The Replay and Analysis Thread

Close enough, I think it’s 1+5 or 1+6 but everything except the 1 is invincible and the projectile hits literally the entire screen.

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I just have no talent for reaction based gameplay whatsoever.

I can’t break on reaction, I can’t react instantly to read what an opponent is going to do, its mostly just “instinct” and heavy focus on offense. I try to make up for my lack of skills in my defense by playing as offensively as I can so they have less of a chance to catch me up and beat me down. This often doesn’t play out in my favor though, I don’t know why folks complain about guess breakers so much because honestly I’m only able to successfully break like 25% of the time.

I don’t know if I’m just to old, or if my fingers don’t move that fast but I’ve been trying to learn how to break, manual and read my opponent for the last three years and I just can’t get the hang of it. Still stuck on Dojo lesson 32 and I probably always will be.

Well, I didn’t see you use counter-breakers or shadow counters, or opener into linkers very much…

Also was that vid on 2x speed? It was fast!

Lastly, thanks for showing me that she can dash cancel into her flying kick and flip kick (and flip-fake) - I did not know that.

For Dayvo:

  • I agree you should pressure more after throws. Throws in most fighting games are not the end of your offense, they are just the “okay, here is your punishment for not teching, I get damage and my offense continues”. If Geek is going to reversal, I say let him try (most of the time, Geek was waking up with non-invincible moves).
  • I recommend never using shadow shoulder in instinct lockouts, instead always use shadow club. Much better damage, much better PD build, and faster.
  • Sometimes you teleported yourself into the corner during a mage combo! You can do front teleport with the same timing (or back teleport to switch position). If you are mid screen, I would never do back teleport. Push them to the corner instead!
  • Use more crouching MK! Amazing low button that is farther range than other warrior mediums, keeps Eyedol on the offensive for longer.

Geek:

Dunno how much of what I’m about to say is stuff you acknowledged in your other post, but I would encourage you to read it and not just dismiss it as something you already know.

  • I feel like you are extremely impatient in all aspects of the game. If your opponent is full screen, you immediately jump, dash, or natural disaster. On the off occasions where you do sit there and wait for a second, you assume your opponent is also immediately going to do something, so you shadow ruin. If you’re close, Dayvo got momentum back from you by reversaling almost every time. If you get hit, you try to combo break immediately (I don’t think I saw one combo that didn’t have a lockout or a break attempt). On your wakeup or after blocking a ranged attack of any kind, I think I can count the number of times you tried to block and react on one hand in the above set. You cycled through okay options (shadow ruin) to some meh options (wakeup st.LK, wakeup shadow ND), to some pretty tough ones (wakeup jump), but rarely did you take the best option, which was block.

  • To me, these things are not so much “I forgot Eyedol had a DP because I don’t have much matchup experience, I will remember next time,” they are symptoms of something a little bigger; you must always be active doing something, or else you feel you aren’t playing the game or winning. Fighting games are about patience just as much as they are pressing your advantage, they’re about biding your time and picking an opportunity to strike when it is most advantageous for you.

  • And I feel you can say “I thought he was going to throw a projectile, so I shadow ruin’d from full screen, I guess I just had the wrong read”… some part of that is true, but it’s misleading to think that’s the only thing. You assume he was going to throw a projectile, because you assume the opponent must be following the winning gameplan of constantly doing something. Pretty rarely did Dayvo actually throw full screen projectiles as mage, because he knows your tendencies here! What you should do often from this spot is walk forward and block in small spurts. Block 10 projectiles for a while, if Dayvo even throws them at all. Not every projectile needs to be countered, just like not every successful break should have been counter broken. There is real value in playing like this, because it means you are assessing Dayvo’s patterns and making him think he is allowed to do things he really isn’t. This is the real mental tug-of-war of fighting games that I feel is missing in your play.

  • As a somewhat related note, I feel your play is basically 5% reactive, 95% predictive. This means when you are playing frustrated or upset or nervous, you will play much worse, because your predictions will be wrong more often and you don’t have a backup gameplan. KI does give you lots of opportunity to react to things… you don’t need to predict as much as I feel you are doing. And this is probably why a lot of your comments on the forums about tier lists have happened; you have conclused that you can’t play predictively against a character (but rather, it’s always against a human). I would like to encourage you to try and play a bit more reactively and take control of moments not by always acting first, but by letting your opponent make errors while you are calm and collected. It doesn’t have to be 95% 5% the other way, a good dose of prediction will force people to think “this guy’s a nut” and play worse, but it can’t be the modus operandi of your FG playstyle.

