lmao. AGREED.
Sirlin is quite a kewl dude, thanks for pointing me in his direction rikuto... i feel so smart right now.
can i make a request for a particular discussion here, since i dont see what im looking for in the forum. lets talk about stun... specifically, and in depth. i wanna know what ppl think about how stun, deepstun and the issue with CB and sitdown stuns are affecting the game, and some suggestions and fixes. somebody mentioned above that the payout for holds has been reduced, but the overall payout for offense has not been re-balanced to reflect this yet (i think it was you Rikuto, though not in my clumsy wording) so i wanna talk about strikes and their properties... indulge me?
Alright...
Well it's pretty much how I said it. In DOA 1-2, only specific attacks could cause a stun good enough to lead into any form of respectable damage. It was not as difficult to achieve as something like a non-shakeable stun in VF, though. You only needed one hit to launch for max height inside of the stun. Some characters have better juggles than others, and when you combined this with dangerzones things could get nasty. In DOA 2 you also had to deal with the counter system inside of stun which did anywhere from respectable to insane damage depending on the matchup. Because decent launching options were limited to one or two different attacks per character, the attacker was usually scared that their coinflip would backfire on them despite the potential payout.
In DOA 3.1 it was the same story, but many attacks now had frame advantage and many characters had tools that would completely destroy a person attempting to hold. This made people fear having to use the hold despite the damage it could cause, and instead the game played with a greater emphasis on environmental positioning, trapping your opponent, and getting that first big lead. You couldn't play with batshit silly offense unless your character was designed for it like Jann Lee. This is why DOA 3.1 is considered the best game... the stuns difficult enough to pull off but the damage was all completely justifiable. The counter system was there, but it was not riding shotgun for once.
DOA 4 is where everything changed and things got ugly. Most environmental setups were made useless, frame advantage was stripped from basically everything, counters were made stronger than ever, and now you had to hit your opponent several times after they were stunned just to get a decent juggle. In a vain attempt to balance this they made it so nearly any attack would cause some kind of stun on counter-hit... which actually made everything even worse because now you couldn't properly anticipate threats as everything created the stun situation.
DOA 5 thus far has nerfed the counter agreeably for MOST characters, which solves the first major problem this series ever had... but only after it got to its most extreme breaking point. Wall combos are back in a slightly different form, as is frame advantage. The possibility of intelligent offense is present. The stun system, however, is left over from DOA 4 in its entirety as is the need to score multiple hits before a decent launch. This creates a situation where the gameplay is closer to what DOA 3.1 was at the pinnacle of the games triumph with insanely strong but super situational offense, but unfortunately the stuns come way too easily and you have to smack around your opponent several times inside of that stun to get what you want. Intelligently, Team Ninja put in the CB system which focuses very strongly on making one option better than everything else once a stun happens... which of course, leads to mindgames that just about any level of competitive player can comprehend rather than a random clusterfuck of guessing and choices.
Master is basically telling everyone that good stuns are rare enough that we can revert to single hit max height launches again. And I'm telling you that its still a super convoluted mess and we can't. And why would I ever tell you otherwise, when my character was not missing a single stun that he had from DOA 4?
