OFFICIAL Combat Survey Discussion Thread

And when you do get in there they can luck out and nullify you being patient , making solid reads, and winning the neutral, all with a braindead mash. Theres countless other MU and character examples I wont go into detail about but yeah, thats the general premise I’m talking about. I’m done with this topic, Just came in to share my piece about why I don’t enjoy playing the game anymore as it is tied directly to the combat system. Peace.

Well, that’s that I guess.

Shago and Maya come to mind. Yes Maya can cash out but she’s got other problems, at least for me personally, that I don’t think add to the discussion at large.

So off juggling alone and getting potential damage so that the next hit you land will scare your opponent I think of Shago, Maya, and Orchid to a degree. Season 3 we got the ability to use juggles as an alternative combo type and as much as I like it it seems like an after thought for characters without flip out or the meter to cash it out or just to add maybe 2-3% to the end of a combo.

Orchid doesn’t really do much with juggles. Maya’s got a meterless juggle cashout and shago…well he’s shago.

Maya’s meterless cash out comes from wonky juggles in my opinion. I spent some time learning how to do the meter less cash out and finding consistency in it without instinct was beyond frustrating. Even watching people like PinkDiamond play I almost never see her use it. More often then not she just goes for daggers to again tack on that extra few percent and let them drop.

Orchid’s a good example to my point. She has juggles but they don’t add anything to her gameplan. They just add more damage. That’s how most characters who can juggle with flip out seem to be. There’s no reward to doing juggles over a full combo unless you have meter.

I see pink diamond use mantis all the time. I watched a set with her and thompson the other day and she was using it alot.

I use juggles for setups mostly. Or for more corner carry. Since ARIA’s juggles are good at that. That and other things.

I usually follow tournament footage, only recently found these guys YouTube channels, and I rarely see her pull it out. I’d argue that offline sets and tournament are different settings but that’s splitting hairs.

At the end of the day unless you have flip out or meter I feel that juggles are a weak use of ones tools. My method of working on it is that if you let a juggle go the potential damage lingers a bit longer so you just have that threat hanging around when you mount your offense again.

Well I play ARIA so this doesn’t affect me in the slightest.

That’s fair.

Unless of course buffing the whole casts PD to last longer then it will just strengthen ARIA then. Which I’m fine with.

On one hand, I think that potential damage could return a little more slowly, as I think breakers might favor defense a bit too much, but shouldn’t that be your reward, or is the actual combo being broken enough of a reward?

Can lowering the rate of potential damage recovery place more of an emphasis on smaller combos and could that act as a more viable way to skirt the combo system to avoid breakers? Is that just another strategy to use when playing the game, thus increasing your options as a player or would this lead to high level play that avoids playing the game as it’s intended and does that matter?

As for breakers, I think that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if they sped up light autos slightly to help give more of a visual cue, as I’m not great at distinguishing between lights and mediums, though I’ll admit that I’m not a high level player by any stretch. I think that this might cut down on guess breaks a little, but if it leads to more breaks overall, well, that’s probably not a good thing either.

I voted 3’s across the board except for breakers, which I gave a 4 on, but just barely. I’m fine with keeping them as they are, it was more just personal preference.

I do tend to wonder if there was a way to make counter breakers more of an attractive proposition to players that don’t use them. They should be used, no question. The benefits are obvious. So if people aren’t scared to throw out combo breakers, knowing that they can be locked out, what could entice people to interrupt their own combo with a counter breaker?

I know I’ve seen suggestions of failed counter breakers pushing the attacker back out to neutral, with the punishment for a failed counter breaker being the lost combo itself, but what if failing a counter breaker also gave the defender all of their potential damage back and maybe even a little more or perhaps they get a smidge of shadow meter or instinct meter in addition to refilled potential damage? To me, that would be a nice counter balance to removing the substantial disadvantage a failed counter breaker currently has.

I know it sounds like I’m getting off topic here, but I think that this funnels in to the combo breaker discussion. People hate guess breaking. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard higher level players talk about this. Well, what if breaking was slightly less of a guessing game, but counter breaking was less punitive to the attacker so that they could throw out counters at any time without feeling like they’d be killing themselves if they guessed wrong? Couldn’t this lead to greater usage of these mechanics and maybe give attackers more confidence in using the combo system as opposed to trying to work around it?

Sorry if this was too off topic. Also, if I’m way off base here, then my apologies. Just wanted to throw some perspective out there as it pertains to breakers. I personally love the way the game plays right now, so if there’s any potential for adjustments in the survey topics being a solution in search of a problem, then I’d obviously hope that can be avoided.

