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  1. #1

    Making Orochi threatening without giving them an unblockable [in depth writeup]

    As For Honor continues to improve and move forward, the developers have fully acknowledged the role that a solid unblockable plays in making a character viable. Whether its a "bash" type unblockable that forces a dodge or an unblockable attack that can be feinted, these types of moves accomplish their task of forcing constant decisionmaking in neutral and keeping the game moving. They also allow many characters to press their advantage, creating a dynamic offense game that is satisfying to pull off and harrowing to receive. However, with the latest additions to the cast of fighters, it seems that Ubisoft is experimenting with ways to achieve strong aggression with basic attacks. Shaman's soft feints and Aramusha's lightning speed strings are powerful tools that are capable of producing results without relying on unblockables.

    Orochi is one of the few remaining characters without access to an unblockable in neutral or on the offense. This is a hole in their overall toolkit that puts them at a disadvantage in many matchups. To achieve the same results as other fighters, Orochi must take risks and gamble away their stamina, often for single hits with no opportunity to press their advantage. To make matters worse, one of the strengths that helped to improve the risk reward, their incredibly damaging top light, was nerfed with the fairly weak rationale of "bringing it in line with the rest of the rosters' punishes when parrying a heavy." As a result, Orochi feels like a character in need of something to "modernize it" as a character, but before I talk about what that could be, let's look at Orochi's strengths and weaknesses.

    Orochi has an identity as a mobile fighter who can use Storm Rush to control the engagement distance and threaten extremely damaging pokes from range. Being able to quickly get in and out of the opponent's range gives Orochi a lot of leeway for reacting to their opponents attempts at offense and also to stuff their approaches with his double threat of a top light attack or a zone attack. This is a cool, unique and powerful strength and can make extremely skilled Orochis a nightmare to deal with.

    On top of that, Orochi has a unique, distance based counterattack, Riptide Strike. This attack is exceptionally damaging (now that some of top light's old damage has been redistributed into it,) but it is an extremely high risk maneuver. It cannot be feinted, and it has extremely severe ending recovery on whiff. It is also somewhat unreliable for avoiding some of the longer range attacks. These drawbacks make it a fairly niche tool. They also have excellent damage off of their deflect (again, thanks to some of top light's damage being redistributed into it,) with Wind Gust dealing as much damage as their top heavy.

    Orochi has a lightning fast zone attack, slightly faster than Warden's. This means that opponents must always be on guard to defend their right side, or must make reads. The value of having an attack like this should not be underestimated. If you abuse this attack then you will always leave opponents second guessing how they want to defend themselves, and that can give you openings.

    So, Orochi has some powerful strengths. Just because a character is underpowered overall does not mean that they can't have powerful strengths. It simply means that their strengths are not enough to compensate for their weaknesses. There are two ways to address this. One is to shore up the character's weaknesses. The other is to give them more access to their powerful strengths so that they are enough to compensate for the character's weaknesses. In Orochi's case, I propose the following changes, and each one will come with an explanation for how I think they affect Orochi's power as a whole.

    Zone attack and feints: As I said above, this attack is one of Orochi's biggest strengths. However, it has an extremely punishing stamina cost, taking approximately half of the Orochi's stamina bar. This means that their access to this tool is very limited, and mixups using this tool are extremely risky. In the following clip, I show some examples. I do a few zone attacks to show the stamina depleted, and then I do a simple directional mixup, feinting a top heavy into a zone attack, which takes an astonishing amount of stamina, nearly 90% of the Orochi's bar. I then show how an Orochi with most of her stamina will exhaust herself using this mixup.



    This mixup is fundamentally strong, and giving Orochi more access to it would help to shore up the weakness in Orochi's offense game.To that end, I propose a reduction in the stamina cost of Zone Attack from 50% to around 38%, and reduction in stamina cost of Orochi's feints to about half of their current value. This will allow Orochi to be less predictable with this mixup. Currently it should only ever be attempted with full stamina, and on a correct read and a parry, your opponent will exhaust you. With the fairly mediocre reward of 20 damage for this mixup, I don't think that this risk is necessary. This change is in line with Orochi's identity as a quick striking counterattacker.

