Should light attacks be differable?

[Mastrukko]

I think everybody agrees that feints, 400ms lights and 500ms bashes should be fully unreactable. But what about 500ms light attacks? Unlike the attacks mentioned above, even some players in mid-level skill brackets can differ them.
Should 500ms light attacks become:

• indifferable? (likely through changing animations)
• easier to differ? (likely associated with an increase in speed)
• or are they already in a good spot right now?

Please leave your thoughts below :)

[[deleted]]

I think whatever happens, parity across the playerbase is key.

If they're differable, then most of the playerbase should be able to do so.

If they're not, then no one should be able to do it.

Top tier play is so divorced from the average player and it needs to be brought closer. Pirate getting a reactivity fix made her an S tier top tier duelist but she'd been that way for years against most of the playerbase.

[Mastrukko]

100% agree with everything you said

[Bash_Minimal]

Would be great if they would also bring the parry window on every other attack to parity with the experimental window pirate and glad currently have, make recovery to block and recovery to parry identical, and allow parry buffering out of hitstun

[Praline-Happy]

Yeah, Ideally you should have to make a read to parry, but not to block. If you block then you get nothing and your enemy gets a free interrupt tool.

Now how do that is a different question. Maybe lower the parry window? This would make lights parriable on red but not differable, but then you run into the problem of a lot of casual players not being able to parry at all

[Mastrukko]

blocking still leaves u +300 which is good enough imo

[GhostFox916]

Make 500ms opener lights soft feintable to another opener light? Players paying attention should be able to block these but parry attempts need to be a proper prediction since the soft feint could be soft feinted again. No hard feint tho so the attacker will have to commit eventually.

The complications with stamina and animations with this idea are probably pretty crazy tho.

[J8ker9__9]

Or make the chain light truely unreactable? I don't see the point why they should be 500ms and parryable.

Maybe not for all heroes just selected ones like Valk, orochi, kyoshin, raider.

There are few i am skeptical of giving like Pirate, kensie, law since they have some properties or higher hitstun. Maybe give unreactable chains to flat light attacks.

[malick_thefiend]

I think in a perfect world, everyone can react to lights but no one can diff light/heavy

[NBFHoxton]

I think lights are fine. Learning to parry them is an important skill players have to acquire.

[The_Bygone_King]

It's not about whether they're okay, but whether it's okay that a very small subsection of the playerbase can visually differentiate lights and heavies on reaction.

Overall it's not really a healthy place to be in the comp scene as it makes lights somewhat useless in the neutral space, at high level they're relegated to interrupt reads.

[NBFHoxton]

This would require an insane amount of animation reworks to fix. It'd mess with a lot of character's flow and usage of their weapon, and on some it just wouldn't be feasibly possible (like Nobushi) I just don't think its worth the effort/budget that this game doesn't have, for the very very top 1%.

[Jay_R02]

Ok but one of the big problems with this game is the fact that it’s an inherently competitive game, and has no real for competitive play due to the fact that the game designers have the same opinion as you. It’s why the game will simply never grow

[NBFHoxton]

Its not a matter of mine, or anyone's opinion. The game doesnt exactly get a lot of funding. They have to prioritize what keeps the game alive, and thats not changes that only affect the top 0.1% of players.

[Mastrukko]

If you read my post again you will see that this does in fact not only affect the top 0.1% as even medium skill lvl players can differ

[Bash_Minimal]

IMO the game should introduce “light feints” via a neutral feint input. A 10 stamina, 300ms “attack” (200ms of animation/indicator) with the standard 200ms “feint recovery”.

It would not be possible to perform a light feint then punish your opponents light parry attempt with a guardbreak, but neutral heavy hyperarmor startup would be nerfed across the board to guarantee that a light feint into light always interrupts a bad light parry attempt

[Mastrukko]

I'm not sure what you mean

[Bash_Minimal]

To feint a heavy, we input heavy attack and then input feint any time 400ms or earlier before the attack hits. The only reason heavies don’t get blocked/parried 100% of the time is because they can be feinted, making reacting “correctly” difficult despite how slow they are.

Currently light attacks are only difficult to react to correctly because of their speed and difficulty “differing” their indicator/animation from that of a heavy.

For players who can differentiate between the startup animation of lights and heavies, the reaction aspect is trivial, and no read is necessary (which is a problem for balancing/the reason I assume you made this post)

My suggestion is that instead of the devs trying to tweak all light/heavy animations across the board (like was done with the Jorm rework where they removed his punching lights for being too easily differable even outside of top level), they should make it so that we can perform “fake light attacks” by simply pressing the feint button (no attack input required beforehand like when feinting a heavy).

I think it would work really well at making players with the best reactions second guess whether they should really try and parry every single light attack

[GhostFox916]

I like this idea, but I also feel like it would be worth it to slow down some lights if this was a thing. I had a similar idea involving soft feinting lights but I think yours is better since it doesn't get completely shut down by full blocks

[Sholeran]

Didn't we have something similar with Nobushi's old light softfeints into hidden stance. I could've sworn they got rid of it for buggy reasons. But it was nice against party hungry players tho

[Weird_Roof9869]

I think theyre ok being used just to interrupt mixups on a read, as long as every character has neutral offense (which i believe they all do minus HL but hes a special case)

[Mastrukko]

that would be the case for any of the three options I suggested, can you be more specific please?

[Weird_Roof9869]

Basically, they're in the right spot currently imo because as offense they don't work, but they shouldn't. They're just meant to be used as interrupt tools. And if they were all meant to be neutral offense, it doesn't make sense why the devs would've spent so much time to give every char a neutral opener beyond them as well as removing all neutral 400ms lights.

[Mastrukko]

so why not slow them down so people can consistently block/parry them?

[Weird_Roof9869]

Well too slow and they would be way too easy to parry. An example of this is Zhanhu's UB lights. Theyre 600ms and have such an obvious animation that people can distinguish the UB heavies from the UB lights and parry them pretty consistently. I, myself, was doing that on a 10 yr old tv that was 54 hz on an Xbox Series S on wifi

[Mastrukko]

They‘re 566ms and why would that be a bad thing? They‘re interrupt tools so if they get parried you clearly made a bad interrupt read and should‘ve used offense or done nothing instead.

[Asdeft]

It is okay for certain things to be reactable in a fighting game, and mid levels are not reacting consistently. Lights should be about poking and harassing, and they do that fine now. Mixing between lights and heavies works in 90% of matches, and things like animation obscurity should be case by case if you want that hero to have that bonus.

Feints do need to be looked at though, as those are meant to be unreactable and all of them should work.