I’ve been meaning to get around to posting here. Good work, @DEClimax. I only knew about the bug with Riptor. Sifting through the rest of the cast for it was more work than I was up to at the time, so I know you’ve put a lot of effort into this.
I encountered this with Riptor…probably more than a year ago? Made a note of it in the bug thread then, but like @STORM179 I figured it might be known by the devs and may’ve been “baked into the damage cake” by that point, or might even be how the majority of characters are done for all I knew, so I didn’t make a lot of noise about it. Riptor’s damage was viable enough as a short combo setup/pressure/shenanigans character that the issue didn’t bother me as much as the one-frame medium manuals thing I complained about (which IG addressed, bless them 
), but it does discourage longer combos with the dinosaur, especially since Riptor’s opener manuals are bad/inconsistent enough that you want to do opener into linker most of the time. (Let it be known that Jago is probably still the king of manuals.)
At the time when I figured this out I was trying to infer how the damage scaling worked to use it in an expected damage solver that I was talking about making at the time, that I’ve…kinda left on the backburner, to be honest. There’s some subtlety to the model I was working with that I wanted to do right, and I guess also that the way the competitive community has behaved bummed me out a little, and left me apprehensive about putting my work out there. Whilst I’ll stand by the mathematics of it anyday, my KI “game sense” isn’t something I’m entirely confident about leaning on, and I kinda didn’t want to invite a wall of cynicism about that not being “how the game works”.
For those who are curious, a little more detail on damage scaling: as you’d know, first hits are scaled by 200%. Subsequent manual double hits appear to be scaled by ~75% x 0.9^n, where n is a counter which roughly tracks the total number of “hits” in the combo thus far (including the current hit being scaled). Multi-hit moves usually increment the scaler with each hit of the move and each hit is then scaled separately, with notable exceptions (e.g. most linkers tack on two increments regardless of the number of hits, obviously the exceptions being the subject of this thread). Auto double and linker hits follow a similar formula and use/increment the same counter, albeit with a different constant percentage out the front. I think the numbers are a little different in places from this time a year ago (so I’m not giving the percentages from my notes, but I think the auto double number is 50%), but considering how drastically the combo system has changed in that time I guess that’s to be expected. There seems to be a bit of weirdness that throws this off by a percentage point here and there, which might be rounding errors (say, if the game is tracking a scaling coefficient and modifying it at each hit by multiplying it by 0.9 and then doing some rounding?) or might be something else. Opener and pre-opener hits generally increment the scaling per hit as well, so that e.g. it’s better in the long run for Jago to open a combo with something like HK xx medium laser sword (2 increments) than with fwd+HK xx heavy laser sword (4 increments).
There’s also guts scaling to consider. I have notes which say that guts scaling appeared to kick in at level steps at 50%, 30% and 15% (danger) life remaining, for scaling of 5%, 10% and 20%, respectively, but I don’t know if that’s correct, if it’s changed, how it combines with combo scaling, etc.
I’ve got various other odds and ends, things like ender level PD requirements, if anyone’s interested, but I was lax on details during data collection so I’d have to mess around again to interpret it properly.
