Post your experience with Small/smallest health. Good or bad

[miyodarius]

I'm with DrDogg on this. As a sparing test to get players more aware of the fight, this sounds like a cool try. As a normal for casual and tournament fights, this sounds horrible. I have taken advantage of this with my main Bass. He does half health damage on normal. With my Bass, you guess wrong 2x you're dead and matches don't last longer than 15 secs. This makes the playing boring for me. And hosting this at a tournament will make it suck a quick tourney.
We should drop this idea for tournaments.

 

[Rikuto]

Our definitions of "benefit' are different.

Fuck it. Let's just play Bushido Blade.

Good game, that.

 

[Dr Sexual]

Also lets not forget that Bass and Bayman (2 of the characters that I feel would get the biggest benefit from smallest) are also heavyweights. So alot of characters already lose damage with some of their best combos.

I cant see too many characters being able to one shot those guys even on smallest. Of course I havent tested every single character or combo but I also suspect that it would probably be VERY hard and require CB at the minimum to kill them in 2 combos.

 

[Rikuto]

Honestly man, I feel like.. on one hand, yea, a DDT fucking hurts on smallest. But then again, at 24 frames its not exactly unreactable, and if you can react to it, you can high-counter throw it... which is just as bad. Not to mention its breakable.

Also Bayman thrives on momentum, and one of the easiest ways to win a fight for him is to just hump his opponent before the round even starts and make one of those danger reads. From there he can play his okizeme game until the end of the round if he so chooses.

On smallest though, he can't really risk doing that danger read because it has the potential to just blow up in his face and kill him instantly. So he pretty much has to back off and play the neutral game where he is by far at his weakest.

He's got a pretty big tradeoff there. I wouldn't say he really benefits much, if at all. I find I'm working a hell of a lot harder on smallest than I do on normal, even with the obscene damage.

 

[CyberEvil]

Normal was balanced, to the best of TN's ability, to the new game mechanics. Any talk of changing it from normal should come after any major patching. In its current state, the game would become more unbalanced with lower health. I'm nowhere near an expert with DoA5 but I know enough to know that Smallest life would be like playing UMvC3 (a fighter I can play well) and Small still gives characters the closest thing DoA5 has to touch of death combos. Jann Lee, Christie, and Rig come to mind as being able to get damn near a kill off of one to two wrong guesses. You can say "Oh, but you shouldn't be guessing and that's the point!" No. That's bullshit. The CB system and holds in general are predicated on guessing, educated or not.

Normal for now. Again.

 

[Doug Nguyen]

I always play on normal its literally "normal" its a nice median for me.

 

[Berzerk!]

The main appeal of Smallest life is, like VF5FS before it, to create a more dynamic, intense, fast paced, exciting and spectator friendly feel to the game. In my play environment people are playing a lot of games and you cannot afford to bore them with slow pace. Players of other fighters and spectators in general want to see the hype, and they want to see big rewards when players do well and high a launch, combo, or good read for a throw.

I also think its important to test out this stuff before dismissing it, while tournaments are currently (rightly) defaulting to Normal life, we should definitely consider this to address the above concerns with the game's current format.

I specifically played a bunch of Bass on Smallest life and both myself and my opponent did not feel it was overpowered to land high counter throws with him. The round wasn't over instantly, it didn't automatically set up a win, he still has to eke out another setup at least. So far have played about 30 matches with various characters, using 3 rounds per match, and it really feels right. The player I was testing with is also very familiar with each other fighter and strong in both Tekken and VF, and neither of us felt damage was too much or that one player had not enough chances.

Hold damage needs to be watched but felt ok in the context of a more fast past, high damaging match. As the stakes are a little higher, people are also less inclined to risk going for counters and getting thrown or launched for extra damage.

Overall, I am for Smallest life, but I appreciate tournaments should stay on Normal for now. The ideal for me would be TN patch the game, change normal to Smallest (remember Normal used to be 240 life before), and adjust down the hold damage to suit, and remove the other life settings.

They should also make 60 seconds the default timer setting and a number of other tournament friendly tweaks.

 

[Skilletor]

The main appeal of Smallest life is, like VF5FS before it, to create a more dynamic, intense, fast paced, exciting and spectator friendly feel to the game.

