Does guts really count as a comeback mechanic? Isn’t it mostly a way to have health be denser in certain areas compared to other for certain characters?
I mean, for some other Arcsys games, there’s actually a slight benefit at having low displayed health on the health bar. Reduced damage in P4A+getting 50 meter, or passive meter gain in Blazblue for example. But GG doesn’t have that.
Edit: Nevermind, turns out burst fills up faster at lower health. Learned something new.
Is not the same as scalling.
Well, if you land a Gold Burst, you get full meter… Not sure if that’s considered a Comeback Mechanic, but it’s there.
What is the specific definition for a comeback mechanic these days? Or is it just another term like meta that’s just thrown at everything?
Comeback mechanics are those who can help making a comeback, the problem is that many people feel an adversion towards them due the poor mechanics done by Capcom on their rescent games, so the try to modify the definition so they only include those shitty mechanics on the capcom games.
Many aspects of the Bursts, Guard Bar and guts work as comeback mechanics.
For example with guts, the less health you have the less damage you get.
Burst fills faster when you are low in health and are being comboed, also it grants a full bar when doing outside blocstun/hitstun (many would argue that is not a comeback mechanic because it doesn’t get stronger when you are lower in health or because the player winning also can do it)
The guard bar depletes when you are being comboed, increasing the gravity making it harder for you to being juggled, it also has an impact on the hitstun proration.
A good comeback mechanic is not egregious about its functionality.
No, I’m pretty sure the guard bar is just the visualization of GG’s scaling. Unless you count infinite prevention a comeback mechanic. I think that’s why it was changed to look like it does in Xrd, so you only see the guard bar increase, and once it gets back to neutral, you know the combo scales normally.
edit: I’m not going to reply on this topic any further. If you disagree, that’s fine. I just can’t understand how the GB can be interpreted as a comeback mechanic.
sigh…
Its not just a shitty Capcom thing.
SNK originally started it with stuff like the POW system that carried on into Garou and CVS2 where you get pretty powerful stuff for basically taking hits that activates outside of your choosing. SFIV ultra didn’t really do anything that other fighting games before weren’t already doing other than turning the comeback into an attack rather than having it buff your attacks directly. XF is fucked up, but Marvel has always been fucked up shit the fighting game and a test to see how much fucked up shit can be overcome in one match.
The definition you gave makes sense enough. Which is any benefit given as a result of taking damage through the fight. Which is looked at as benefitting from making the wrong decision. That’s obviously not the definition normally used.
I am totally aware that capcom didn’t do anything new when it comes about comeback mechanics, maybe outside the x-factor (and i think that out there, there could be a game that did something similar), is most that they did the most egregious examples on this current generation add that the current pool of players that lack a real experience with fg’s outside sf4 and mvc3, so you can see how those 2 (ultras and x-factor) always come into the discussion.
Yeah, I don’t think I would count guts as a comeback mechanic in and of itself. Having higher defenses at lower health isn’t actually a comeback mechanic because you can account for that in a calculation for how much health a character has. The fact that different characters have different amounts of defense at lower health doesn’t change it either, it just means the lifebar is being dishonest about how much life is actually left. It’s pretty standard in fighting games too, even MvC2 had characters get higher defenses at lower amounts of health. It does create some weird time-out implications occasionally.
Now, coupled with the fact that there are actually advantages at being at low health that you wouldn’t get at higher health, you get a comeback mechanic, but it’s not guts, it’s the burst system. Guts has synergy with the burst recovery rate being higher at lower health, but doesn’t do anything by itself. This is barring some of the weird mathematical implications you can get with the fact that minimum damage is always going to be 1, chip or not, so some moves/combos that hit a ton of times become a bit better at lower health opponents (Dark Angel comes to mind).
The guard bar is an additional scaling factor on top of the scaling already applied to moves in the game, including gravity, push-back, hit-stun, what not. I wouldn’t really call it a comeback mechanic either, because the more unique aspect of the guard bar is that it you can jack it up to do some crazy damage if you’ve forced your opponent to block for a while. That also could be a side effect of me playing Jam and ABA, so I’m pretty used to cranking it up.
As i said a good comeback mechanic has more aplicable scenarios than just helping to do a comeback, that is why not many people see them as comeback mechanics to begin with, but they still have a comeback element attached to them.
They all can help the player at disadvantage, some in more clear ways than others.
As a Marvel 3 player, I actually remember being a bit disgusted with KOFXIII’s HD gauge. I know the combos take some skill to do, but that shit isn’t really what I imagine when I think of the KOF series.
How does guts by itself explicitly help a player at a disadvantage at all though?
I mean, at first glance, sure. I’m low on health, I get to take less (visual) damage on my health bar. Yay. The game is giving me some leeway for losing health.
But that could just as easily be represented by having that portion of the lifebar with more health be more accurately spread out through the rest of the health bar. Blazblue has a simpler guts system that represents this oddity well. In CT, Taokaka has 10500 health, and Nu has 10000 health. However, when they’re at 20% health left (visually on the lifebar), Taokaka will have 2100 health left and Nu will have 3600 health left. Beyond the bonus heat regeneration you get for being at low health (which is the actual comeback mechanic associated with low health, not just a denser health bar), you could just rearrange how the health is distributed in that life bar and the game would be more or less the same. The one exception for that besides the heat regeneration is a time out situation, but that flips on who it rewards depending on how much health each character is at when the timer goes out.
