Kilgore tech/strategy thread

Hmmm. 50% off a grab for 2 bars isn’t that bad. i just did a shorter version just using the shadow ball. Still got 40%. So using another bar for just 10% seems meh.

Damage isn’t that easy to come by with him though meter is, which makes it worth it imo. But yeah there are loads of diff juggles with him for as I said above 30-50% some worth the meter some not.

I think the only thing he really needs to be buffed on is his ability to chip with hp. That and make c. Mk hit low. I can’t figure out why in the world it hits high

The generally strategy that I see with him is to zone until your heated. Mostly using L. Missiles and M. Missiles for chip and hp for counter zoning. Once heated start using L. Metal ball or M. Metal ball to get in due to it now being safe.

Yeah I think that’s pretty much the strategy. I think it will evolve more though as people get better with the character to more set ups and making them safe with missiles, there is prob some really dirty stuff to be found.

Here is a vid with most the juggles I have come up with, some of aren’t worth the meter etc, but look cool :slight_smile:

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Most of his damage is gonna be coming from his grabs or heated combos. Other than that your looking about an average of 37%. Which is meh. In heated your damage goes up to at least 40%.

I’m guessing the intent is that after you heat up and hit some fire shots to stack some PD, you cash out either by rushing down with wacky ball mixups…

OR back off, then use a cooldown cancel to confirm off of a long-range gun…

OR use a cooldown cancel to punish Projectile Invulnerable moves (or I guess a jump!), which is shown here:

What sucks is that I wanted to be able to phase through the Shadow with KKK and punish, but that just won’t happen because KKK has too much recovery. You either have to spend meter on a Shadow Counter or DP to punish. What also sucks is that if you DP here (you’re guaranteed to be cooled down), your only juggle for a Shadow cashout has to go through a light normal or light DP.

What doesn’t suck as much is that with a good bait, Kilgore never has to block a projectile invulnerable Shadow. If you have those old-school reactions, you can react to the Shadow freeze and heavy DP, because it has such a long startup and moves so far forward. IF you can pull this off, you’re not bound to your level 1 spin juggle opportunities. Even at level 2 spin, it’s opened up to mediums and heavies, which gives you access to Shadow Metal Ball recaps:

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I also found this stupid mixup off of a level 1 DP, quick-rise only. He seems to have a lot of dumb, probably not practical quick-rise crossups.

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Here are best counter breaker combos I can find (damage numbers after jump HK -> counter breaker). OH = overheat needed:

0 meter: HP, light dash, HP, light dash, HP, light dash: 41%
1 meter (OH): HP, shadow dash, HP, light dash, HP, damage ender: 58%
2 meter easy (OH): HP, shadow dash, HP, light dash, HP, shadow launcher ender: 65%
2 meter hard (OH): HP, shadow dash, HP, light dash, HP, launcher ender, juggle QCB + MP, manual late shadow DP cashout: 72%

It’s not even worth spending meter if you don’t have overheat, you will not extend your numbers much beyond 41% (I think it’s like 43%-44%), so I don’t even list them. You want to do shadow dash early so the guy gets burned out and starts cooking.

The two meter hard combo requires some practice, but the QCB + MP juggle needs to be very early (basically just mash it as soon as Kilgore touches the ground after landing from launcher, the camera won’t even be settled yet). Then you need to delay the DP so all the hits will connect, but not too long or he’ll fall to the ground. If you’re early you’ll still get a cashout but the damage will be 65% or so. I also had a bit of trouble getting it to recognize DP instead of shadow gun dash, something to do with the back input from QCB forcing a fireball motion over a DP if you finish your DP motion on forward accidentally. You can try to fix it by doing QCB + MP and then letting the stick go to neutral, or rubbing the corners for the DP, but it’s still pretty blech. The damage is probably worth it though.

For the 2 meter hard version, you also need to have OH for the whole combo, which means your CB kinda has to be early in the OH state. For the 1 meter and 2 meter easy combo, all you need is for it to last long enough to start up the shadow gun dash, so it’s much more reasonable.

UNFORTUNATELY, there is a bug that means shadow gun dash does not start cooking an opponent if you are overheating because of instinct mode, only in regular overheat. Which means the time you are most likely to 2 bars (due to meter build while zoning) AND the full duration of overheat going for you, these combos won’t work at all. It’s not a game breaking bug, but holy cow does it make Kilgore’s life miserable, and it doesn’t sound like it’ll be fixed for at least 3 months.

For the meantime, Climax above has posted some instinct-only counter break combos to hold you over. You need to use these, otherwise your damage will be identical to non-overheated mode (and therefore spending meter is terrible). Good luck remembering to do these.

1 bar (instinct already active): HP, launcher ender, cr.MP juggle, dash forward (very important), immediate QCB + LP, delay a bit, LP gun dash, delay a bit, shadow DP cashout (60%)
1 bar (instinct not active yet): HP, instinct cancel, then follow the above combo (72%)

To make matters worse, you’ll be at level 2 for the top combo after launcher cashout, and level 3 for the bottom combo, making the timing on cr.MP juggle different. Have fun!

