nice rebuttal brah, to bad that with your 4 years old account you cant still grasp how fighting game works
Just go play something else OP. Cause I hate X-factor but you know what I did? Stopped playing marvel 3. And Im happy and the people who still like marvel are happy so everybody wins.
The Karate player didn’t have the meter to do a GCR until he was already guard crushed, at which time, it would have been a moot point, unless you can do a GCR while in the midst of being combo-ed.
I agree with the context comment though. Coming into the final round with no meter generally means you’ve had to burn it out of desperation.
Like I’ve said a few times in this very thread, I love the game. Except for this one aspect, which, while I dislike it, isn’t enough for me to want to quit the game. I just wanted to know if I’m the only one who feels the same way, and apparently I’m not. It’s discussion. shrug
Don’t you have racist comments to be posting on YouTube right now?
Fixed. 
…You have bad reading comprehension skills. The first sentence, it all comes down to Karate not having the meter, which in most cases he would that late in a match.
As you noticed with the second part, it all came down to the likelihood of him burning it all earlier in order to get back into the match. Falling behind early is usually something that gets you wrecked in KOF, it was like that before, it hasn’t changed now. The only thing that changed are the approaches to said situations.
And of course you’re not the only one who feels that way, because there’s not an opinion in the world that isn’t shared by someone else. That doesn’t prove anything.
Believe it or not 4 and 5 bar HD combos do significantly more damage than simply going into NeoMax, and sometimes even Max Cancels, that’s the beauty of KOF.
Getting a 90% damage 6 hit combo from a guard break seems extreme when damage seems so low on stray hits and no meter bnbs in comparison. Say whatever you want about not holding onto 1 meter just in case, I’ll agree. Not going to change I think the payoff Shen got was too high.
Can’t say I’m a fan of a “Open you up 3 times, get 50%, hit me once, 80-100%” that HD introduces. Seems like conflicting design when you have back and forth gameplay and then include CCs which always ruin that flow. This is what happens when you add something like CCs though so whatever.
This happened off someone choosing to block actually, which just reminds me why I’m not a fan of guard bars on principle (no, I wouldn’t take them out or think KoF would be better with no guard bars).
I wouldn’t complain if they decided to nerf HD mode. I really enjoy playing KoF but if someone asked me how to improve it, HD is at the top of my list.
No, the problem is, you post things and expect everyone else to connect the dots that you yourself haven’t connected in a coherent way. I agree with the context thing and until we see the rest of the match, we can’t know for sure what led to the Karate player having no meter there at the end. So as of right now, your argument is the equivalent of saying, “Well, if he didn’t let himself get hit, he wouldn’t have lost.” Saying the guard crush was “easily avoided” and playing theory fighter to explain how it could have happened when we have a video of the event is a non-sequitur.
Did he have the meter to GCR there at the end? No? Then, no, that guard crush couldn’t have been “easily avoided.”
Thank you Captain Obvious, can I be your sidekick, “No-Shit Boy?” 
ok, now this one has me cracking up
seriously man wtf?
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
…How the hell was that not coherent. First sentence, I mention Shen’s Guard Break relies on Karate not having a meter. I go on to a scenario stating what happens with Karate has said meter. If people can’t follow those dots, then real talk, they should go back to remedial English Courses.
Secondly, that’s honestly the truth, if he didn’t let himself get hit, he wouldn’t have lost. But again, that requires context of the earlier match. Mostly, he had to avoid getting touched just to get enough for a meter (or enough so when the opponent does touch him, he builds it in time), but it’s tough, I realize that.
But I’ll say it again, if you think the game would be better without it, then prove it. Get everyone together and play the game without it. No matter if it’s better or not, at least you’ll know rather than coming on to SRK and ranting with people who would give you shit like myself.
Who’s reading comprehension is problematic? I was talking about the part of the discussion where YOU said the guard crush was “easily avoided.” We already KNOW Shen’s GB was dependent on Karate not having meter, no one’s arguing that. But we were talking about the video, the event at hand, where the GC WASN’T easily avoided, NOT whatever theory fighter scenarios you can cook up.
Ladies and gentlemen, the secret to being good at fighting games, right here in this thread! Put your checkbooks away, that one was on the house! 
I guess until we see the rest of the match, this is a moot point. I’ll see if I can find the full video later.
I actually have played sets with friends where we don’t use HD/Max combos and it makes the game a little more fun imo. But that’s just my opinion and it would be stupid to ban a mechanic that’s in the game regardless of my opinion of it.
I’m trying to stimulate discussion not trying to prove that something is or isn’t what I say it is. If you don’t like it, go back to lurking. I don’t care if you give me shit as long as you post something the relates to the topic at hand.
It’s common knowledge that when Shen Woo got 4 bars and HD mode, you’d better save one bar in case he do this. This set-up is nothing new. That was the fault of the player having Mr Karate last and naked.
I really don’t think the reward was too high. When both players are to their last character and one got 4 Bars + HD, and the other nothing, something went extremely wrong during the match, and one must suffer the consequences.
Honestly HD/Neomax isn’t a bad thing. It allows for mixup to actually mean something. Shen would get absolutely no damage off c.BB without HD Mode. He’d just get c.BB s.B. Where a character like Kyo would stun you. Ryo’s basic combos would cost 3 bars instead of 1 bar HD. Leona would have no place in the game etc etc.
