The title of the thread is “the KI is too YOLO debate.” If you come in here talking about these things and why people think KI is too YOLO and then say "plus Kim Wu has this crazy damage combo off counter break, then I’m sorry but you are saying that is YOLO.
Also, there is nothing YOLO about the breaker system. And I would not describe it as more forgiving than other games either. An early lockout leads to a lot higher potential damage than just about any other game. And again, different does not equal YOLO. Yes, the two way interaction doesn’t end when the first guy lands a light low jab the way it does in most other games. That makes it more intense and continuously challenging than many other games. This idea that people have that the one and only true “fair” fighting game is “you messed up, I jabbed you so now I get unfettered access to my dial-a-combo and you deserve to just eat it” is just not true. That doesn’t make KI YOLO or random or mean the game has no fundamentals.
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Oh yeah for sure but that’s what I have seen that is not liked about KI the most even from players who do play the game the breaker system has a risk for locking out but your shadow meter is still in tact even with guessing for breaks that is what it comes down to.
Which is a point that’s been thrice-over vivisected in this and many other threads, so I’m not sure we’re going to spin any more gold from that yarn, friend.
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YOLO just means “I got hit by something I probably shouldn’t have gotten hit by.” That’s all it means now. There’s yolo DP, yolo counter break, and yolo sweep in footsies (lol). It’s a tired term and I wish people would actually say what they mean.
Anyway, Kim’s damage is high when she does shadow Dragon Kick after a level 2 or 3 ender, but it doesn’t seem much higher than other characters when she’s at level 4 ender. Her counter breaker combos (which I just re-did from scratch for every character on my ki.infil.net guide yesterday, using new S3 damage numbers) are actually not as high as you would think; for 2 meters she gets about 63%, assuming you had no white life on the character before. Compare that to other characters if you like: Jago (70%), Glacius (70%), Thunder (68%), Spinal (67% + two curses), etc. Heck, even Tusk only gets 64%.
Kim’s damage looks high because she melts it all off in one hit, and functionally in a match she hurts a lot because of Dragon Kick and short conversions into shadow Dragon Kick, but lots of other characters hurt just as much.
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The breaker system returns us to neutral now, so it’s basically no different than getting out of block-string pressure with a DP, save for the lack of damage.
You must have not been only doing just shadows without her dragons being able to cancel out for even more damage with two shadows.
http://ki.infil.net/kimwu.html
If you can find a higher damage combo than the ones I listed there (please read “damage calculation notes” first), let me know and I will change my page.
I do that, and people just laugh at me, or don’t respond…
Maybe I’m doing it wrong? 
Kim Page is Up? 
Edit: Damage Calculations! Yes! 
It’s up, but far from complete. Her page and Rash’s page are about the same level of completeness now. Hopefully I can get around to them soon, they’re hard characters to fully understand so I’m taking a bit of time.
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LCD found this combo but she needs three dragons to perform uses two shadows as well https://twitter.com/CrazyLCD/status/715443962551541761
This is a cool combo, but it will definitely extend longer than the 4 second counter break window, so it doesn’t really apply to my damage numbers because it’s breakable. I’m looking for guaranteed damage after landing a counter breaker.
And also, yeah, the problem of needing 3 dragons makes it hard to recommend for general use. You also can’t adapt it to only 1 shadow bar, since you need a shadow to launch them AND a shadow to cash out the damage later. Also, it only works as an opener, because you need all that white life from the initial shadow dragon kick (which, if done in any other situation, would count as an ender). So it’s an extremely specific combo.
Kim does hurt, but in the context of counter breaker combos, she hurts less than you think, probably only slightly above average. Again, I’d encourage you to try the combos listed on my guide page and let me know if you can find better ones (people have found better ones in the past!).
Wait off CB you were only able to find that low amount of damage I got CB yesterday VS her and got hit with 73% damage and killed me it is crazy all unbreakable as well after the CB was opened up with firecracker had no potential built up either plus she didn’t pop instinct either after CB or before. I will have to send you the video because It was not a long combo either pretty insane.
It really sounds like potential damage was involved, but we’d have to see the video to make that call for sure.
Yes, if you are doing a longer combo and counter break in the middle, you will get damage numbers in the 70% and higher.
But… this is true for every character. That’s why I try to isolate JUST the counter breaker damage by doing one opener move and counter breaking immediately. If you read the “damage calculation notes” on that page I linked above, it tells you what move I used and how I calculated it.
If you can find a 73% damage combo using the same damage calculation as me, send it to me.
