The 7 characters who still enforce the defensive meta | Forums

[Goat_of_Vermund]

While offense works surprisingly well nowdays, and barring some weaker heroes everyone starts to find his or her offense- excluding the times you are fighting these guys and girls.


Conqueror: Multiple very strong optionselects, with his own offense being completely unthreatening.

Lawbringer: neutral 400ms toplights safely interrupt everything for 15 damage and no significant stamina cost. He recovers fast enough to hit out a heavy finisher even if he ate the hit before. He also has 20 damage on a heavy parry (with the second light hitting for 15 more since the blind will makes reactions impossible), and 50 on any light or on anything if a wall is behind. He has shoves with hyperarmor that are mostly safe from reactionpunish and punish any bash (and has the highest hp on top of that).

Centurion: Potential 65 damage without feats on any mistake, be it a parry or a guardbreak. He himself is invulnerable to guardbreak feints in heavy startup. And his own offense sucks (his testing ground version mostly covers this).

Jormungandr: Being parried, guardbroken or even dodged comes with a huge stamina punish, which is obviously something you want to avoid against her.

Shugoki: Safe 500ms hyperarmored lights that are also superior, heavies with hyperarmor too.

Hitokiri: Instant HA on variable timed heavy openers, which allows to trade 30 damage with everything on reaction, followed up by an S tier mixup.

Shinobi: No offense, but still broken punishes and optionselects, which encourage the opponent to take minimal risks.



I think addressing these problems should be a top priority.

[Knight_Raime]

Just because i'm nitpicky (and not really completely disagreeing here)

LB forces a turtle more so because of his parry punishes and his overly safe dodge bash to a lesser extent.
And it's also worth noting that regardless of what the developers do the game is always going to favor the defender so long as blocking works the way it does.

This isn't inherently a problem (and on that note neither is the idea of defensive oriented heros.) It's strictly the fact that defense as a whole is/was too rewarding and that offense itself wasn't possible/rewarding enough. The devs still need to address how bad feints are and chained offense as well being bad. And they need to re look at stamina costs as a whole.

Not saying these heros shouldn't be addressed in some way. More saying that even if these heros were at acceptable levels we still have core game issues that would still support defensive play over offensive play.

[EvoX.]

In what universe is Conqueror's bash offense ''completely not threatening''? Haha. Or are we just going off by the few tournament players that can dodge it consistently on reaction and applying it to the thousands of other players?

99% of the playerbase can't deal with bash/delayed bash/dash-GB consistently. But oh, that one guy can, so it means I and everyone else can. Nope. You don't have to parrot what the wannabe pros are saying, Conqueror most definitely has offense, it's just that his defense is superior.

[Goat_of_Vermund]

Conqueror has offense. But his bash deals 13 damage only, his risk-reward is far from good on it, and you can dodge it on read a few times at least to get a punish. Even his guardbreak is 25 damage only. I don't parrot anyone, this is my own experience, and I am far from tournament level (I am actually just above 50%, though this is mostly because I kept sticking to peacekeeper).

[EvoX.]

That mostly applies to console. Id say at least 60 to 70 percent PC players can dodge bashes with no issues

These numbers are nowhere near true, but I expected to read something like this from the guy who can react to Hitokiri's mixup.

Conqueror has offense. But his bash deals 13 damage only, his risk-reward is far from good on it, and you can dodge it on read a few times at least to get a punish. Even his guardbreak is 25 damage only. I don't parrot anyone, this is my own experience, and I am far from tournament level (I am actually just above 50%, though this is mostly because I kept sticking to peacekeeper).

So which is it, he has offense or it's completely non-threatening? The two are mutually exclusive, and hyperboles to get your point across are unnecessary. I understand what you're getting at - that the opponent is more likely to kill Conq before he whittles him down with his low damage, but you worded it very wrong and the main way Conq gets consistent damage at everything but the very highest level is by the bash. After that, he's mostly forced to turtle, but I don't think he enforces the turtle meta at all. Lawbringer should be top 1 on your list - highest HP, highest parry punishes, 400ms poke interrupts, no reliable way to deal any damage. He's made to turtle.

[Goat_of_Vermund]

My wording was bad then, sorry, I recently use less English and my wording is sloppy. I meant that his only offense is his bash game, which is low damage, and if you try to be offensive, you will lose the game against anyone with dodge attacks or against anyone who will take the risk and read-dodges, because you will lose more hp than the damage you deal. The other moves, like the infinite chain, are obviously terrible for offense, you may sneak in some attacks, but that's really not something you want to lean on.

I did not list them by priority, I listed them by selection screen. Conqueror is in the upper left corner, Shinobi and Aramusha are in the bottom right. If I would list them by priority, Hitokiri and Shugoki would be the top 2, followed by Lawbringer and Jörmungandr.



I also agree with Raime about the stamina system, you can't get too creative if you wish to keep your stamina, which is obviously wrong since it greatly limits your capabilities. I think that the chance of falling over, as well as some damage nerf in oos would be enough punishment, the complete inability to act is a wrong approach that slows the fights. Blocking is also quite safe, and I think block damage should be higher, and even blocked lights that are stopped should deal some very minimal block damage.

[Sweaty_Sock]

Its definately in the stamina/parry system -

My thoughts on a 'quick' fix are that parrying no longer damaged stamina & light parries no longer indicate its a light parry... you should know what you parried before going for a max punish...

EDIT: this of course feeds back into the issue of UBI not teaching new players enough so light parry's were made obvious... so obvious that accidental parry with an LB nets you 55(?) damage and basically OOS the other player

Top priority for me though is the HA on hito & shugo though

[Sweaty_Sock]

Dodging 500ms bashes is so much easier to do so in PC thats why many people can do it. Well its harder to do so now with the patch and yea believe it or not I can react to Hitokiri's mixup because I practiced against at and I used him enough to get used to it.

Its the fact Hito can cancel into GB & the fast bash = 30 damage that are the issues. I can dodge 500 ms bashes on console (well until the servers started dying recently) but Hito's ability to feint GB + charge/feint + full charge tracking that make it IMO a better warden combo... It was this coupled with the HA/variable timing that made me so angry about hito from launch... took about 12 seconds to work out the broken parts of the kit (having put something like 24 reps through prerework shugo, 70 reps into warden & 14 into cent the moveset was very easy to pickup for me as its basically those mashed together)..

If you can 100% react correctly to hito mixup I struggle to believe that unless the Hito is not very good with the mixup or is over relying on it - given the HA abuse Hito has access to alot of unskilled players have flocked to the character to farm wins, while many skilled players moved on because the character commands about as much respect as picking prenerf reworked raider & that tarnishes the wins