought and dexterity associated with hail. I assume you are on a standard xbox controller. You can try different methods of hitting the buttons (i.e. fingers, thumb etc) but just using light hail should leave you with the ability to rock over to shatter on medium and leave your other finger on the trigger to use heavy. It will take some practice, but it can be done. You just need to avoid using the hail that corresponds to the shatter you expect to need.

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Well maybe he is not your character, my Kan Ra is lvl 49 but i suck with him compared to other good Kan Ra’s. Try other characters and once you find that character that is easy to create ambiguous mix ups for you then your golden.

TJ has always been like that for me. Easy to create mix-ups, Sadira is another that was easy to pick up, those characters play style matches how my mind works. I absolutely love Tusk but i cant do much with him despite being high lvl with him cause something about his playstyle does not match my playstyle as a gamer.

Not sure if this is your issue it just sounds similar to a issue i had with S1 Spinal.

Takes a bit of practice, but I use a standard controller, can hold call all three hails, hold two, and the summon shatter while holding the two hails in place.

So I took the advice I didn’t want to the most…I picked a new character, a rushdown the opposite of glacius, and practiced. I picked saberwulf…fofuht the CPU then went online. Sigh…I had fun…I did well, very well for only training for 5 mins, started beating golds, and even losses felt like they were fun. I guess I should hang up the icy towel and re visit him for giggles. Gonna buy riptor, and Maya now since they seem similar in style.

you might as well buy the full thing

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Actually I think I’m done with KI. Whatever I did with wulg isn’t working anymore. I’m down to fighting qualifiers and bronze players as gold and can’t beat them. This just isn’t fun anymore. Too much of a time sink just to be decent at a game.

I don’t feel like your expectations are all that reasonable here. Fighting games, and by extension KI, require ongoing play and practice so that you hopefully get better and better. It is also a genre that involves direct, constant opposition from an intelligent and growing opponent, if you play multiplayer. You admittedly spent five minutes or so learning Sabrewulf, and you’re upset you aren’t performing better? You’re being unreasonable.

Also, rank can be deceptive. Especially with the recent reset.

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I understand that but it’s not fun. I play many other competitive games that require time and effort like RTS games multiplayer, FPS such as counter strike, I have a very high mmr in Dota 2. All which took me very long to get good at. But the climb was fun. There is nothing fun about losing control of my character to combos for half a fight over and over and over again. The climb isn’t fun, the learning isn’t fun, I’ve been delt many punishing hands in plenty of other games and they didn’t feel like this at all. Ive been playing nothing but KI for 2 weeks solid and im litersllyno better than i was 2 weeks ago. Was at zero points in gold then and im still at zero now.Not only that but games in real life such as chess, and Go. The progression feels way to slow. I’m a weight lifter and know ALL about putting time in a longer term fashion of gradual gains. I never feel like I’m improving, there is no sense of upward climbing that many other things I’ve done has that keeps me going. It’s not like this is my first time doing something that requires the commitment, its that the reward is so miniscule for the time put in that theres a ton of other games I could be improving at with great sense of accomplishment with that time. From what I’ve read on the Internet unless I plan to just play at a bottom tier level forever I basically have to dedicate a majority of the limited gaming time I have to just fighting genres, that’s anti-fun in my books so I believe my expectations are just fine, its the Genre that isn’t doing it for me. I

There are approaches you can take.

  • Play someone around your level, instead of playing in ranked with a wide assortment of players of varying skill. Find someone who is also learning and you go 50% win/loss against and just play them for 2 straight hours in lobby mode.

  • Get advice. You’re trying to get advice in this thread but you haven’t really posted any of your own footage, so all people can do is offer some vague ideas. If you provided some gameplay, we could say “oh, this one particular thing you’re doing is wrong, here is a simple way to fix that, if you practice it for 10 minutes in training you will be a better player.”

Fighting games are not for everybody but if you play a ton of other punishing competitive games, I think they might be for you. You won’t find immediate gains playing randoms in ranked (most likely), especially with a bunch of decent players still lounging around the lower ranks since the reset. But you will find gains if you take a gameplan to your improvement, such as posting some matches where you lose and say “ok, what’s the deal guys”.

In my many years of trying to help beginner players get better, the main thing I’ve noticed is that they’re often quite unable to even describe why they’re losing. Somebody might say “everybody jumps over all my fireballs”, but when I watch match footage of them, that isn’t what happens at all… the advice they need to hear is something that isn’t related to good fireball spacing in any way (such as “learn how to block” and “practice your anti-airs”). So it can be really tough for us to advise areas of improvement without some video.

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I don’t play in ranked anymore and I still lose 80% of the time. Plus I already know what I’m doing wrong, I can point exactly where I messed up ,go into training,fix it, go into a match, and repeat the mistake. I could tell you right now every mistake I make in a match off the top of my head.

I would also encourage you to post a video or two - the advice you get here will be much better if we can actually see what it is you’re doing exactly.

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