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A bit off topic, but I assume that you got the windows 10 update?

I hope it goes smoothly and gives you no issues ^^


Back on topic, thank you a lot for this!

Could you share your early impressions about Kilgore?

I built a new computer, so I installed updated Win10 on it. So yeah I have KI again now.

Getting KI back on my computer was a story of untold Microsoft incompetence, and it made me very upset. Then, the MS store wouldn’t let me buy Kilgore because it wouldn’t let me choose anything but an American street address, where I do not live. It wouldn’t even let me use Paypal, which I have American funds in, to buy it without providing a street address (providing a fake address caused the MS store to choke, and then I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out what went wrong before giving up entirely). I then had to do google magic to find out that there is a setting buried deep in my Windows (not the store) that caused this.

In case you haven’t noticed, I have been very upset with them a lot recently. Most of the time, MS is very frustrating to work with and it makes me just want to go play Rocket League instead.

As for Kilgore, he seems like a lot of work and a little buggy. His visual and sound design is pretty cool though. He is probably one of the game’s biggest lab monster characters… I think you stand no chance of playing this character even remotely well if you don’t invest serious lab time. He’s probably low-mid tier if I had to take a super wild guess. (Oh and I still really dislike the name “Kilgore” but c’est la vie, compared to the frustration MS has put me through over the last week it seems like such a silly thing to complain about now)

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It’s very hard to judge how good a character like this is. Low-mid makes sense to me, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if he ended up being secret high tier in the hands of a VERY good player. That being said, Kilgore is definitely not a character for players that don’t put the training mode time in.

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I think he can probably win (and might have some pretty lopsided matches in his favor), but he’s a knife’s edge character that doesn’t have as much of the upside as the other knife’s edge characters like Mira and Aria.

But that’s not necessarily bad. I don’t think they can make his HP guns do chip damage for instance (chip damage resets the white life timer, so good luck getting your white life recovered, ever, from anywhere). Maybe they could increase his gun damage a bit (3% to 4% or something), but I can see why they kept it low in case Kilgore turned out to be super powerful and they didn’t want KIWC to get wrecked.

He stands no chance unless you lab him up though. You need to know ways to get max damage, how to use cooldown cancels like Leo was showing, how to use shadow missiles after OTG (only works after some spin speeds), how to avoid doing special moves up close, etc. If you don’t do these things and play him like another KI character, I think you more or less instantly lose.

Yep, compared to the rest of the cast, he is very unintuitive. When I started playing Gargos, at level 10 I was confortable with him. I’m around 20-25 with Kilgore and still struggle to do some basic stuff.

I have A LOT time to put into the training mode

BTW, a second shadow DP at the end of that instinct cancel combo pushes it up to 81%. I think it could go higher juggling into an unbreakable move and THEN shadow DP, but it depends on if he can get full hits on DP and also not blow out the combo

Yeap, I noticed how hard it can get vs a Spinal.

Sorry to laugh at your pain, but this was too perfect not to quote.

On topic, I’m way out of my league here but I wanted to post a couple of thoughts. Thanks to everyone for all of their interesting investigation. I’ve played with Kilgore for like an hour, outside the lab and can certainly confirm that he is a low damage, unintuitive character. I spent maybe 20 minutes in a mirror with @Dayv0 and we shot each other for days without doing any damage at all. I think 50% of our total damage output was throws.

He does have some tools that are going to confuse and frustrate low and maybe even mid tier players but won’t do much against high level players. Some of his combo timing is weird and therefore weird to break. His first AD is often delayed and the hits after his ball linker are out of rhythm. His shadow ball linker - what the ■■■■ is that? Anyway I think at least for a while early lockouts are going to be common. So you can confirm his terrible damage combos.

The only other thing I would add is that, although it’s immediately obvious to everyone that his guns are worthless in terms of damage don’t underestimate the psychology of being able to say “nope” to whatever your opponent is trying to do. His bullets are so fast they stuff just about everything at full screen. This is going to make Sabrewulf players nuts even if it does no damage and may well frustrate everyone else. And while Kilgore isn’t going to win matches just by zoning he is going to be able to very easily prevent any other character from zoning him. Which is probably good for something.

Anyone play much of the Kilgore Vs Gargos matchup yet?

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I did. Kinda got bodied. When outside of heat mode trying to build heat he will either punish with Tele or just summon demon and its kinda hard to keep gargos off.

Honestly I think the only buffs kilgore needs then is that c. Hp hits low and c. Mk hits low. Given for the fact that the only comboable low hit is c. Lk which has such a short range means its unreliable.

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Maybe I misunderstand, but Kilgore can combo off of crouching medium kick into special as well, can’t he?