I don’t think Parries in and of themselves are bad; I love playing Yata for instance. But as a whole I’m not a huge fan of them as a mechanic and prefer something less universal and overwhelming.
I suspect this post is supposed to mean “that’s not really how 3S parries work, guys”. And while I agree with that, I also have to say that you can dislike something without being good at the game it’s present in. I’m not particularly good at SFIV, but I still dislike invincible backdashes and crouchtech conversions. They don’t function quite the same at my level and at higher levels of play, but still. =(
I’m at this weird place with 3S parries myself because I understand a lot of the criticism of the mechanic, and even agree with some of it, but I still think it works out very well. Maybe because I love everything else about 3S so much. Maybe it’s because I have developed a decent understanding how to take advantage of parry-happy opponents. Maybe it’s because I haven’t ever faced anyone who’s truly great at 3S. Maybe it’s because I’ve learned to see it as “just another option” (partially from how I learned to apply parries, I can write more about this if anyone’s interested).
Fun fact: the cost-less parries of 3S somehow annoy me less than XrdR blitz shield*, which has a meter cost, a whiff animation, and a built-in mechanic to counter it. I suspect that’s just familiarity with the system.
- yes, I consider blitz shield to be a “parry mechanic”
What about the Iron Fist parries in Marvel Vs Capcom 3?
(What? Iron Fist doesn’t have parries, unless you’re talking about the super armor on his :dp: Chi moves, which is something entirely different even if it can have a few parry-like applications, mostly against the relatively few single-hit fireballs or moves in the game.)
For the record, I don’t think Third Strike is a horrible game necessarily. To me it’s just deeply flawed for reasons beyond but including parry, which also include stuff like being able to whiff normals to build meter, and I just don’t enjoy playing it at all anymore.
Also, I was under the impression IglooBob was being facetious–not that this is all that “serious”–and using the default “but you’re wrong about parries” ad hominem “argument” that too many people who like Third Strike use whenever someone mentions they dislike it. If he’s being serious, then oh well–it’s literally nothing I haven’t seen before.
Hey do ya think there could’ve been a way to implement X Factor, and TAC mechanic better in UMVC3? If so what changes would ya make to them? Me personally I’d make the X Factor boost and duration the same regardless of how many characters are left when activated. Or here’s a crazy one. You have the option before a match to choose from different X factors. Like say if you activate it. You could opt for a specific percentage of health immediately being converted to meter.
(…I could say so many things right given how harsh and sarcastic I am by default, but I’m just going to assume you’re genuinely confused and ignorant about this, @Fatal1ty_93_RUS, so I’ll be nice.)
That’s only possible in that in-game card mini-game mode, Heroes & Heralds Mode, where one of the abilities you can put on your characters is the actual parry ability, though IIRC it costs meter because Capcom is now aware of how powerful parrying is.
You see those icons that are below the Iron Fist’s player’s team health bar? That’s what indicates that mode is being used. That mode isn’t tournament legal and was barely played causally even before the game died/was abandoned, at least between people.
If Iron Fist could actually do that naturally, then he would at least upper mid-tier if not outright top tier due to how overwhelmingly powerful non-restricted parrying is. He can’t, though, which is why he’s generally considered one of the worst characters in the game.
So, again, the closest things that unmodified Iron Fist has to a parry are his Chi moves, which just have IIRC only 1 hit of super armor.
I think they could be implemented much better, but even I’ll admit that as much as a bunch of stuff seems like could have been “simply” changed for the better in UMvC3 before it was basically abandoned by Capcom after it was too hastily “updated” from MvC3, a lot of that has to be weighed against what else is being changed or already exists.
That said, in a vacuum, I think the chief ways to fix both of those for the better without just straight up excising them are only moderately difficult at best to achieve. As such, I’ll try to be (relatively) brief, especially given everyone knows by now how long-winded I can be:
Possible X-Factor Fixes:
[details=Spoiler]There’s no reason for there to be variations on this at all beyond maybe duration dependent upon the number of characters downed on a team; the only exception might be giving “pixie” characters slightly less of a power-boost and bigger characters slightly more of a power-boost beyond what would already happen given the different bases being multiplied. As far as increasing base stats go, power and maybe meter-building boosts are likely fine, but that’s likely all that can “safely” be done before it starts getting stupid again. Outright boosting speed is definitely a no-no though, especially since it’s the chief problem with that mode anyway even before the power boosts that make Touch of Death combos so common at Level 3 because you’d be able to kill people even without it just due to the sheer amount of stupid, easy infinite the greater speed boosts allow; this isn’t even before getting into the fact that said speed boosts make some characters basically unblockable while also keeping them ridiculously safe.