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@HUMANHUNTER205

You jump a lot, and take a fair bit of damage because of it.

Your friend guess broke the first chance he could almost every time you opened him up. He usually went medium, too. You need to mix up your strengths and/or throw in more counterbreakers to deal with that.

You got a lockout in one of the games and comboed for the full duration but didn’t efficiently add damage. Then you went for a shadow after the lockout window and got broken. You should make an effort to get the most damage you can from your lockouts, and end the combo once it’s breakable again.

When in instinct your friend has a habit of going for overhead after double fireballs for a reset but you didn’t adjust to it.

You don’t take advantage of shadow counters in obvious situations; he gets away with some double roundhouses that you should be making an effort to punish. Likewise you should be careful about your use of back HP when your opponent’s sitting on a bar.

Currently about halfway into the video and you just…never chill. You get counter hit a lot in weird situations where it doesn’t make sense to be pressing anything. Sometimes it works, I’ve seen a few wakeup sweeps connect, but you’re not picking good times to press buttons with disrespect. You also almost never sit still and see what your opponent will do in response.

On the other hand, your friend is sometimes willing to just wait and let you make risky approaches that result in free damage for him, and when you do open him up you frequently go for the same options which gets you broken a lot. Like, at 5:50, you open him up and get broken on mediums right away four times in a row. You’re hitting him a lot, but he’s making better decisions that get him a lot more damage.

You use maya’s overhead a LOT, and it’s just not very good. Toward the end your friend is blocking it, but vs jagos with faster reaction times you’re eventually going to start eating DPs for that. It can work, sometimes, but not when you use it that often. You have to erase the expectation of the overhead carefully and bring it out at key moments.

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In order to understand why you lost, I want to point to the first 30-ish seconds.

Notice how you are jumping all over the place and your opponent is kinda just soaking it all in? I want you to pretend you are playing as Jago against an “all over the place” Maya and watch through your friend’s eyes starting at 0:40 in your vid.

Notice how he just sits there and waits for you to jump into something. At 0:42 he tries a pre-emptive crouch HP, because he is pretty sure you are going to jump. It doesn’t hit, but he just sits there anyway. At 0:45, just a few seconds later, you turn around and jump at him again, and this time he gets you.

Now, watch the rest of the set with this in mind. He knows you are a little hyperactive (and he knows you constantly start your combos with mediums, apparently!), so watch his patience and how he just walks into a range where he knows you will jump, then just smacks you out of the air. Watch how, without even really engaging in the fight, he lets you hang yourself. Watch the match from the Jago player’s perspective and take a look at how often he just walks directly into your jump range so that you will try to jump.

(Some more concrete advice would be to stop using leap kick so much! It is a risky move that can get you killed pretty fast)

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I’m much less familiar with Eyedol and his gameplan than other characters in the game, so my advice to @Dayv0 will be somewhat limited. But here are some things to note:

  • As others have said, pressure off throws
  • You didn’t really use Eyedol’s pips too often, particularly the warrior ones. Eyedol’s jump cancel pressure strings are actually pretty good, and you should probably learn to incorporate them into your game
  • Don’t corner yourself with Mage teleport. You don’t need to, and it will put you in a bad spot if you lose momentum

For @GalacticGeek, I think there are a lot of little things that go wrong in your play, but I think most of those little mistakes are really just outgrowths of one or two core mistakes that lie at the foundation of your play.

The first big one is just patience. You always want to do something, and this kills you. If you’re in neutral your immediate inclination is a roll, jump, or ruin, and if you’ve gotten hit you break almost immediately. You have a hard time sitting still, and that is just not a good place to be as Aganos. He has many sterling qualities, but the ability to just kind of do stuff and get away with it is manifestly not one of them. He’s too punishable on bad reads to be played fast and loose. You have to learn to sit still and be ok with just taking damage sometimes, and when you’re in neutral you need to learn to be patient and just assess the situation. Which leads into what I think is your other core issue.

