Man, there was a lot of fun stuff discovered about the game and the characters. A lot of it comes from not really thinking too hard before about how the game works or being unfamiliar with a character so it was really fun getting to find out about a lot of this stuff!
One of my most favorite characters to work on was TJ Combo and seeing how drastic of a change he went through from in and out of Instinct. For example, I didn’t know that his jabs actually become 4f startup, making them the fastest normal in the game! Other fun stuff was finding out just how plus he is on everything (i.e his sweep becomes +4 on block while in Instinct!) I just hope with the data finally out there, the idea of TJ wanting to use his Instinct for anything other than Last Breath becomes highly prolific!
Something else I found out about TJ that led me to looking into other characters is Kara Cancelling his Back Step special into a throw which doesn’t actually give him any extra distance on his throw but allows some oddly fun stuff to do with him. For example, you can hit someone with a Stagger and then do the Kara Cancel and make it look like you special cancelled into throw! Here’s an example of it: https://twitter.com/Atsumachi/status/894453823053234176
This then led to me trying to think of what other characters this could apply to and so I went looking. I tried it out on Riptor and although she couldn’t get it to combo off of staggers like TJ, she did get the benefit of increasing the range of her regular throw! Here’s an example: https://twitter.com/Atsumachi/status/894458423466532864
Beyond that, I think one of the most fun characters to work on was Arbiter. Boy howdy, talk about a very interesting character with a lot of quirks that you may never know about. For instance, did you guys know that he can Negative Edge his Down Forward HP into itself? Just hold the input, wait for it to finish, and then let go of the button and a second one will come out on it’s own! This is the only button I could find in the game that had this unique property. Another instance I found of Arbiter being able to do something no one else could was with his Cr.LP. I haven’t tested it with his St.LP but I assume it’ll probably be the same, but did you know you can actually whiff cancel his LP into a shadow move? I actually didn’t find this one out on my own, a friend of mine who got a person at his locals interested in KI actually found this out. This allows for some really neat stuff like using his jabs to bait a Counter Breaker, and since hitting one of those is considered a whiff, Arbiter can cancel his Jab into a Shadow Energy Shield, thus beating or trading with Counter Breakers on Reaction! Really cool stuff!
One other thing I want to shout out is @ninjafrombox for discovering the First Launcher bug. He had compiled all of Eagle’s data and I decided to double check it and the info I got from a throw was different than his so I just assume he made a mistake. He then sent me a PM saying that the data I had was wrong in that only during the first time Eagle performed a throw would the advantage be different, then afterwards it would go back up to what it normally should be. From there we started looking and speculating what could have caused it and what we found at first was that this would happen if you performed a throw that also led to a Hard Knockdown so we called it the First Throw Bug. Then after that as we went through all the pages finalizing everything, we were going through changing the data for projectiles and making sure everything was right and when it came time to ARIA, I checked her Shadow Dissonance and when I recorded it, I noticed the advantage on hit was way different then the number I had originally recorded and so from there we discovered that it wasn’t only just throws that caused it, but anything that allowed for a juggle AND provided a Hard Knockdown. From there we were able to discover how the bug could be dispelled and fount that all you had to do to fix it was have the opponent either get hit or block a normal or special and it would disappear. This is how it went on for so long without being discovered, but it’s also a testament to how inconsequential this bug truly is.
One last character I wanted to mention was Aganos since he’s my main. I never knew until doing all of this that when Aganos can start performing manuals, he uses the 2 chunk variation of his moves for the manual timing. This actually explains a lot as the @developers always had in mind that Aganos 2c was the default state of the character and that’s why the in game data was for his 2c variation for the longest time!
There’s a good deal more that could be discussed but these were the things I definitely wanted to showcase that surprised me! I’m sure the others have fun things to talk about as well!
