Junior Member
I want to start out by saying, firstly, that Valkyrie was overly buffed in patch 1.03 for several reasons: 1. pre-patch, she already had guaranteed combos off of her Guard-break, which, depending on the opponent's stamina bar, could lead to an easy 2 bars worth of damage. Her parry game is insanely strong because of this. 2. considering how Valk's spear is a long-ranged weapon, she did not need a buff to her attack speed. Her speed is now comparable to that of Peacekeeper's light attacks. This only makes it harder for the defender to react to her long-range pokes. 3. combine that with her ability to knock you down at the end of a string, she gets a scary "Vortex' situation that forces the defender to commit to a guess. It becomes increasingly hard to react to her onslaught of light attacks and knock downs the more she mixes you up. So you've got a defensive long-ranged class coupled with some insanely strong Okizeme, and you've got yourself a bag full of OPium. Someone in Ubi must have been Hiiiigh rebalancing Valk, just saying.. :P
Here's hoping that Ubisoft rebalances her for the community's sake, and with that being said...
Onto the topic at hand.
Berserker is one of those characters that is easy to use on the surface, but hard to master. I'm a prestige 3 Zerker, and with a ton of Fighting Game experience, so you can say I have quite some experience playing this class. Now, his/her whole gameplan is to daze their opponent with feints and capitalise off of their mistakes. It's quite rewarding once you make all the proper guesses against someone with solid defence. I think that, while Zerker does have some unfavourable match ups (Conqueror and Warlord for example), they still have a fighting chance against them.
For those unaware, Berserker has the ability to deflect (dodge towards the incoming attack), and automatically follow it up with a Guard-break, which is meant to be guaranteed in any situation. Now, my issue, and I think that a lot of Zerkers mains will side with me on this, is that Berserker's Deflect does not work as intended in some specific situations. The first time that I'd encounter this, was against a Conqueror. I deflect the Conqueror's incoming heavy attack, which succeeds, and as the Zerker proceeds to Guard break, the Conqueror follows his/her heavy with a Shield Bash mix-up, which nullifies the Guard-break attempt. Personally, I think that in this specific situation, it is completely fine for Zerkers to lose in this exchange, as the Conqueror is linking their heavy into an unblockable shield bash. Grabs should not work against unblockables.
But the main issue is this: deflecting a quick light attack, and being beat out of a Zerker's auto Guard-break attempt by another light attack. This happens notably against Valkyrie's Pouncing Thrust followed up by her "new and improved" quick light attacks, which is why I brought Valkyrie up in the first place. What ends up happening, is I deflect towards the Pouncing Thrust, it succeeds and Zerker attempts the Auto-grab, then Valkyrie follows her Pounce with a light attack, and it breaks my Guard-break attempt, resulting in a pretty hilarious exchange where you SEE Valkyrie being grabbed, but Zerker gets immediately interrupted out of it, as both freeze in place for a second. If I remember correctly, Zerker takes no damage from the 2nd light attack, but the Guard-break is cancelled, preventing Zerker from getting his follow-up throw, or heavy attack. So in the end, I was not rewarded for deflecting a light attack, which defies the whole purpose of the move: to deflect quick attacks in any given direction.As far as I'm aware, all the other deflect characters, namely Orochi, Peacekeeper and Valkyrie, do not suffer this same issue, because they follow their deflect into a physical hit, which causes hitstun on the attacker.
I can think of a few possible tweaks that could perhaps fix this issue. 1. make it so that a deflect results in the "Parry" animation (where the opponent ricochets backward) to allow the deflect to succeed. 2. grant Berserker some Hyper-Armor (that is to say, make them uninterruptible) during the Guard-Break attempt, to allow its animation to complete and successfully grab the opponent. 3. lower Valk's attack speed, Lel... (but that still leaves Peacekeeper, Orochi, essentially any fast-attacking class that can counter Berserker's deflect).
AND SO, with all that being said... damit Ubi, WHY? please fix your damn game! haha jokes aside, I seriously hope that they consider my suggestion, and if I can get all my Ziggas out there to vouch me on this maybe I can get my opinion heard from the Ubi-cops.
and as a final note, I love your game Ubi
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I dunno, I kind of feel like if a berseker could get a free guard break off of any deflect then that class would be completely OP. I mean guard breaks rarely land on people, so for a warrior to be able to do this constantly is not balanced. There has to be some type of counter play to it. Deflecting attacks isn't even hard either. I've seen plenty of people do it very consistently.
Junior Member
if you consider that most parries lead to a guard break follow up anyway (except if it's from a long range attack), then deflect is just another way of doing this. except parries can stop unblockables, deflect cannot. which means in every situation parry is still the favourable way of punishing moves, especially considering you can cancel the attempted "heavy attack" if your parry fails. this makes your parry attempt safe every single time you try it
Junior Member
there are situations where deflect would come in handy however, just like when a peacekeeper is trying to mix you up with her fast light attacks, deflect can be a nice way of covering both a dodge and a deflect. except in some cases when i do succesfully deflect, i'm not rewarded as a zerker, thats the crux of the issue here