I’m not sure how much you actually stop to assess what your opponent is doing at a given moment. I’ve remarked before that I think you flow chart, and I think this set is a good illustration of that. You have a set plan for how you think the match will go moment to moment, and you stick to that plan largely irrespective of how your opponent is responding to it. As an example, I think Dayv0 hit you with every DP he did on wakeup across the entire set. That’s a very impressive feat, because he woke up DP an awful lot. The reason he was able to hit you with a 100% success rate on wakeup DP was because you never adapted to his strategy. You attempted to meaty him on basically every single knockdown, and mostly just ignored that he kept waking up. It’s one thing if you have chunks and can stuff it out; it’s another altogether when his constant DP’s are shutting down your offense with some consistency. You have to be able to notice these things in the moment and adjust your gameplan on the fly in response to them. Don’t just do things because they’re “good” - do things because they are specific counters to tendencies and patterns that you’ve observed from your opponent.

For what it’s worth, I think the adaptability/assessment piece also contributes to your impatience. You’re not looking for things from your opponent, so what reason would you have to be patient? You have your plan and by golly you are going to execute it, because the opponent is essentially incidental to what you’re going to be doing. Once you start actively looking to assess patterns and habits in your opposition your play will automatically slow down, because observation often requires that you simply don’t do anything. Don’t shadow ruin because you think he’s going to throw a fireball - shadow ruin because you’ve seen him throw that fireball. One is just you doing something because it’s in your plan and it’s good; the other is adapting your play to the specific action your opponent is taking in a given moment.

On the more small-bore stuff that’s big enough to warrant its own mention:

  • Learn to hit confirm. Hit confirming is a skill that isn’t super heavily emphasized in KI, but it is still important. Don’t just cancel into specials because you’ve pushed a normal and “that’s what you do”. Cancel into the special because you’ve seen that it’s hit and now you want to go into the combo system. At the very least, don’t blindly try to confirm into your special that’s negative 60 or something on block.
  • Work on your lockout combos. Those shadow payloads at the tail end of your lockout combos cost you a lot of damage. It feels weird to say this since I’m always berating people about always going for safe damage, but there really is a time and a place to just take your damage and go. If you’d spent that meter on shadow pulverize you would also have gotten good damage, and more importantly, you’d also be able to fit the combo and ender within the lockout time. Don’t give people chances to weasel out of damage when you don’t have to.
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no problem, however, its much harder when I cant do a dagger throw on block after doing her dp

I see, ever since her re-work, I could never make my dp safe anymore, so I will have to remember that

its much harder than I thought then, I can’t be risky without her daggers to keep me safe

Yep, I’m not particularly good using pips. In this particular match, It was non-existent. I have to work harder on that.

A really bad habit, you are right, I will correct this

Yep, after watching the replay, I noticed many throws where I dind’t preassured. I belive I respected Geek to much, and I should correct that

Noted. I have to improve my blockstrings to keep me on the offense, I tend to be too predictable, as far as I see in these replays

Noted :+1: Good point

I have another I need some thoughts on, its when I got the chance to fight Ignant Rizzy using my Orchid against his Rash, I won, but I need some advice on how to improve my Orchid, if you like, I will send it

@GalacticGeek there’s been a lot of great advice so far.

I’d add, in general, as soon as u have meter, use your shadow counters for easy combo openings. There were several times eyedol did the triple hit bash move and it appeared there was only one shadow counter attempt.

Also, as an aganos player, when we trap folks in the corner, pressure with jabs, tick throws, and jumping hp, continually until they have meter for shadow counter. And depending on the opponent, until they actually show that they will shadow counter. Even with no low attack outside of stomp, we still have to make opponents hate being trapped in with us when possible!

Geek:
(Note:I can’t watch the replay right now, so I’m typing all of this out of my memory)

As @STORM179 will appoint later, I hit you with every wake up DP. Using DP as wakeup is not always a good idea, but since you never adapted to it, I kept trying. Even worse, you didn’t took advantage of Aganos armor. You tried to use a meaty against me on wake up even chunkless, or you jumped when chunked, so the armor was not there to protect you. Even when you had, I just Shadow DP to multi hit you and strip your chunks.

