I’d be curious to see the exact quote and context, because PR people tend not to go out of their way to correct public assumptions, but in any case, Combofiend is not a designer. You had Woshige (actual designer) say that any character should be able to beat a powerful jump-in if they have the right timing. That’s an indication that they don’t want any characters who are weak to jumps in this game.
And more importantly, it doesn’t matter if the entire staff of SF5 form a line and each say that Karin is supposed to have an AA weakness, because what matters is what’s in the actual game.
I spent time practicing AAs myself and I was satisfied with it, so I don’t particularly care what the intent was. If you keep an eye on ranges and know the proper AA for each, then you can’t “just jump at her,” which is an acceptable request. If I couldn’t do that, I wouldn’t play the character. I can’t stand having weak anti-airs in games like this, and I’ve said before that your ground game is only as good as your AA. Even in other games (Marvel 3) it bugs me if I can’t prevent chicken-blocking.
It’s different when the opponent gets in crossup range, which is also not unique to Karin - almost no characters have truly good answers for this, and Karin actually has more than shotos do for example - but then you’re not talking about an opponent jumping over your ground game, which is where this conversation started. In order to get in crossup range they have already passed your ground game.
Not sure honestly, my memory says 100 but it could very well be the full damage. Either way I don’t think it’s usually worth the meter compared to what else you could do with it, unless you’re recovering from a poke and you don’t have time to do anything else. Part of the reason for this feeling is that AAing with normals puts you in a better situation thanks to dash cancel.
We don’t AA by looking at frame counts though. In my experience testing against randomly-chosen recordings, when used at the proper s.HP range, the 1 active frame hits high enough that it catches the opponent regardless of their jump-in timing or empty-jump. At different ranges or when divekicks are involved, you would be going for different AAs anyhow.
In fairness it’s not something that you can just pick up and do by hearing what the character’s AAs are. You have to actually practice it and know what the correct timing is and at what range s.HP actually works.