As for the Shen vs Karate moment, if Karate makes different choices that plays out considerably different. HD just faciliated the end means, but Karate had options and choices, he just didn’t choose the right ones. He chose the safe ones which, were read like a book and BBZ took full advantage and killed him for it. KoF isn’t your SF game where you have to play safe 100% of the time to win.
You have to take risks and make reads or you will lose. That’s why HD isn’t one bar, it’s two. You have to make the read that ‘I’ll hit this fool again’ and use the one stock to set up a favorable situation. You can also make the read that ‘He probably doesn’t know the matchup’ and burn it all on character 2, and then character 3 comes in and if you’re right and he doesn’t know the matchup, no amount of HD will save him.
tl;dr: HD balances the game by giving every character the tools to win.
KOF in general has a lot of high damage stuff for a variety of reasons:
- the minimum damage a super can do in a combo is quite high (i think it’s 40% or 50% of base damage based on the conditions/whether or not it’s a neomax… gotta check the wiki)
- the minimum damage a move can do in a combo is 20% of its base damage, to a limit of 4 damage if the move does >0 base damage
- there is no defense modifier as a result of having less health
- the damage scaling is per hit, and the amount of additional scaling per hit is 5%
- lax juggling
- i don’t think there’s a damage penalty for super cancelling (somebody check for me?)
So except in cases where you’ve got somebody like King or Yuri and you are looping moves that have many hits (and most characters don’t have moves like that), combo damage is scaled much less than in games like SF4. Ending combos with supers is usually worth it.
For comparison, in SF4, the first two moves of a combo are unscaled, and then the third hit does 80%, and then each hit after that is scaled by 10%, down to a minimum of 10% of base or 1 damage, and this applies to supers as well. This is part of the reason why Honda’s combos hit so damn hard (each hit of the slaps does not cause additional scaling), and why long-ass combos into ultras see the ultra do piss-all damage (see: vanilla SF4 Akuma s.RH loops that end in a dizzy, and doing a raging demon on the dizzied opponent sees the raging demon do literally as much damage in total as a jab). On top of that, defense modifiers kick in as the character has less health.
HD is a big part of huge damage combos, but if it alone was severely nerfed I think that would just be an indirect buff to all the characters who have damaging loops without using HD. For instance, without using HD, Raiden can still do big damage combos using 2 EX moves and one drive cancel. Unless significant nerfs are thrown in to other parts of the combo system or to the characters themselves, a cornered player that gets cleanly hit will still be subject to a “near ToD combo if they have enough meter”.
when it come to “max mode” combo, i think kof 2002UM is the best… not too long and the combos are beautiful… Kof13 has too long and too damaging combos and too much juggle. juggle combo looks ridiculous.
but the problem with 02UM and older kof is that SNK only focus 100% on certain characters. so not all have full max combo.
another problem is, no proper damage scaling…
and when it for super high damage super moves like in 02UM and kof13, i like them both…
This, pretty much. The 2k2 UM combos are short, sweet, and to the point and while they require some execution, they don’t require a lot. They do decent damage without requiring long retarded juggles with damage scaling to pull off.
There have been way too many KOF 13 victories where I’ve seen one guy do Shen’s derp as fuck 80-90% only to have the other Shen return the favor and win the round. While it’s not on the lines of MvC3 (which is a derp game in general), this shit feels very un-KOF-like. And don’t tell me about it being situational to have meter. The console version gives you a LOT of meter for free for getting hit, which was a change nobody asked for. It’s like the game is punishing you for using its mechanics and rewarding the other player for getting HIT by it.
I can’t agree on the execution part. To me, even the simplest 2k2 Max Mode combo feels more difficult than the XIII norm, in part due to the game’s higher speed and (even) stricter inputs. IIRC, 2k2 does not feature XIII’s “auto-dash” at the Max Mode activation, either.
In general, I would say that 2k2 has among the highest execution barriers in a series known/infamous for them, while XI and XIII are as lenient as KOF gets.
One reason HD combos are so dominant is that normal hits and combos are fairly weak. Also, HD costs the entire Drive bar (whereas 2k2’s Max Mode only requires a single bar). That said, I would definitely prefer that all moves did more damage (as in XI) and that HD combos were a bit shorter but scaled less. As it is, XIII vaguely resembles Speed Mode Last Blade (while '94-'95 would be Power Mode and XI a happy medium).
I’m going to side with the “HD Combos ruin the game” party.
HD Combos basically give every character in the game Genei Jin. That’s reason enough to not like them.
I think HD/Neomax is brings it’s own weird sort of balance. If they kept EX moves and made everything super-cancellable THEN you’d see some really dumb shit. As it is it presents the player these two options:
Either save as much meter as possible to TOD with HD/Neomax.
Or blow meter and HD as soon as you get a chance to kill and/or deal as much damage as possible.
Both are legit. There’s some imbalance in regards to certain characters like Takuma/Karate and Shen who can HD combo for around 4-500 damage and then end with a Super if they have one bar for closer to 700-800 damage while other characters just don’t have that option. If they do an HD combo they HAVE to end it with Super into Neomax or just Neomax.