Instinct cancels have lots of uses outside of converting damage off of a combo breaker. It’s a bit excessive to say we should get rid of it just because we don’t like it being used to convert damage off of a combo breaker.
You can instinct cancel to lock people out, you can instinct cancel to make a move safe, you can instinct cancel in neutral to give yourself an advantage and start a punish or reversal. All useful ways in which it can be used.
And I get your point about the “combo game” but what you may be failing to realize is that we do indeed play it and that’s not a problem. You must play it or you lose your damage. You have to play it so you are not punished with losing your damage. My point is that losing your damage is punishment enough that punishment already forces people to play the combo game (KI!).
You are right about instinct cancel, but I’m not arguing that it isn’t useful. The argument is that the WAY it is useful is always the same. Instinct Cancel is a mechanic that lets you cancel out of whatever it is you are doing and gain an advantage on your opponent. That is the commonality in all of those situations. I don’t see how we can logically justify “no cancel out of a breaker” when we can cancel mid-combo, out of a DP, out of a blocked (or successful) shadow move etc. Cancelling (once or twice per round) is a mechanic. The fact that you can use it after combo break seems like exactly the type of situation you might want to employ a cancel mechanic to me.
If we are talking about tough to bear situations, getting locked out towards the end of a combo and seeing the opponent instantly reset his KV with an Instinct cancel and tack on 25% more damage before you get another break opportunity seems pretty substantially similar to an instinct after combo breaker. If it’s not similar, that means “winning” a combo break is somehow a less earned victory than winning a lockout (which is easier to do because math).
I see where both of you are coming from, but I have to disagree with you in this one Andy. You can’t just IC out of everything, a whiffed Shadow Move, even if grounded like Soul Sword, Ragged Edge, etc, can not be canceled out of until late recovery frames.
Personally, even as a Spinal player, I agree that ICing out of a Combo Breaker should be removed. Especially since they removed the HKD on breakers because it was such a big momentum swing. I feel dirty for doing it whenever I do it, especially because it’s unbreakable damage/momentum.
What im saying is that the reward for winning the neutral should be a no risk combo the worst that could happen is it return to neutral, in the combo section of the game on the side who initiates the combo there should be no risk by default unless you want to make a hard read via counter breaker but that should be your decision and not your opponents by earning the combo game by default your reward should be not having risk involved anymore. Being punished for winning the neutral is bad fighting game design just like moves being punishable on hit.
Nor should it be. Not to put words in people’s mouths, but while I do respect the sense of grounded neutral, and why people want it, I’m thinking as though because this is the brand new version after a multi year absence, it’s still extremely young and fresh that people want to feel the urge to want it to be molded in their version of what makes a fighting game. I commend the devs on listening to us, much like Double Helix did in Season 1. But nothing was exactly perfect.
I hope the devs focus on Balancing specific character issues more than core game mechanics since those are mostly fine (minus the instinct cancel crud from a combo breaker). Imo the combo breaker system is great as is.
I think making unsafe things safe at the cost of meter should be character specific, not an universal rule. I like Fulgore has a specific air laser that makes his dp safe at the cost of meter, I like that Cinder has a safeish (or at least difficult to punish) flash kick when fired.
I don’t like that you can cancel “generic unsafe move” with “generic fireball” or “generic positive on block shadow move” as a standard for everyone.
Well… aside from popping instinct, I’m not aware that Hisako can make anything safe with meter.
(aside from her pokes with full wrath… which is certainly arguable)
Not every character has a recapture, yet they are pretty common. I’d like recaptures to be something pretty rare, that only one or two characters can do.
I’d like both concepts (unsafe into shadow and recapture) to receive the same treatment. Not something that 70% of the roster can do, but 30% instead.
I’m less worried about how many people have recapture and more worried about whether or not it’s an appropriate tool for that particular character. I think it’s weird that Sabrewulf has a recapture and Sadira doesn’t, but Cinder and Combo’s are fine. Kan-Ra could go either way, in my opinion.
Wakeup DP is not “their own offense”, it is a YOLO defensive last resort not unlike a combo breaker. The player applying oki pressure is the offense, not the wakeup DP player. Complaining about converting a combo breaker into offense is aptly comparable to complaining about someone converting a wakeup DP into offense: in both cases, the successful offense is being denied their reward.
Scrubby means “in defiance of the mechanical realities of the game for reasons of ‘honour’ and ‘fairness’”. In this case, you are by definition the scrub, because you’re not accepting the mechanical realities of the game, and claiming that the people getting blown up by guess-breaks into instinct are losing to cheap play.
And that’s okay: you have to act scrubby in order to air your grievances about mechanics you feel are unfair. Even Infil is being a bit of a scrub in the other thread in order to talk about characters being “too active” on wakeup. I’m not saying I’m particularly attached to instinct cancelling after a breaker, either. (tbh, I don’t really care.) But stop co-opting words like “scrub” and “scrubby” to mean things that they don’t mean.
Then WHY THE FRIGGEN HELL ARE YOU PLAYING KILLER INSTINCT?!?