Here's an idea. How about the devs do their fucking jobs so players aren't making up excuses to make the game seem this way?

 

[CyberEvil]

This game is in its infancy and you guys are FOR tossing up a massive wall to new players? No new player is going to want to guess wrong twice or worse, once, and die. That's why Tekken has such a hard time convincing new players to jump in, because they don't want to get hit once and spend twenty seconds in the air. Virtua Fighter can't get new players regardless of a minuscule pricepoint on their newest release because it's just known that it's the most complex fighter out there and the damage is insanely high. The SFIII series started small because of barriers to entry and only got smaller.

This kind of change is very similar to that. It should not be done, regardless of what a few players that know the game think. I'm slightly more concerned about getting people into this game and franchise than I am with catering towards a small group of people. I don't think people should have the ability to throw holds out recklessly and not have it cost them dearly for doing so, but making one mistake turn into a 75% high counter Izuna Drop or back-breaker is not the way to handle it.

EDIT: Having said what I have in the thread, I'm going to just un-follow it. Everyone is welcome to their own opinion and such but since more than a few of us have now posted multiple times the thread has the potential to shrink in scope and take on more of a debate tone and I personally think it's too early to have that.

 

[DR2K]

Matches already end in like 20 seconds in normal DOA5, I can't imagine how quick smallest would be.

 

[Berzerk!]

Here's an idea. How about the devs do their fucking jobs so players aren't making up excuses to make the game seem this way?

To be fair it took am2 3 major revisions of vf5 (and about 3 versions of each) before they had something as high impact and finely balanced as FS. Basically I'm "ok" with normal but can see that smallest simply improves the game and would like a future refinement to take that on board officially.

To DRK2, you don't need to imagine - try it out. Fights aren't that short and tournaments dragging on is an issue we should be wary of for doa5

For now Normal / 60 seconds / 2/3 rounds is the standard because of how long it takes, you can't use the superior 3/5 format unless the matches go faster.

 

[TRI Mike]

As quick as they ended in DOA2, 2H, 2U, 3, 3.1, 3.2, 4 and Dimensions. Because it's actually the same.

 

[RyuJin]

Some of you don't understand the point of this topic. It is named "post your experience with small/smallest health. Good or bad."

This means go out and try it vs players of your skill level (playing someone that much higher then you WILL make you not want to play on either health.)

I will agree that I see a smaller health bar making it harder for new comers to join but no one is playing now. Online does not count because if it did we would not be talking about getting more players to play. Like Rikuto, Berzerk, and myself have said try it out and post how things went.

Don't come in here talking about "everything hurts you die in .3 seconds ;_;. The tournament standard will not change overnight so no one needs to worry about that.

Lastly no one wants smaller life to help them win. We have stated we have no problem playing on normal life. I'm a tournament player first and foremost. What did you think would happen? I'm going to walk into an event an go "YO DAWG! WHY YO TOURNMEENNT NOT ON SMALLEST HAEATH SON!"

 

[Raansu]

I'm still mixed about it. I like it a lot but I also still think smallest is a bit too much. I've been going back and forth between small and smallest and I definitely think small has the right balance of damage/reward while smallest you just blow up and I kind of laugh at your misery as my PB kills you while you still had 70% of your health. Part of me says "Ya that's awesome, I took the risk for the CB > PB" but part of me says "holy shit that's too much." Especially when I bounce back and forth between Hitomi and Jann Lee. Hitomi has to work 10x harder so I love the damage...Jann Lee I don't have to work as hard so it kind of seems over kill.

So ya, for the most part I love smallest, find it hilarious most of the time, but overall I think small is the perfect health setting. In normal you find situations where your opponent has just enough health left to survive and mount a comeback after you just took a huge risk. On small, that fucker is dead as he should be.

 

[d3v]

Not always, it's dependant on meter, plus a character is only 1/3rd of a lifebar, incoming character is a total guess.

If it's any of the tournament viable characters (i.e. the top tiers) then 1 hit usually means death and positional advantage over the incoming character.

 

[DR2K]

If it's any of the tournament viable characters (i.e. the top tiers) then 1 hit usually means death and positional advantage over the incoming character.

Assuming the soap isn't dropped.