It is random. In neutral you can more or less get a feel and read somewhat what your opponent is trying to do. That's not really a thing in stun when they just pop out of it with little animation to really follow since holds pop out at 0 frames.
The catch is that there's more to it than that. WHICH hold? Are you doing a strike, if so, is it a punch or kick? What height? Are baiting the hold from stun to go for a double damage grab instead?
There's a lot of options going on.
Why would I bother doing that kick if (like you could in doa4) just stagger out of it, immediately turn around and block or hold the follow up. In what world is that ok?
Because you already know they're going to block or hold what they assume will be a followup, so you are correctly reading and anticipating them, and therefore DONT do the followup, but instead perform a throw on them. Either they're free due to blocking, or taking extra damage from attempting a hold. Or you simply perform a DIFFERENT followup, like a low.
That's half the point of DOA is the mindgames like that, conditioning people to patterns then exploiting said pattern.
You made the mistake and let yourself get hit by a high kick thats unsafe on block. Why is it ok that you can recover from that mistake in the neutral game?
Because I already took a high kick to the face.
Why do you want free damage after already getting damage?
You're taking this completely out of context. People are not saying they are getting beat by random holds. The point is that random holds in stun are exactly that, random. It kills the flow in a situation that shouldn't exist to begin with.
My point was that it's not random at ALL. If you know they can hold from stun, then you can expect it, and plan accordingly. That's not random.
Random would be if they pressed a single button, and that button had a roll of the dice chance to either strike/hold/throw.
Just to be clear on your meaning here, please explicitly define what "random" means to you in the context of this discussion.
The fact that you have four options on four hit levels alone means that it's more involved than "pure RPS," let alone the numerous other considerations. I understand that what you're trying to say is that it's purely anticipation so you can't read enemy movements and the like (unlike you can in neutral), but to relegate that entire process to "pure guessing" would be to dismiss all inductive reasoning as "pure guessing," as well. And anyone with a reasonable capacity knows the difference between an active inference and a purely random guess.
This. You may not always be RIGHT, but you can still figure it out.
That's literally a long winded way of saying you're guessing
....
let's put this another way.
Back in school, with the scantron tests (or whatever they're called in other places), where you fill in a bubble for multiple choice questions.
There's 4 options, A, B, C, and D. Each technically has a chance of being "right", but the context of the questions and answers assigned to those 4 letters should make you consider things more carefully.
Did you just "guess" your way through those tests by filling in random bubbles, or did you read the situation and attempt to answer correctly to the best of your ability using all provided context and knowledge? Or would that still just be "Guessing" for you because it's not 100% guaranteed to be the right answer?
As a sub example, sometimes I legitimately would not know what to pick, having narrowed it down to say, A and C, but unsure of which. So I would leave that question alone, because, due to the nature of those tests, I knew later on there would likely be a question in the reverse, and sure enough, i'd find a question later in the test that was basically the answers to the previous questions, but Jeopardy style in the form of a new question, and then I just reverse engineered that question to plug the answer back into the previous one.
To give that context, even in a situation against someone I haven't got a "read" on yet, I'm not going to "guess", but simply eat it and get more experience fighting them so I know what to do in the same situation next time they put me in it.
It's never "Random" or "Just Guessing", unless you're just farting on the controller while blind and deaf.
I do find it funny that a lot of the people who complain about the stun system pick characters that are designed to play the stun game as frequently as possible. For some reason, I rarely hear someone say: "I hate the stun game, so I'll just use a grappler for high-risk, high-payout damage packets."
This is exactly why I usually pick power characters in fighters, in all honesty haha. Part of why I love leon, for example, I know no matter how bad the match is going, I can turn it around at the drop of a hat, so i'm not worried until the match is actually over.
But to be kinda back on topic.
Do you think they'll nerf Leon's counter hold damage? Sometimes I feel dirty basically one shotting people from half health by doing a desert falcon after baiting a hold.
Or like the general rule of "stay out of the water" when fighting Leon, because that 6T gets nasty on a baited hold over water.