But seriously, a player who wins neutral in SF usually wins the opportunity to pressure an opponent either at negative frames or on wakeup. Said neutral winner could proceed to lose in either situation – say, to a DP, or to a throw if they wrongly predict a DP, or even to pressure from the defending player if they’re really wrong in predicting a DP. The emphasis you’re placing on the absolute importance of reward for winning neutral is irrational and unproductive: you’re basically picking up your ball and going home, rather than coming to the negotiating table in good faith.
KI is a game where there isn’t only block and wakeup pressure, but combo pressure as well. You can secure ~15% guaranteed damage by the time you’ve opened a combo, and the expected lifeswing of a combo is probably in the vicinity of 30% (I’m actually planning on modelling this soon), with huge damage on the table for people willing to play the combo game and/or spend meter. If you think that it isn’t acceptable for combo pressure to curtail a neutral win, but you’re fine with losses in block and wakeup pressure doing the same, then KI is introducing a theatre of pressure that you’ll never be able to reconcile with your principles, and you should probably just go play a different game.
I actually don’t. Not everything has to be breakable, the unbreakable stuff just needs to be balanced.
I would argue that almost all uses of instinct cancels (including those you mentioned) are “dirty”, and could be argued against on principle. I’m also fine with keeping them, because a “clean” game doesn’t seem so fun, and kinda runs against the point of KI.
KI is meant to be a game of disgusting oveheads, unreactable safe half-screen specials, projectile rushdown, etc. You couldn’t put Jago or Glacius in SF – and those are two of the funnest characters I’ve ever played, to the point where my KI brain can’t understand what people find fun about Ryu or Dhalsim. If KI toned down the dirt, then plenty of character designs would cease working in essential ways.
Man, when the DH forums went up and I did a skim-through of them, I abruptly realized why developers were typically reluctant to invite fan feedback up to that point. It was like reading Youtube comments there for a while.
I still don’t understand the recapture hate. As far as I can tell, recaptures do two things:
Discourage jumping…in a game where anti-airs are pretty guaranteed anyway. In other words, it’s a mechanic that makes bad play even worse, and punishes those Jumping Jagos that everyone hates even harder.
Enable grounded combos off of character-specific tech, e.g. TJ’s shoot toss into juggle into tremor, Cinder’s aerial antics into crossfire, without making them “sure things” because the recapture is usually very breakable. Get rid of recapture and these moves become either significantly better (easy grounded combo), or significantly worse (no grounded combo).
Both of these things seem very innocuous, so I just don’t get the big deal.
Eh… to be fair, the word “scrub” to me is always an insult that stems from in-game play. It tends to mean the person is telling the other player to stop doing something based on some notion of “honour or fairness”. You’ll never find me doing that; I would never tell any other player to stop using their in-game tools because I personally don’t agree with their existence or they’re using something I dislike to beat me.
I think healthy debate on what is good and bad design outside of an actual match context is great, if you admit your biases (which I try to always do, probably because I feel like I have good reason for having them) and come to the discussion table in good faith. There are some things that simply shouldn’t be in fighting games (to take a massively extreme example, a button that literally wins the round from anywhere on the screen); what those are will differ from person to person, and it takes some experience to understand how “extreme” some things are and how vehemently you need to fight against them (which is what some people in the forums are lacking… they’re blowing up relatively minor annoyances way beyond what they deserve), but healthy debate on these is good I think.
Yeah, exactly. People have slowly come to realize that earning a knockdown in most fighting games does not mean they are free to take the rest of your health bar without having to play a mixup they might lose (although they are given the advantage in this mixup), but they still aren’t there with KI’s philosophy on combos yet, despite it being virtually the same thing.
I suppose some players are mad about having to play that game “twice” (winning the knockdown game and then STILL having to win another game), but that’s the price you have to pay for KI’s insanely strong offense (winning the knockdown game is relatively easy, all hits lead to a combo) and the fact that DPs tend to be minor annoyances at best most of the time. KI basically gives you a massive jump start on the knockdown game in order to allow the combo game to exist fairly. That’s why all tools need to be looked at as a whole, rather than just picking the combo game and analyzing it in a vacuum. I maintain that SF4 with combo breaks would be an extremely bad game, because the rest of the game is not built around it, and I think that a lot of detractors of the combo system are still thinking about KI as if it was SF4 (especially people who haven’t played KI before and are discussing it from the outside).
But yes, KI’s combos are basically a continued pressure string, except you are constantly losing damage while you weigh your options; during traditional pressure, you will probably not be losing much damage while blocking and thinking about how and when to interrupt the pressure and make your read. Taking damage via combos while having to make this choice adds a very interesting psychological flair to KI, because people panic when they’re about to die, and you can see the ramifications of this often.
Would very much like to see this. I thought about doing this myself many months ago but never got around to it (I also thought it wouldn’t really be appreciated for the amount of work it would have taken to do, so if you’re in that same boat, you can know that at least I would be quite interested in it).
Can you tell me how to pronounce your online name, and maybe where it came from? For someone who uses English as well as you do, you might have the most confusing/hard-to-remember username on the boards.
