Spinal Moveset -- good normals?

I’m a Jago player and Spinals have given me a lot of trouble. I’m currently playing against the AI on Killer to train and it is tough. It just feels as though I get stuffed or hit by that damn Shield Crush, which seems faster than my Neck Cutter. I haven’t yet looked at the frame data, but am I crazy or just terrible? A lot of his moves seem safe, but is that more a matter of my reactions or is the AI just picking the safe versions?

It also doesn’t help that on higher difficulties it seems nearly impossible to counter break the AI.

It’s just the AI. It just reacts to whatever you do with the best possible options. You can’t bait shadow counters from it and it doesn’t seem combo break if you attempt a counter break. I laugh every time I attempt to play footsies with it, because it will do a shadow move the moment you try to poke.

I would only recommend fighting the AI to practice manual and juggle execution or to test what’s safe on block. If it can punish you, it will. You’re better off fighting other players if you really want to improve.

Spinal: The Complete KI Guide → Ctrl+F “Normals to watch”

^I agree with Infil.

Don’t play against the AI on killer. Play against human opponents, Shadows, or set the training dummy to CPU on Medium/Hard if you want to immediately practice something on a moving target. The default AI, especially on higher difficulty levels, is not playing Killer Instinct.

I’m not entirely sure why both players would frequently be choosing overhead simultaneously.

I’m pretty sure they are. Slide isn’t safe, but mostly Spinal is about spending resources to access dirty mixups and prolong pressure, he doesn’t pay for his mixups by being punishable on block so much.

On the other hand, Spinal is mostly free to pressure – he doesn’t really have any good defensive options to speak of – so once you have frame advantage you can keep it for a while, nab him with a surprise throw or overhead, and then keep pressuring. This is probably how you beat Spinal as a Jago player.

Okay, so playing against the AI is not worth the effort. That’s good to know because it certainly feels as though it is reading my input and frame data and just responding.

Nah, not at the same time. It just feels that way by comparison. I use Neck Cutter and the AI or player stands up. Spinal uses Shield Crush and I’m just fast enough to know what happened, but not do anything about it.

Like I said, the default AI is not playing KI. Shadows was built at least in part to address the problem of making AI that reacts on a human-like delay, yet still manages to make decent decisions with imperfect information.