As for my main, I picked Kan Ra. It feels like it can be a bit too hard to build up white damage with him, but he’s just so fun to use I barely notice. Plus, again… (whispers) I’m not very good. :slight_smile:

What? That is completely contradictory.

1 Like

No, people hate being broken. No one complains when Joe Ranked locks himself out repeatedly on opener->linker - they just kill him in 5 combos and go about their business. Many pros get broken on “guesses” because they’re consistently going for the least reactable option they can, and this is limiting. They would often have better success in this regard if they were more comfortable with a bit more upfront risk on their combo games (i.e. going for delayed heavy AD after light linker instead of light manual).

I guess I’m the only douchebag here who said that PD recovers too slowly. While I meant this primarily for high PD scenarios (say, when Cinder makes you hold inferno->shadow inferno, or your PD regen post Demonic Despair), I really am against slowing it down further in low PD scenarios. Someone above mentioned not getting enough off of reset throws because the PD goes away too fast, but I would submit that you’ve already been amply rewarded for your reset throw. You got your unscaled throw damage and a HKD, in addition to whatever real damage you were able to do in the initial combo. That is a lot, and perhaps more importantly, you got it off an unreactable mixup within your combo.

I think that’s the key thing to remember in this discussion. KI’s two-way interaction is largely predicated on the idea that higher damage entails some additional “risk” for the offense. If you want to do 40%, then you need to put some skin in the game with something breakable. Throw and other resets already let you pile on damage with not that much risk to yourself - if it gets blocked or teched, you’re still at neutral or on pressure, and the opponent keeps their PD. You’ve already been pretty rewarded, and you eluded the combo system to boot. Making this tactic even stronger by slowing down PD will just encourage people to avoid the combo game even more than they already do, and you’ll wind up with a S1-style of play, except that one chance->shadow will be replaced by reset->one chance->ender. I think slowing down PD recovery will make offense more degenerate, with unreactable reset->one chance being obviously the best tactic in most scenarios.

And I am also firmly against applying a KV “credit” to the offense on lockout. People not capitalizing on lockouts has considerably less to do with maxed out KV’s than it does player preference for “I must end this combo now or I’ll be broken!” These players would still be ending their combos early, and if you’re doing cr.LK->cr.LK->one chance, then you don’t deserve higher damage in the first place. You’ve taken little risk, and your reward should be commensurate even if they lockout.

6 Likes

So you think they’re line of logic is that “if I’m getting broken, they must be guessing” when the reality is that their self imposed option limitations are getting them reliably broken by people that aren’t guessing.

Is it possible that the truth could be somewhere in the middle? I get that you don’t think it is and that’s fine, of course. But if guess breaks are an issue at high levels or even mid levels for that matter, is it possible that finding a way to lessen guesswork without hurting the gameplay might be worth looking in to?

Best just leave the PD alone. We try to fix something that we might break?

2 Likes

You are wrong about juggle counter breakers. If you are trying to hit the juggle button and then hit counter breaker…that’s your problem. You have to just hit counter breaker as your juggle…that’s how it works. You either get the CB or you whiff that way. You cant hit a button and then CB… its too late at that point.
I dont have any problems counter breaking people on juggles. But I do think the game has too many juggles therefor it can be hard to break them but easy to be counter broken. New players dont have a chance against a juggle heavy player.

Counter breakers work just fine though… the trick is insert counter breaker where you would do a auto double or manual.

Oh, it’s absolutely a combination of guesswork and having a good read on the part of the defender. A manual break is by definition a guess (even after a light linker you can instead do delayed AD’s), but the system has rules, and those rules serve to narrow down the range of my guess. If I know your general aversion to risk (i.e., you regularly eschew all opportunities to do anything reactable) then I can break with a pretty high degree of consistency, because I know at any given moment what your unreactable options are. And if I’m wrong, so what? You were just going to end your combo after that one chance anyway.

Fighting games have guessing. And KI has ways of punishing guessing that have absolutely nothing to do with counter breaking, and it isn’t the game’s fault that people ignore them. It is on you as a player if your fear of doing anything reactable brings down your combo damage and keeps you from capitalizing on lockouts. Combo breakers reset to neutral now, so there’s even less issues with getting broken.

4 Likes

Even light/medium linkers? (Not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious.)