But wait! Guts is slightly different. It kicks in dynamically when a character is at certain health thresholds and a player has the ability to skip those thresholds through properly managed combos and attacks unlike the lifebar in BB. But there’s a lot of thresholds to manage, and I’ve never really seen players deliberately try to avoid those thresholds to deal more damage on the follow up combo.
I honestly don’t really consider guts to be a comeback mechanic, just extra health that both players have.
There is a difference between what BB does and what GG does.
BB simulates the guts system by having more health hidden on a certain portion of the healthbar, while the guts system is actually a modifier that changes how much damage you get depending on how much health you have.
On BB a combo that does 5000 damage, does 5000 no matter how much health do you have.
On GG the same combo does different damage depending on various factors, based on how much health do you have, your guts modifier, your defense modifier and the guard bar modifier.
So a combo that did 50 damage at full health bar doesn’t do more than 30 at mid bar and maybe does only 20 at 25% of health (totally made up values for the sake of the example)
The reason why is a “comeback” mechanic is because it ensures that it takes more hits for you to actually get killed giving you the possibility to actually made a comeback happen.
Ultras and XF both do more than just help make comebacks. You can use ultras to reversal punish attacks, you can use them to go through fireballs, you can use them to anti air and a lot more. You can use XF to cancel recovery of a super, to guard cancel punish an attack, to stop yourself from taking chip etc. Pretty much all comeback mechanics do more than help make comebacks. XF is the only really egregious comeback mechanic if you account for that, but it’s in a game where it can get away with it the most any ways. Mainly since it has always been the egregious fighting game that wasn’t for everyone and forced you to learn a lot of specific habits that are hard to translate to other games.
It sounds more like what you’re trying to say is that other games comeback mechanics are much more subtle and specific in how the aid you. Ultras aren’t really any cheaper than a second super with slower start up at this point. They don’t turn your character into Superman like K groove or XF2/3 and Marvel 3 goes much farther in that respect.
But that doesn’t actually change anything. You can extrapolate a health value from that defense modifier and then apply it to the health bar anyway.
Let’s take this one step at at time.
For the Blazblue example, you can just change the way the information is displayed to make it a “true” guts system if you want to call it.
Nu has 10,000 health. 6400 of that is in her first 80%. 3600 of that is in the last 20%.
What would this look like in a system with defense modifiers instead? Well, it would mean that Nu’s numerical health is actually 8000. (6400/.8 = 8000). So when loses 6400 health, she’ll be in her last 20% on her health bar both visually and numerically. But, she has 3600 health at 20%, so how would this be represented through guts? Well, she actually has 1600 health left at a 1.0 guts modifier. This means, in order to reach her true 3600 health, she’d have a guts modifier of 2.25 at 20% health (or .44). The only difference here is that the damage done to her would be represented by a different number.
In other words, Nu could just as easily be represented (and the entire game for that matter) with a defense system instead of a life system. And this process is obviously reversible, as you’ve already seen in this topic: http://www.dustloop.com/forums/showthread.php?15601-Where-s-the-Beef-A-GGXXAC-Health-Tier-List
Now, there’s several things that defense modifiers can do that dense lifebars can’t. They can reward combos that deal minimum damage per hit, and they can reward chip more at lower health. For guts specifically, there’s the fact that it’s threshold based, so a really really tactical player could skip entire portions of guts if necessary.
Rewarding combos that deal minimum damage per hit only matters if your combos consistently get to minimum damage per hit. I’m pretty sure they don’t in GG, unless you’re desperately trying to go for an OTG kill. Same thing with chip damage. But even if it did, it actually rewards the player on the offense, it doesn’t help the player losing, because it means that every option the player on the offense has suddenly become relatively more powerful as opposed to when your opponent was at higher health.
Example:
Say you have two options for a combo with your character, a 5-hit one that does 40 damage, or a 20-hit one that does 24 damage. From a pure damage perspective, the 5-hit combo is better. But what happens when your opponent now has a higher defense modifier? Maybe that 5-hit combo only does 24 damage now, but that 20-hit one still deals 20 damage because you can’t get lower than 1 damage per hit. All of a sudden, your offensive player has MORE options to deal relevant damage. This holds true for chip as well. 1 point of chip for a fireball vs. 13 points of damage is a pretty significant difference. 1 point of chip vs. 7 points of damage is still a difference, but it’s not as big. So, something like Dark Angel becomes relatively stronger at lower health as opposed to higher. The exact opposite of a comeback mechanic.
The point where guts could make a real argument for a comeback mechanic was if it skipping thresholds to avoid guts defense was an actual thing that players did. But as far as I can tell, that doesn’t happen. Feel free to prove me wrong on this one.
I think the Comeback Mechanic horse is now thoroughly beaten.
Oh god, if you can’t really understand how is different then i don’t know what to tell you 
I wonder when we are gonna get to see some new characters in action. A basketball player? Baseball player? A knives user like Agito?