Defensively, it’s actually probably fine as it is with regards to being able to cancel even whiffed specials and hypers and completely negate chip damage. At the very least it still needs to greatly reduce chip damage and prevent death by chip damage while active so as to still work as the “comeback factor” they intended it to work as at its base before it exploded into the idiocy we know now. The only possible defense change might be getting rid of X-Factor’s ability to outright cancel out blockstun if that’s actually the case, which I think it can, though it’s been a while since I’ve played. It probably doesn’t need that even if it obviously still needs to able to be activated in blockstun so as to be worth a damn.[/details]
Possible TAC Fixes:
[details=Spoiler]At the bare minimum, this has to have some type of actual risk beyond “you have a 33% chance of dropping your touch of death combo that would have also probably drained one level of an opponent’s meter or netted you an extra level of meter”, especially if they are going to be such high rewards and getting set back to maybe neutral is the worst thing that generally happens. The easiest solution, if one is still going to insist on incentivizing an already highly rewarding system, is probably just to take the burst feature from Capcom vs. Tatsunoko and apply it only to TAC Combos; Marvel 3 already takes heavily from Capcom vs. Tatsunoko anyway apparently.
Other possible solutions would be getting rid of the directional incentives all together, making it so that breaking the stupid guessing game can lead to actual punishment (or, hell, even reversing the incentives as well) in the form of either wall bounce or hard knock down, simply lessening the options to 50/50 or some possible combinations thereof. The last option would theoretically be best achieved by just combining the Side bonus’s option with the Up option and getting rid of the Side bonus; as it is, the Up option’s incentive bonus of more damage tends to be the least useful one overall anyway.
Regardless, TAC still needs to have some use if you’re not going to outright excise it, but right now it generally gains you way too much for very little risk.
Finally, TAC has no real reason to so completely reset the hitstun–not the phrase I’m looking, but I can’t think of it right now–of the victim to point where you can do the infinites and other really dumb combos that certain characters like Doom and Strange can do, but that’s more a problem with tag-ins in (U)MvC3 in general needlessly resetting things than being specific to TACs themselves.[/details]
Shrug. All of the above is certainly arguable, especially since it’s basically been like 2+ years since I’ve really touched UMvC3 at this point. So even before general disagreements there may well be stuff I’m forgetting, remembering incorrectly, or don’t know about that’s been discovered since then.
to add to The Damned’s X-factor suggestions:
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I think it should just stay at level 2 regardless of team size. The length used for it is already nice and it seems pretty good enough to catch up to opponents with or life lead can use it pressure and
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I think that there should be no red health recovery. We already have the comfortable benefit of no chip off of anything. it’s being way too generous for losing players.
I guess what I think Xfactor should be like is something that can help emphasize your tools and defense, but shouldn’t be the end all, be all answer. I think it’s a great mechanic when it becomes a case of when to use it for offensive/defensive opportunities, but with the way it’s designed it feels like it’s encouraged as a dumb last resort (well, it is designed to be that way).
(I swear, whenever I proofread something and think I catch everything, I usually have an omission somewhere. Sigh.)
Oh, right. X-Factor does totally also recover red health even for the point character.
Yeah, I agree with MajormelisThere that it could probably stand to lose that. At most it could maybe still boost the red health recovery of the tagged out characters and maybe prevent red health from being lost when characters are tagged-in, like is weirdly already the default for DHCs in (U)MvC3 unlike in MvC2. Recovering red health for the point character is totally unnecessary though, especially since it only really benefits Vergil, Dante, and (Dark) Phoenix by boosting the rate of their health recovering hypers to absurd levels; I guess it technically also benefits Ryu given his power-up mode stupidly has him lose health for some reason, but that’s both easily fixed and beyond the scope of this thread.
Good catch.
(Almost two weeks later and I see that I missed fixing a lot of typos and omissions in the “can TAC and X-Factor be fixed?” post. Sigh. Fixed now.)
Anyway, just bumping this thread a bit in part because I’ve been thinking about dizzy/stun as a mechanic for a while again now and I was reminded that a thread about precisely that existed two years ago. I was also reminded that I apparently never finished reading through said thread even though it had me initially think a lot about dizzy/stun’s merits as a mechanic quite a lot: Dizzy is a Terrible Fighting Game Mechanic.
I’m still not sure what I think about dizzy/stun, in part because it’s probably the best example of those case-by-case mechanics rather than being always terrible or always good, but I think there is at least one aspect for dizzy/stun that must always be implemented if you’re going to actually make use of it: at the very least, there should be some highly visible sign of when you’re about to get dizzied/stunned even if there’s not some formal (small) visible meter/bar set aside just for it. There’s where I think SF4, which the above thread is about, as a series chiefly fails when it comes to the dizzy/stun mechanic given you only ever tell when someone is “close” in Training Mode.
