Does anyone know if Reversals or Punishments have actual in-game effects? For example the way a Counter Hit adds extra damage.
I’m not a big lab guy, I don’t study frames or anything like that, but I’m curious as to the difference seeing the new UI stuff makes. I really like seeing the breaker strengths, and the effects for Punish etc, but since it was specified as important information for someone to know (especially on streams) I’m curious as to why, exactly.
Here’s a great example of it in action:
When Cinder has a Trailblazer blocked, he has a number of follow-up options including 1) Doing another one immediately 2) Doing another one, but delayed 3) Throwing and 4) Blocking.
These things can end up with Cinder baiting out a counter hit/throw/blocked DP on his opponent. However, if Jago (or any other character with a 3-frame DP) does a DP with true ‘Reversal’ timing after blocking, it shuts down all of these options.
Early in the first match, GunZ (Jago) was on point with his reversal DPs on medium and heavy trailblazers (as shown by the new UI). ILLusion (Cinder) was getting hit regardless of what he did afterwards. In the second match, he got a couple of non-reversal counter hit DPs, meaning that he was a bit late with his input. That also means that if ILLusion just blocked instead of doing a 2nd Trailblazer, he might have been able to block the DP and get a big punish for it.
The commentators did a great job of recognizing this stuff, but if they didn’t already know about it, they (and the viewers) could look at the UI to see ‘Reversal’ + ‘Punishment’ and say “oh yeah, Jago’s DP punishes Trailblazer. I know everything about this game”. Additionally, the only reason I’m able to break this situation down and explain it to you is because of the new UI callouts.
I appreciate the response, but I’m either wording my question poorly, or just misunderstanding your explanation!
Is Jago’s reversal beating out Cinder because of the number of frames it takes and the fact that the DP is invulnerable (this is what I think is the case) or is a Reversal something which has special qualities like higher priority?
Do Reversals or Punishments do any extra damage, have special qualities or change the frame data at all besides what the specials or normals do on their own?
I don’t think they have any added damage or plus frames like counter hits, but I could be wrong.
The reversal DPs beat Cinder based on their frames alone (not their invulnerability). If you see a ‘punishment’ callout, you know absolutely that the punishee couldn’t do anything about it. Jago could’ve instead done a ‘Reversal’ standing jab, but that takes 2 more frames to come out, and Cinder could’ve interrupted it by immediately doing a 2nd Trailblazer (because standing jab doesn’t have invulnerability, reversal or not).
Please remind me again why these terms appear when they do.
The point of the reversal notification is to let you know that your move is starting up on the very first frame after you leave knockdown or blockstun or whatever. It’s particularly important if you want the startup invincibility of the move you’re using, e.g. on a wakeup DP, so there aren’t a few frames in there before the move where you could get hit before the invincibility comes into effect.
The punishment notification is mostly there so that, if you block an unsafe move, you can know for sure that you hit them before they recovered from that move, as opposed to just happening to hit them after they recovered because they just happened to do some other dumb thing afterwards that your punish attempt caught instead. It’s important in training so that you know that you’re capable of disincentivising your opponent from doing their super scary unsafe moves, otherwise you’re going to get into a match and your opponent is going to find out that you can’t punish them, and they’re just going to do their crazy unsafe moves all day and murder you with them.
Both notifications also, as noted above, help viewers and commentators (and even players!) figure out what happened in scrambly situations.
No.
Reversals don’t have any higher priority, the message just lets you know that your move came out as early as it possibly could have
As for punishment, that just means that you hit your opponent while they where recovering, does not add any extra benefits.
The actual definition of “reversal” is just “move that comes out as early as possible after a stun or knockdown state.” Usually reversals matter because you want the move’s special properties to kick in at frame 1 after coming out of said stun or knockdown state (e.g. full/partial invincibility or armor). That’s pretty much why it’s called a “reversal”: if successful it reverses the pressure situation, from “I’m getting pressured by buttons” to “I blew up your button with my reversal and now you’re on your back and now I get to pressure you.”
That said, sometimes you want “reversal timing” (that is, you want your move to start up on frame 1 after recovering from knockdown or stun) just for the speed it offers. Whilst I’m not entirely familiar with the Cinder/Jago example, what the Jago player wants from the reversal DP is just the fact that the DP is active on frame 3, whereas Jago’s next quickest move (a light button) would be active on frame 5, which (apparently, again not familiar) isn’t fast enough to punish the trailblazer.
Also worth noting is that there is this thing called a reversal buffer, which is an input buffer that is available before you recover from stun or knockdown. If you input a special move into the reversal buffer, then the move will occur with reversal timing. The buffer is pretty big on knockdown, but much smaller coming out of stun.
Thanks for the responses! These really helped clear things up for me, so it sounds as though the Punishment and Reversal popups are really just informational based on timing, and nothing else.
Still really cool, useful bits of information, though.
I believe you’ll find that the reversal notification only comes up if you input your move in the reversal buffer. The punishment notification comes up whenever you hit someone during the recovery frames of a move they are currently performing, so you’ll also see it on whiff punishes.
But yeah, you seem to get it.
I think a reversal is any special move executed on the first frame of your recovery from hitstun, blockstun, or wake up.
It’s a message to inform you that, indeed, you have input your move to happen at the very first frame where you regained control of your character. Nothing else.
The reversal message is useful to know if a move did hit the opponent because it was a good wake up option or simply because it was correctly timed. If the move was performed on frame zero after the recovery, and hit the opponent, it means it is a good wake up tool.
If, on the contrary, the move was performed on any other frame than zero, the message “reversal” does not appear, which tells us that it may have hit the opponent just because his/her timing was off, our timing was off, or simply the exchange between hitbox/hurtbox was favorable in our case for whatever reason (timing /reach mostly)
Let’s simply tag @Infilament and luckily we’ll get a quick dose of FG knowledge.
Everything @Fnrslvr, @LeoFerreis and @Crainiak24 have said in this thread is true.
Also worth noting that the reversal message only applies to special moves. You can technically “reversal a normal”, but you won’t get the message, and the input buffer doesn’t apply to normals, only special moves (I’m pretty sure, at least; in SFV there is a reversal buffer for normals but not in SF4 or any other FG I can think of and I don’t think it’s true for KI).
Sometimes you do want to “reversal a normal” if you’re trying to punish a move that is -5 on block with a 5 frame normal, for example. The only way to know if you were correct here is if the “Punishment” message comes up. Otherwise, you might be late with your normal but the other guy just didn’t block, or jumped, or something else and got hit. In any other fighting game, you don’t really ever know if your punish was frame-perfect or if the other guy just wasn’t blocking, unless you ask him.
But yeah, “reversal” and “punishment” give no extra properties to moves. They just tell you about the state of the match. (In SF4, reversal special moves did gain armor breaking properties, so in some games reversals might be special, but not KI)
Lol. That’s actually me on commentary :3 I’m the second one who speaks after the video starts.
Hope the commentary was decent! 
They are just notifications:
Punishment, tells you interrupted an opponent attack with one of yours and dealt damage
Reversal, means you did an attack on the first possible recovering frame it could happen
They are just clarification notifications for a too tight of a frame it could happened and eyes could deceive you.
This is true, and if you guys find those situations where punish should appear but does not (or does appear and shouldnt), please report them in the bug thread.