Imagine this combo breaking change

General Discussion
21

I am confused. If you add a limit,then guess breakers will still break. Then people who react to doubles get punished because you have a limited amount. How will this encourage people to break properly?

22

Well, it already does, so you have nothing to worry about. I can’t even begin to tell you about how many times I have lost despite combo-breaking everything


23

You go ahead and do that; my long combos will destroy you in short order. :smiling_imp:

24

Because breakers are the only thing stopping me from hitting you for 50% every time I touch you.

If you limit breakers in some way, then you must open up a strategy that values removing them as fast as possible, so that I can exploit this. This strategy actually wants you to spend the breakers, so that you have no way to stop yourself from dying in round 2. Being broken stops being about “dang, he broke it” to “good, he spent a breaker and now he’s dead”.

As an aside, here are the other things my proposed strategy would avoid:

  • you would only ever see heavy autos, light linkers, and shadow linkers (when the breakers are used up)

  • you would never see M/L autos, M/H linkers, or manuals of any kind, in any combo ever (character-specific things like Mira’s heavy linker aside). There’s no point, it simply does less damage on the way to my strategy of getting you to spend your breakers.

  • you would never see ultras ever again, because by round 2 you will have spent all your breakers and if I touch you at 50%, I’m killing you with an ender and not ultra.

  • playing neutral and converting every hit into big damage is considerably easier, because you just OS heavy auto-double after every opener (with Mira, you OS heavy reaping linker). There’s no reason to sometimes manual after your opener, or mix up your doubles, or sometimes drop combos. The offense is basic and linear, because either you break it and I’m happy, or you’ve spent your breakers and you’re about to die.

  • every game is now counted by “number of openings” instead of damage. Let’s say there is a 5 breaker limit. Then I have to hit you 8 times (or less, if you jump into anti-airs and stuff), full stop. I say 8 because let’s say the 5 breakers take off about 50% of your life (10% on average before you break the heavy double). Then my next touch kills your first life bar (6 total hits), and then my next 2 touches will kill your second life bar (8 total hits). For characters like Raam and Mira, they will kill the second life bar in 1 total hit (via optimized combo, instinct cancel at 90 KV, then optimized combo into damage ender), so the number is less for them.
    I don’t care about my particular combo starters that much, all I care about is whether I hit you and you have to spend breaker. I also don’t really care about my character that much (every character can do 40-45% meterless with an optimized combo, often much more).

The suggestion is that the game would be far more interesting because you’d have to “know how to break stuff” rather than guess, but I challenge this thought and say that the resulting game would be remarkably worse and less varied. And if someone disagrees, they will have to show me why the strategy I listed above is not the best way to win, because I can’t think of another strategy that works better.

8 Likes
25

Didn’t he say that one gets 10-12 breakers a round? Not that it would change much though.

26

I used the 5 breaker example to drive the point home just a little bit more.

If you add more breakers, you don’t change the strategy
 up until a point where you add too many breakers, at which point nobody really runs out of them, and then the limitation doesn’t have any impact. I don’t know where the break point is
 maybe 10 breakers is on one side of that limit, and 12 breakers is on the other side, or something.

The point is that the specific number of breakers doesn’t make the change more reasonable to me.

27

Oh yeah for sure. Actually it would just reset what happens in round 1. Speaking of combo breakers, apparently it takes 13 combo breakers to fill the instinct gauge (without taking other damage). Or in other words 20 damage (aka instinct) is awarded for breaking.

28

That’s basically the most sub-optimal option there is to deal with someone guess breaking in this manner :confused: If all you do is one-chance into ender, then there is literally no reason not to guess - either they’re right and get out of damage, or they’re wrong and eat the exact same amount of damage they would’ve eaten anyway. There’s absolutely zero downside.

If you are a panic breaker, then I will kill you guaranteed in no more than 6 openings. True guess breaking is mathematically and demonstrably an awful way to play the game, and there are a myriad of ways to defeat it. Resets, opener->linker, delayed AD’s
all of these also significantly raise your damage potential, especially with a character like Thunder. You can mash out breaks if you like, but it’s probably not going to go very well. Educated guessing of the sort that happens at high level is one thing - mash breaking is quite another.

With respect to the OP suggestion, I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Too many breaks (and 12 is too many) and the limit never gets hit and I’ve no need to change my break patterns. Too few, and I’ll simply use heavies to make you hit the limit, and then kill you on my next opening after you cant break anymore.

4 Likes
29

I just wanted to pull out the point where Feng Shui intoned that perhaps a solution was better neutral and this was disregarded as not making sense.