    New passive: Glide - when Orochi's Heavy Starter or Riptide Strike is blocked, the startup time of Tidal Wave Slashes' first light attack is significantly reduced (down to 350ms) when done from the side. This passive is my alternative to an unblockable for Orochi. This makes the Orochi's heavy starter scary to block without actually making it impossible to block. Thematically, this is a sword technique where one attacks with the intention of gliding your blade past your opponent's blade in order to cut from a different angle. It's thematically appropriate for Orochi as a swift attacker, and it is a change in line with Ubisoft's experimentation with basic attack chains. The principle, obviously, is that when blocking a heavy starter or riptide strike, the opponent must now guess left or right in order to block a followup. In order to combat this, an opponent might parry or dodge a heavy starter instead, giving Orochi a mixup, or they might simply submit to the directional mixup which also opens up potential for Orochi to use their Lightning Strikes Twice chain to add in additional timing mixups. It also gives Orochi something to do against exhausted opponents aside from get some chip damage in.

    And... that's it. Really, I think that would be enough. Orochi already has some powerful strengths. These two changes, one intended to give them more access to one of their more prominent strengths and one intended to make their weakness of having no proactive unblockable less hindering, should be enough to make Orochi into a viable fighter. I wanted to think of a way to modernize Orochi without the simple, obvious solution of "just give them an unblockable" and I think I've come up with one that has some flair and uniqueness to it.

    What do you think? I would be happy to entertain discussion, or explain why I didn't bother with other tools. Let's get the ball rolling!
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  2. #2
    I agree greatly with your assessment on the Orochi. As an Orochi user myself I tend to think that his fighting style does not fit the role of a katana wielding samurai. I feel that the glide technique would be an excellent addition because when I think of the samurai I think of level of warrior that is always thinking on how to trick or outsmart the opponent.

    I have also made a thread on the reworks I think are appropriate (Orochi combos don't make any sense!) where I add or change some of his moves. I would have placed it here but I read this after having posted it at suggestions and feedback. I don't want to repeat myself so I won't post everything here but I feel that even though this buff is great it leaves Orochi without an opener against turtles. Turtles are at the moment my biggest problem and I'm normally left with no options except zoning and I'll be honest I think zoning is really cheap and as you pointed out it costs to much stamina leaving Orochi with almost no tools to counter so I think that the unblockable stab suggested in my thread would do the trick although I'd like to have your opinion on it in case I wasn't able to think of some flaw on it. If you have a comment on it you can answer it here instead of the other thread.

    I hope the Orochi gets a rework that will balance him even if it isn't something that has been suggested.
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  3. #3
    I don’t think they are bad ideas. The problem with orochi is in the beginning of the game they gave class a bit of predictability to give them a nich example (orochi top dependence). That was fine in the beginning but now they opened up every direction for the new characters. It feels like we are playing from a different set of rules from almost everyone else.

    They need to make riptide cancelable and more then anything else make deflect cancel chains with characters that have hyper armor like Shinobi does.
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  4. #4
    @Tatsu, I read your thread with your suggestions for the rework. The main reason that I suggested the Glide passive rather than giving them an unblockable is simply because I think there's a lot of potential for characters to be strong WITHOUT unblockables. Simply having an unreactable attack (with a reactable setup, landing a heavy attack on block) could allow the Orochi to get quick cuts in the same way that an unblockable with a guaranteed attack afterwards, such as the Conqueror's shield bash, would. The principle is similar, but it creates more variety and opens up further tweaks in the future. Yes, you are right, just giving them an unblockable heavy like the Gladiator's stab or the Shugoki's charged heavies would solve the problem, but it doesn't feel very Orochi like. It doesn't fit into their current character design to give them slow, charged moves. They're supposed to be an assassin and a fast attacker. Something like the Glide passive would reinforce that identity, add variety to the hero design and preserve the uniqueness of the hero.

    The passive does give you an opener against turtles--your opener is a blocked heavy attack, and it gives you an unreactable attack afterwards that must be predicted. It's pretty easy to get people to block heavies, you just have to make liberal use of heavy feints to punish attempts to parry or dodge them. Using tactics like this forces people to either respect your heavy attack startup or die to repeated punishes. Then, once you have them in that state, you can start making use of the passive to punish blocking as well. This is the crux of any mixup. For example, the gladiator's stab. Either you do something about it, like dodging or parrying, which can be punished by feints, or you read the feint and do nothing (or attack into it.) Hopefully that makes things a bit more clear.