Why? Well, others worded it already: You are impatient. Infil and Storm worded it very well:

You seem to need “doing” stuff. You seem to suffer if you are blocking or waiting. This leads you to bigger mistakes: Bad wake up preassure, trying to defy my preassure gaps when you are chunkless and I have advantage, yolo shadow ruin without instinct, jumping to much… Particularly with Aganos, sometimes you just have to stop, block, and wait for an opening, a mistake.

I will make you one question: Have you ever win a match by timeout? Not a casual match where you stop playing to explain something. An actual match, a competitive one?
It’s something really unnusual in KI, because eveyone can get big damage in seconds, but this is interesting: Since timeouts are very rare, sometimes you could just unconsciously forget about the time. But you have A LOT time to actually fight. Most of my matches end with the timer at 50 or more. You have plenty of time to STOP, just let the match go, block, wait, play safe, and mark your territory. If you acknowledge that you have more than 60 seconds(really more) in the timer, you just can stop doing risky stuff, and start going safe.
I recomend you one exercise: Play as Raam against someone like Shago or Kan-Ra
Raam is the least mobile character. His walkspeed is not fast, his dash is definetively not good to cover big distances quickly, and he has no ranged attacks. Kan-Ra and Shago, in the other hand, can run away easily from him. Just try to get closer, and closer, and closer, until they have they back on the corner. You could spend 15 seconds in the timer just blocking and getting closer, they could get, what, 8% chip damage from you? Land a successful krill attack or a combo, and suddenly, the wait was worth. Raam is the most extreme example of patience. You could spend 30/40 seconds just walking and blocking, and in one single instinct combo, take a full bar in one lockdown. It’s the most extreme example of reward for being patient. If you learn to wait for your moment with Raam and punish your opponent, you could transfer this gameplay to any character, being patient, and taking your time to get in.

Sometimes, Aganos would just need chunks. That’s your priority. One-chancer into payload assault ender, to get One or two chunks. With that, you can fuel your neutral and offense, and only when chunked, you can start trying more damaging combos. But giving me 4 break points in a combo with lights to get two chunks it’s just not optimal. Use a short combo, with only one breaking point, and get the same reward. You are losing what, 4-5% damage? Are you risking 2 chunks and the advantage for 4-5% damage? Not a good idea.
Also, you used shadow payload assault in two combos. You dropped the combo in the first, and I didn’t block it, so you got lucky there. You used it after a Heavy punch auto double, and I’m not sure about that working. It works after a M manual, a HK manual, and maybe after a HK double, but I belive it doesn’t connect after HP double. I may be wrong
In the second, you performed the Wall setup, but instead of going for a ruin(which would be hard to break), you went for a normal into CB. Since you dind’t go for the ruin, that normal seemed like CB bait. I went for the “no break” since I expected a CB after NOT seeing the Ruin. I was right, and you got punished. My point is that you could go for a Ruin, CB, and probably you would get me. But since you used HP, the CB was More likely to happen. So my only choice was NOT breaking you. The point here is not making your CBs obvious. That is what you have to correct.

Again, Aganos combo damage is low, but very good once you put a Shadow payload assault on it. Once chancers into chunks, or HKD ender if you already have chunks. Don’t make it longer if you don’t have shadow meter or your opponent locks himself soon.

The problem here is the lack of patience. If you work in your patience, you will not do this, I’m sure.

Well, I’m nobody to be nervous XD

I can understand that you were nervous because you knew you were being recorded, so this is my recomendation: When you play anyone else who knows about this thread, that people will record some of your matches randomly, so you can “forget” that you are being recorded. So, for example, you play a set against @TheNinjaOstrich. After some matches, ask him to record some of them to post them here.

As Aganos, happy jumping is not advised, since it nullifies your armor. If you jump, be sure to not be easily countered. You jumped against me from far distance when I had shadow meter, basically provoking me into use shadow lighting bolt(or as I like to call it, Tesla madness XD).

At the end, your biggest problem is not every mistake you did, is your lack of patience. This, coupled of some short of “flowchart mindset”, makes you predictable and punishable.