If you neutral is better you should win more often than your opponent. Neutral is a very strong tool against guess breaking because you will continue to wrack up small damage even while getting guess broken while your opponent will not be able to land any meaningful hit on you. So while yes you could further improve your “combo metagame” with manuals and counter breakers and different combo routes, you can also gain a lot just from improving your abilities in the footsie game in KI. I feel like due to the the very strong tuning of specials in this game people often overlook the neutral and figure well I’ll just (insert advancing attack here) and win the day, but that does not have to be how it is, you can definitely zone, whiff punish and bait as you would do in Street Fighter, you just have more difficult options to contend with.

Removing Guess breaking won’t make the game better for reasons Infil has noted and also because the ability to guess (read) is a fundamental element that makes fighting games so exciting. A strong read can pull you away from that ultra and allow you to make a crazy comeback, why would you want to do away with that?

1 Like
30

http://images.t-nation.com/forum_images/2/c/2c0c8_ORIG-oh_really_now_tell_me_more.jpg

2 Likes
31

Why almost everyone here feels smarter than devs?

32

I don’t think Chanchula needs to feel bad (or we need to make him feel bad) for proposing a system change. I also don’t think he is trying to project himself as smarter than the devs, but rather just having fun trying to design a system that solves his frustrations.

I disagree with his proposed system (and tried to explain why it actually doesn’t solve his frustrations), but he shouldn’t feel bad for making a suggestion, and I hope he doesn’t.

5 Likes
33

This. People need to dial it back. Some times a new perspective can shed light as to why an idea might be flawed without insulting the person for having an idea and the courage to post it.

34

When people post stuff like this, they get torn apart


But in case anyone doesnt know
 @CHANCHULA is currently number 3 on the top 32 list.

The fact that Number 3 on top 32 list is suggesting the same thing that random scrubs do is very interesting.

I dont have a clue what it means, good or bad, im just pointing out that it is an interesting situation that could say something about Fighting game mentality.

(as for the topic
 just counterbreak ffs)

1 Like
35

There are a lot of people who are assuming that guess breaking automatically means that it’s a player who is mashing combo breaker on the first frames.

I don’t agree with the ops suggestion, mostly for the reasons infil highlighted. But I think it’s important to specify that guess breaking doesn’t mean it’s just some player mashing on the first frames of a combo. Of course counter breaking is the simple solution there, and I’m sure a guy who is currently ranked 3rd online for the month is aware of that.

1 Like
36

IMHO what a lot of people consider to be guess breaking could be more like educated guess breaking based on noticed player trends of various ranks. For example, I’ve noticed that new players (qualifier,bronze) typically lead off with a heavy AD, somewhere around silver they switch to medium ADs, and upper gold-Killer typically start with light ADs. Obviously there are exceptions, but that is, from my experience, the trend I’ve seen and is certainly enough to justify starting off a fight with breaking habits that apply accordingly.

37

Nah. If we were to put limit/constraint on breakers, I’d say make it cost meter. Whether that be instinct, or shadow.

38

This is pretty much the same thing, though.

The best strategy is to do your damage loop when the guy doesn’t have meter (for example, the first hit at the start of the match is guaranteed to be huge damage, because nobody has meter to break yet), and then when the guy does have meter to break, you should probably just do a breakable combo so the guy spends the resource so you can go back to the first part and get 60% guaranteed damage.

It also means using meter for things like shadow counters or breakable shadow linkers will just 100% go away from the game, because your punishment for not having meter and getting hit is game-ending. Holding onto meter so you don’t immediately die, rather than spending it on all the other fun parts of the game, will be the only way to play.

You could say “well, make it so it doesn’t cost very much meter, like 1/5th of a bar”, but then what’s the point? People always have 1/5th of a bar and any time your opponent blocks anything, you get enough meter to break again. It’s effectively the same system as it is now, but with a weird convoluted rule. You could reduce meter gain across the board by 10% and effectively have the same system in place.

It doesn’t curb guess breaking at all until the system is so powerful that it curbs the use of all other strategies in the game. And you can apply this same strategy to any system where you run out of the ability to break, whether it’s a separate “break gauge” like the OP described, or its tied to an existing meter, or whatnot.

The key thing about the entire KI combat engine is that you can break any time, but your punishment for being wrong is a brutal 3 second window where you get dunked. I think players need to be trying to make that 3 second window contain more dunkage (which short combos into vortex demonstrably do not do).

3 Likes
39

Remember the old saying? “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?” Well that’s partially true here. But there then there’s “If you don’t know it, probably shouldn’t touch it.”

I see the combo system (the basics of it, excluding things like flipouts, staggers, recaptures etc etc) as perfect. People should just leave it alone. Don’t fiddle with it, you’ll end up just making it worse.

40

What concerns me is how many restrictive regulations do we install for sake of strategy, before we start pissing off those who just want to play?