To clarify, I think it’s really hard for humans to be truly random (there are lots of studies on this, I’ll be happy to link you some, although I’m sure you’ve heard the argument before). So while breaking “truly randomly” is what you’re going for, in practice I doubt it comes through like that unless you read your break attempts off a computer printout. Also, you say that you can input your guess with manual timing to cover all cases but this is definitely not true for all linkers… some manuals come late enough that a light AD would have completely finished by then. It’s possible, then, that you will get an orange lockout on the following linker (which can’t be broken in startup).
Yes, there are some times when the defense will guess break because they were going to die anyway, but this is just the nature of fighting games I think. Risk/reward changes near the end of the health bar and it’s true of all fighting games. Lots of people do crazy stuff because “oh well I was going to die anyway” in any fighting game, and you just have to handle the situation appropriately.
Actually, the counter breaker is active for a very long time; what’s actually happening here is that the opponent is leaving hit stun. This is why sometimes it feels like you catch really really late break attempts and other times the guy breaks immediately and you don’t catch it. It depends on what move you chose to counter break on (and where in that move you chose to do it).
The end result is the same (you didn’t counter break something you thought you should have), but just wanted to say that the counter breaker itself isn’t the problem, it’s that some multi-hit moves do weird amounts of hit stun in the middle.
Yeah, this is true; late in a combo with high damage scaling, your value of a counter breaker goes down. But I think the offense is not helpless here… for starters, it’s rather uncommon that you end up with a level 4 combo with 90 KV that your opponent has not locked out on. If that’s the case, I think you should just end the combo earlier rather than risk the break or counter break. Sometimes it happens, but I think in general, if you get to level 4 it’s because your opponent locked out (and you can safely cash out) or because you had a bunch of white life some other way, which means the damage scaling is probably low.
In the rare cases where this DOES happen, though, I think there is a lot of value in a reset here. It’s important to remember that varying attack strength and counter breaker are not the only ways to bait combo break attempts, resets actually do a really good job of it, often giving you a counter hit bonus AND resetting your damage scaling, and you lose very little (or none) of your white life for trying it (this was a S2 change!). Your reset will also often beat somebody who chose to not break, so it counters more than ONLY the break attempt.
I agree that counter breakers resetting damage scaling would be bad for the game. A Thunder counter breaker would be 100% life, basically.
It’s your opinion, like you said, but I still don’t really see it. You mentioned that some combo things are reactable (which is true), but certainly not all of it is… if you wait for a reactable point, it’s entirely possible the offense will not give it to you. You can choose to start guessing here with presumably better odds, but then the offense is, again, back at the advantage because you are removing some options from your list of possibilities (and you are not defending against resets, probably). You talk about barely ever using counter breaker because sometimes the reward is too low, but most of the time, it will be substantially huge IMO, especially if you are able to pick off your defender’s break habits and counter break in situations where they are > 50% likely to break (the health swing for success vs failure here is way in your favor if you play 1000 matches). So the issue comes in finding spots where your opponent is > 50% likely to break. If breakers are as common/easy to perform as some think, I think this is a very doable task.
I think the real issue here is that we’re arguing based on feel… you “feel” like counter breakers are too risky and I “feel” that they (sometimes) aren’t. It would be cool if somebody modeled the system mathematically to indicate what the risk and reward actually is. I try to bring numbers and percentages into my arguments but they are only ballpark figures.
<tugs collar nervously> I dunno man… this really skews the risk heavily in favor of the offense. Like not just marginally so, we’re talking orders of magnitude more. It is basically a risk-free attempt at 60% damage on every opening, and it decreases the offense’s mental stack significantly and devalues reaction on defense, two things I think are skill-based.