The flowchart mindset, as others pointed, makes you play as if only you were playing. You have a plan, and if everything goes fine, its good, but you have a hard time if your plan is read and you can’t rely on it. You should adapt more to your opponent. Does he uses meaties? How often does he try to throw me? Does he always DP on wake up? You should watch for this stuff, and work around it.
Again, Infil nailed it:

You have to react more, not predict. Making a hard read and punish something with shadow ruin feels good, but it happens 1/10 times.

I forgot to add this move into the poll of “best shadow moves in the game”, and IMO this one is a really good use of shadow meter. It’s not a reversal, but it really feels like one.


Also, some Aganos tips:
-You never used Peacemaker in the neutral. Never put a wall and grab it, you just used peacemaker during instinct. You had plenty of time when I was fullscreen with warrior, and with the peacemaker, you would had the upper hand in the neutral. Hit me two times, wall behind you, grab it again, repeat.
-I belive you never used j. HK, and it’s a really good move.
-Avoid using F+HK as meaty against someone who has reversal, specially if you are chunkless. I got out of it with mage reversal, which is bad.
-If you have instinct, you could activate it after a blocked ruin, making it safe. I know you know this, but it’s good to remember it.

Yeah this is a good enough block o’ text that I’m gonna quote it and make you read it again.

If you don’t have much of a plan except “this move is good so I’m going to do it, and it has worked on people in the past”, then it actually doesn’t really matter what your opponent is doing… you’re kind of playing a single player game. Often the best approach is to understand why you are doing a move.

  • What good is shadow ruin if you have not blocked a bunch of projectiles and given the opponent incentive to throw them? It’s otherwise just a -80 on block move that costs a bar and gets you killed 80% of the time, and earns small damage 20% of the time. For those odds, you can pick something much safer to accomplish the same goal.

  • What good is stomp if the opponent hasn’t shown he wants to walk back and forth? It’s a good move, sure, but if your opponent is jump happy or not in stomp range, then you are not accomplishing anything. And until you block for a while and sorta try to read where your opponent wants to stand and how often he jumps, your stomp is just a guess that may or may not accomplish anything.

In general, you should be able to answer the question “why am I pressing this button?” when you press it (or, at least, in replay analysis after). If your answer is “I dunno, it’s a good button”, or “it worked last time I tried it, might as well try it again,” then it’s going to be hard to improve as a player. Your answer should be something like “I thought he was going to walk forward into that space” or “by taking up that space, I am forcing him to jump into my anti-air a few seconds later, and if I don’t press this button now, he has proven in the past he won’t jump, so I am trying to force him into a mistake.”

Hopefully you can see the difference a bit.

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Dayvo, according to my profile you have liked 369 posts I have made. Just thought you would like to know that.

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I know. What can I say, you usually are right, and I like to use likes as a “I agree with that / I appreciate this post”.

And if I take a look on your older posts, I’m sure I would like more.

This could be applied to many members of the community. Take my likes as some short of “you are right/I like your attitude” feedback

370 XD

Actually he did try a ruin here, but I feel you just live with the consequences if they break, so I still don’t think it was a good counter breaker.

(Also, isn’t this setup really hard or impossible to break because of some weirdness with the engine?)

It was during S2.

Since it already had a breaking point, these are the possible outcomes:
-Shadow ruin: Works as ender, chashes out damage, unbreakable, wall break. Guaranteed success. Hard to see, since you need two shadow meters: One for Shadow payload, another for the Ruin
-L/M/H Ruin: Regular ruin is breakable, but you have to break it with the appropiate strenght. If he would use any regular ruin, It would be a 1/3 chance of succes for me if I go for the break. Even less, since he could just CB it. So, I have to valorate:
*Do I want to break that ruin to avoid the cashout, but risk myself into a CB for more damage AND a wall break?
*Should I just press nothing, waiting for a CB, so I get free and avoid the wall crash?

It’s a good setup, and if you have more walls, it can lead to +60% without problem. Geek setted it right, but IMO he should go for the Ruin instead a normal, giving me only one breaking point, not two(normal, then ruin)

EDIT: Actually, he went into a HP, not a ruin. Don’t know why J.HP stated in my head instead HP.

Are you… Are you Bernie Sanders…?