I’ve also been thinking about it for a while because the initial version of a character I had for a theoretical fighting game was based around dizzy/stun over everything else. That character has been entirely redesigned now, in part because it just seems a terrible idea doomed to either make that character the worst or best character in the game as is so often the case with characters who have unique foci comparative the rest of the cast and in part because the character’s other central element (finally) got absorbed by someone else and changed to something completely different anyway.
Still, it’s a bit difficult to tell whether that would or could actually work, in part due to the above case-by-case basis, so that’s an additional reason that I’m bumping this thread since I’m tempted to ask the following question: Do you think that a character based almost solely around the dizzying the opponent could ever be executed and implemented fairly?
Breaking is a lot of fun in MotW. The concept wasn’t anything new at the time, but the way SNK tied it to a certain move and gave it a universal command was nice.
I think balancing a character around the Dizzy mechanic is dumb. It’s similar to balancing a character around health. Basically it boils down to. You have all this offensive prowess. Utilize it effectively and you wreck shit. But make a mistake and you will suffer for it more so than any other character. But as long as you stay on offense and pressure, the lack of health and or low stun is a non factor.
Now in a turn based game like pokemon balancing around health works just fine IMO. The fast and offensive pokes. Are vulnerable after they attack. They tend to not be able to take a good hit. Meaning they get revenge killed or forced to switch out. But in something more dynamic like a fighting game. As long as you maintain a good offense and pressure and you have the tools to do so I.E Akuma, Yun, that low health and stun don’t matter too much.
At least that’s how I see it. But I’ve only been “gittin gud” In fighters since 2013 so I could be way off base.
I feel its a stupid mechanic when games dont show the stun bar
(Well at least that’s something we can agree upon (thus far).)
I see. For the record, the character in question was envisioned to also be able to increase stun even if the opponent was blocking, though I had vaguely planned at the time that hitting “max” stun while blocking wouldn’t immediately stun the character, though the next unblocked hit would do so not matter what it was. So save for outright dodging, certain attacks–like all special moves or super moves or moves only accessible while in a powered-up super state–were going to do at least some amount of stun via block, which is why I thought the character design in question erred more towards the “overpowered” side than not.
Again, though, it’s rather difficult to tell in a vacuum.
What fighting games do you guys think have the best meter/resource management systems?
Guilty Gear
(Yeah, Guilty Gear is pretty high up there, especially since you get meter just for moving forward, which actually works out far less stupidly than you would think. Still, at the very least is Negative Penalty is extremely contentious as to whether it should exist at not, much less work the way it does, and Burst is arguable to a lesser extent, to say nothing of the new ways that Roman Cancels are handled in the recent Xrd games.)
As far as other games series (that I know about) go, though I really do need to look more into its overall mechanics, Under Night In-Birth seems rather generous with its meter and resources without going overboard; I need to look over it more though, especially since last night while watching a mini-tournament I noticed that Merkava gets 67% meter back (!) for doing one of his supers/EXs moves on a blocking character in the corner.
Anyway, by going “overboard”, I mean stuff like that offering too much reward for relatively minimal meter, as is SvC Chaos’s problem with Guard Cancel Rolls ruining most offense in the game if used intelligently against most characters, or for some reason incentivizing first attack by giving you a bunch of meter for the first hit landed in a round (or, even worse) match, which I personally hate and think is one of the few “always bad” mechanics I alluded to a couple of weeks back. Two examples of the latter are the SF EX series and MKX.
Ok now that sounds like a pretty cool way to balance a character around stun. Give them great offensive tools but the price for it is that they REALLY don’t want to be on defense ever. Because even blocking isn’t safe for them.
Yeah its definitely guilty gear
normally i hate games where access to your resources and high end execution techniques can only be realized through having bar
some games build meter so slow that it almost felt like a superficial mechanic
plus old school games had it so that you could do incredible stuff even without bar.
but guilty gear give you bar for moving/momentum and its flows perfectly throughout the flow of the match.
(Ugh. I meant “outright dodging”, not “out-dodging”.)
I think you’re slightly misconstruing things, @BB_Hoody @VampireSoldier–that or you made a slight typo yourself. The character is stunning the opponent through their opponent’s block, but rather than adding stun to both herself–this character was/is a woman at present–and her opponent. So she would have been fine on defense as well, especially since despite not making up her move list and finding it unlikely that she got anything outright invulnerable, she was leaning towards being a grappler, who tend to have extremely good reversal options.
Hence why I figured that incarnation of her was likely to be overpowered.