So Guard Breaks are really this good, huh? | Forums

[Maljas]

You have 1/4 of a second to counter guard break.

To make an analogy to counter guard break your reflexes must be good enough you could catch flying flies with one hand.

And if you don't agree: you are spamming it with peacekeeper, raider, warlord.

Watch a duel between higher skill players. You'll see them counter guardbreaks constantly. It isn't that hard.

[PlagueGripes]

Complaints about guard breaks have been around as long as there has been alphas and now a beta.

It gets easier to deal with over time, but the window is much tighter now, since before it was almost trivial to counter a guard break. And if you don't have a guard break in this system that's simple enough to use, there's no way to get through defenses, barring fighting someone with bad reaction timing.

It's too late for such a change, but my opinion has always been that guard breaks should be something like... you can only do when your opponent's stamina is low, and blocking attacks with non-parry specific timing lowers your stamina. That way, you break through someone's guard by wearing them out with switch ups. For the defender, blocking with parry timing three (or whatever) times over time builds up like a revenge meter, letting you get a poise-through hit so you can break attack spam.

Whether it's that specifically, or not, point being, it should be something that's part of the blocking system, not something that shuts it off. A serious oversight, in my opinion, but not something that can be corrected at this point.

[Warp_11]

Counter-guardbreaking vs orochi is too frustrating, you can't concentrate on it since then you won't be able to block their light hits or side-dodges on time and if you fail, you automatically lose 1 block of health to their guaranteed heavy attack, which is more than 2 lights hits by other heroes.

[CarnalEpitaph]

You can't even dodge them as your opponent will simply auto-lock onto your position.

I agree with your general point but this part is simply untrue for some characters. Berserker in particular can do his dodge + light side attack which will always make you un-guardbreak-able. I think perhaps making this a standard practice across the board would help. I know that nobushi can be caught out while dodging sideways, but (perhaps in keeping with his 'you can't catch me' side roll animation) the berserker always breaks out of guard breaks that have started during a sideways dodge.

I agree that the instant deaths near a ledge for a single mistake seems a bit extreme, but I've found a good way to mitigate this is to stay on the offensive around grabby players, that way in any lull where you aren't attacking and they're not attacking, you have a good chance that they will guard break so you can be prepared for the counter. Honestly, using this approach on some tense fights on the bridge areas has led me to start my guard break cancel slightly BEFORE their guard break animation catches me, which causes my character to hit THEM with a grab that they instantly counter for free (they've already pressed the guard break button). This is actually probably a bug, but it's pretty funny, and it leads me to effectively knock myself off the ledge, since being GB countered leads to a knock back.