    @LEGENDz82, yes, I didn't suggest making riptide feintable. This is another thing that would definitely do the job of making Orochi stronger, but when thinking about how to buff/nerf characters, you should look at their weaknesses with a critical eye. Riptide Strike is a reversal tool that punishes something heavily (40 damage) with a weakness of being very committal. If you make that tool non-committal by making it feintable, you run the risk of a) making that tool too strong (and hence placing too much emphasis on that tool in the character's overall power, something that I think has really made the warden a nightmare to balance since all of his character power is wrapped up in the shoulder bash) and b) you risk damaging the identity of the move. The reason that Riptide Strike is so cool to land is because it is so risky. When someone gets hit by Riptide Strike, they know without a doubt that they were outplayed, and they just ate 40 damage for that. If you remove the risk, you hurt Riptide's identity as a high risk high reward move. That's the only reason I didn't suggest making it feintable. One thing that I did do for Riptide Strike was make the Glide passive apply to it, meaning that if they falter mentally and block it, it will still lead to another directional mixup.

    And yes, characters with hyper armor are quite strong against Orochi. It's difficult to threaten counterpokes when opponents can trade and your health pool is lower, especially against characters like highlander with severely damaging hyper armor attacks. Although you really shouldn't be trying to deflect when you know they can follow up with some kind of hyper armor move. In those situations it would be much better to parry. But making the deflect stabs pierce hyper armor would be an interesting way to improve Orochi's weakness to hyper armor. I think it would be better to leave the weakness in, apply a first round a buffs to Orochi's other more glaring weaknesses and see where that leaves Orochi in the overall meta. Maybe it would turn out fine that Orochi gets soft countered by heroes with hyper armor because they're good enough at dealing with the other heroes.
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  5. #5
    Thanks for the feedback on the Orochi stab idea. I hadn't actually thought about how the speed would affect the character's identity. Although I'd still would like to see a stabbing move other than wind gust and hurricane blast since those move are sometimes hard to pull off. I mostly based this move on the cutscene when Warden hands Orochi his katana back and he tries to stab him. But I guest the speed I wanted it may have been to slow to allow it to soft faint.

    EDIT: Upon careful consideration I now disagree with my previous assessment on the Orochi stab since it's basically a hurricane blast alternate and actually wouldn't affect his identity.
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  6. #6
    Col.Bullet's Avatar Member
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    I really do like this. Finally someone has a creative idea other than to give him an unblockable. Perhaps one could expand on moves concerning deflects, give him access to a throw/stun herethrouh thus making him less predictable and thus more adaptable as a counter attacker.
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  7. #7
    Love the creative approach to orochi. Being an orochi main and playing devils advocate, my only concern would be how quick that light and directional change can come of a heavy block, as someone on the opposing end it would be frustrating quickly if for instance it became the ara blight that is currently living on consoles. It needs to be reactable even though it’s fast. At least it would be a light so you’d be chipping away at them consistently instead of an overdosed unblockable of big damage, the game has enough of them and your idea is a perfect fit for the class. It would also change up the offensive shut down I see when playing against a half decent player, they simply guard top and wait... orochi doesn’t have many options for that and your idea is perfect for a gentle nudge in applying pressure without killing the idea of orochi as a counterattacker.

    Only other things I’d add is reflex guard, I think the initial delay just needs to go as it bugs me. And maybe, a few other options than the current move set we have as it is very limited, and side heavy/light for us is only good for a feint. Nothing breaking or particularly buffed, some variations on chains or interesting links on double top light etc just to add some flavour.
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  8. #8
    I agree. Orochi needs just more stamina or less stamina cost.

    i don't agree reducing zone's stamina cost anyway. People also complained about zone spam. I think with a little practice we could accept this 50 cost. I did it.

    I think the real problem is the energy cost of heavy and heavy feinting, it should be reduced. Now we have 3 great new combos but no stamina to perform them. That's ridicuolous.

    About Wind Gust stance i just noticed that i can't perform it easily as before. That's bad because, again, we cannot utilize efficiently this "new" tool they gave us.

    Let me know what you guys think about it, especially on the new Wind Gust feedback.
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