Personally, I’d be in favor of IG doing a pass and adjusting all light auto doubles, as well as (if the understanding I’m getting from LCD is accurate?) all light and medium linkers, to make all of them unreactable. I don’t know how you’d do this with linkers, maybe you’d make deadly certain that light and medium linker animations correspond with one another perfectly for longer during startup, and/or reduce the break window at the end, so that the effective time between first true “tell” and last breakable frame is sub-15 frames, hence unreactable.

But then again, I like my clean abstractions. I don’t like fake reversals that you’re supposed to develop really precise OS tech to stuff out. I didn’t like it when Wulf’s jumping slash became reactable. I’m more interested in decision-making than I am in reactions or execution.

I don’t think combo breaking is easy in KI, though, or that mindless mash breakers are doing well against good players. I comment more on guess breaking further down.

Whilst I hope I’m not the one who derails the thread with this remark, if I have any problem at all with PD buildup and whatnot it’s the per-hit linker scaling on select characters. I’m not entirely surprised by your remarks that it’s an intentional balancing mechanic or that it’d take months to rebalance if it were changed, but I think many of the characters with per-hit linker scaling could stand to be given better reasons to prolong combos, fish for lockouts, attempt counter breakers, etc, and transitioning them to per-linker linker scaling seems like the best way to go about it.

I mean, you are apparently looking to tweak risk-reward (EDIT: which, like the linker scaling, would surely take months and months to balance, right?), and I think the ideas implied by the survey are far less palatable than removing per-hit linker scaling. Certainly, nerfing combo breakers yet again whilst leaving per-hit linker scaling in the game would leave a sour taste in my mouth.

They sped this up again. It now appears immediately.

KI’s combo system is basically the only combo system in current fighting games with any intellectual depth beyond the hitconfirm, and you think it’s “rather braindead”? :neutral_face:

lol, I wish more people saw it your way. I don’t particularly want to see juggles hurt more, but I’m very sick of the tantrums over S3’s “emphasis on juggles”.

That said, I don’t think we’d hear the end of it if juggles got any kind of widespread damage buff.

Oh, you’re one of those guys.

Look, KI’s offense is really good. You don’t get to do wind kicks and jumping slashes and powerlines in Street Fighter. Winning the neutral isn’t an indisputable demonstration of your superior play, and as such it makes sense that getting the damage doesn’t end with the confirm. And the braindead mash breaks lead to a 40% combo more often than they stave off half of the 20% that a non-lockout combo would likely deal. So if you’re indeed facing a braindead masher (and you don’t suck at confirming lockouts) then you’re going to cash out more, and if you’re getting broken a lot then you should respect the immense decision-making skill of your opponent.

Ultimately, KI is a game built around the premise that it’s okay to slaughter the FGC’s precious sacred cows – if I win the neutral then I get the reward, if I bait the reversal then I get the reward, etc – as long as you put in place mechanisms that allow you to preserve the risk-reward of the situation whilst interpolating away from the traditional mechanisms. You see this with things like KV (we have good light button confirms in KI, but unlike SFIV they don’t dominate in part because chained lights open a combo with a huge KV penalty), PD (punish a reversal with heavy xx shadow opener and you can probably expect to cash out 40% on average due to the PD buildup and opener damage, variance induced by breakers aside), and damage (I’d be a little uncomfortable with the expected combo damage against a reaction-only breaker if the offense wasn’t stellar or if there weren’t big-damage outcomes to bring the hype, but it is and there are). It makes KI a very interesting experiment, and a catalyst for new ideas in an otherwise fairly stagnant genre.

^Still one of my favorite posters around here. :slight_smile:


Anyway, as I alluded to above, I’m not exactly thrilled by the kinds of changes that appear to be on the table. But I did make some suggestions a while ago that I think are worth tabling here.

From Infil’s counter breaker exposé thread:

Number 3 in particular might be the buff (and especially, the peace of mind provider) that some people in this thread seem to be looking for. I like it a whole lot more than tokenizing combo breakers, at any rate.

5 Likes

agreed. I smoked some top notch players just with basic fundamental strategies, while there trying to be all technical and fancy. I have to kinda like it, although the more adaptable players change it up pretty quick. if you play the game enough it’s obvious what some players tend to go for harder to break combos. it’s not a guess the whole KI community watched ur tech on stream or seen it played out a thousand times. lol

I think that would be a bit much. It would be best if it dropped the combo like a throw tech but keep the pd. Or maybe heal a bit of pd but not all.