Just to clarify this discussion, @RLSSGKingEZ sent me the video (Kim 73% CB combo): https://account.xbox.com/en-US/gameclip/85a6d37b-1ea1-4ff2-ad0b-1244d18aa48e?gamertag=RL%20SSGKingEZ&scid=03a80100-9ff3-46ea-be76-e00e7fe465df
You can see there was a ton of white life before Kim did the counter breaker. The combo she hit before the CB was heavy dragon dance, medium auto, shadow Firecracker, medium auto xx CB.
I did a similar combo with Jago: heavy wind kick, medium auto, shadow Laser Sword, medium auto xx CB and then did Jago’s max damage counter breaker that uses 1 bar (HP, MP, LP, HP, MP xx shadow DP) and got 78%. The illusion for Kim is that it does all the damage on the last hit, not that it does more damage than other counter break combos.
It’s a pretty good illusion though. 
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But still it favors some characters more than others.
A succesful breaker for Shadow Jago or Glacius is more rewarding cause they get back into their comfort zone.
Imo the breaker system ist good but they should have kept in mind that depending on who breaks the neutral position can be more rewarding for zoners.
There would have been different ways of balancing that out but atm catching up to a Shadow Jago after he broke a combo is nearly impossible for many characters.
@topic
I get beat by random stuff all the time - i actually have my top 5 where i lose to random stuff. This includes raw random special moves, combo drop resets that were 100% unintentional and so on
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Shadow Jago - I get hit by yolo slide pretty ■■■■ often, yolo divekick extremely often cause the ■■■■ move is the most ambigious auto correct thing i have ever seen
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Glacius - cold shoulder and puddle punch. This combination is just strong - and i got hit by it a million times. Puddle punch after a jumpin,
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Sabrewulf - Dropped combos into overhead/low mixup
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Omen - Yolo Slide into Shadow Form mixup or getaway
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Hisako - combo resets that are unintentional with a dropped cr.mk manual, yolo counters during recovery of certain moves like her command grab (if you get sucked in and he has the wrath to cancel the recovery you have to make so many right reads to punish for that)
The biggest problem for some characters is that they can not make them reliably pay for sticking out unsafe moves that often and with the recent counter breaker change it simply is not worth to go for a cb cause even if you know he tries to break you end up being punished cause he locked out shortly before you pressed cb. I had hoped for a punishment mechanic that locks the opponent out for 1 second after the punishment symbol popped up.
They did say they were investigating a change that made sure your counter break attempt comes out the first possible frame they could successfully break. This won’t stop people who get timing lockouts during juggles, but it should at least solve the “I couldn’t break that attack” problem that got introduced in S3 because of the hitstop change (which had its own problems, heh).
As for 1 second lockout on punishment, it’s an interesting idea, except you kind of get “punishment” a lot, especially for weird things like counterhitting a jab that randomly happened to be in recovery, shadow counters, and stuff like that. You could do a short 1 chance unbreakable combo (Kim could even do shadow dragon dance linker here since it’s so short) as a punish and that probably kinda upsets the balance a bit, especially if it seems to happen “randomly” in neutral a lot. I think the best approach here is just to make sure your opener hurts a lot, so you do a hard-hitting normal xx shadow move wherever possible. Easier said than done of course, but it’s a reasonable way to make stuff hurt a lot. If they guess break immediately you still got 20%+, and if they’re wrong on the guess break, your KV and scaling is low so you get to put on 50%+ no problem.
Im sure they could have figured something out to make it work. Disable it on jabs or something. Another approach would be the SFV thing. Punishment gives your normal the counter hit property and heavy and medium normals get a small damage buff on the punishment symbol (of course Tusk should not get this).
But since its not there the imbalance in making you pay is damn crazy.
When i play Tusk vs Cinder i do DP way more than when i play Tusk vs Tusk cause even a full combo does not hurt that much (except if im fired up - which btw all cinders should do vs Tusk as the main goal).
I think you understand the issue. I do not whine cause with Tusk i get big guaranteed damage of a unsafe move 
And aside from his footsie heavy gameplay the high guaranteed damage punish is the reason why i found my character in KI and have so much more fun in playing it.
I don’t think anyone would deny this. I think where people tend to get a bit miffed is when someone (not you) says that this only happens in KI, or that somehow KI has this massively larger proportion of these things happening. “Abare” (a term for the ability to deal damage off random hits and trades) has existed long before KI, and it sure as heck didn’t create the American Reset. 
Random special probably does happen more in KI (just due to the overpowering nature of KI specials in general), but to a great extent this is somewhat mitigated by the combo breaker mechanic. I actually just tend to think of KI specials as getting touched by an E. Ryu low forward - every character in this game has great abare, because normals are cancelable and specials are so powerful. KI’s neutral “randomness” simply prioritizes its specials, where an SFV prioritizes the normals.
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