Combo Mechanics Guide
By Geta92.
The following observations have been thoroughly checked by in-game playtesting as well as data mining. These claims should be highly accurate despite the possibility of minor misinterpretations.
Attack String Types
All Rush Attacks (including Violent Rush and Air Combos) are internally separated into two types, A and B. These attacks will do different amounts of damage and may even have a different amount of hits for some characters depending on which type you are using. The game keeps track of these separately as well which is relevant for other game mechanics. As a general rule, B-Type attacks usually deal slightly more damage with a substantial damage bonus on the final 5th input compared to their default counterpart.
Which type you are using when inputting Rush Attacks specifically depends on your prior action. You will normally default to using A-Type Rush Attacks unless other conditions apply.
Using any of the following actions will force your Rush Attack type to swap:
- Smash attack (including Jump Attack and (Dragon) Dash Attack)
- All Rush Chain Attacks (excluding Lift Strike and Grand Slash)
- Burst Melee Attack
- Step-In
This means that if your prior attack was A-Type or if you did not do a prior Rush Attack in the combo, your next attack used immediately after the listed actions will be B-Type. If the prior Rush was B-Type already, doing Rush Attacks after these actions will swap back to A-Type. The condition is that you do the input for the action within a short time interval. Taking too much time to follow up a prior action will make an attack default back to being A-Type.
Rush Attacks immediately used after a Grand Slash seem to defy the rule and keep your type unchanged. This is likely due to the fact that the Grand Slash is not intended as a combo action but something else.
Air Combos have their own types and work a bit differently. Using an Air Combo immediately after the Lift Strike will always result in an A-Type Air Combo and one used directly after an Aerial Heavy Finish attack will always be B-Type instead. For the sake of keeping these terms simple, you can think of them like Light and Heavy Air Combos because their logic literally only consists of whether or not you started them from a heavy attack or not. Switching between these Air Combo types is not possible. Interrupting an Air Combo by taking too long to follow up with new inputs will not only default back to A-Type but also void the entire air status and you will go back to using regular non-air A-Type Rush Attacks.
Combo Penalty System
Repeat Penalty
If you use the same Rush Chain Attack, directional Smash Attack or final Rush Attack twice, you won’t be able to continue your combo and your enemy is flung away. If this happens on a repeated Rush attack, the base damage of the final attack is reduced to 540, usually resulting in a noticeable damage drop. Different Rush Attack types (A and B) count as different attacks and will not count as repeats, unless you use two full Rushes of the same type in one combo in which case they will be penalized. Any Rush string that has not been finished with the final 5th input will also have no penalty attached.
Super Armor Penalty
If your enemy has Super Armor and your attack did not make them flinch, your damage will be reduced by 10%. Certain characters like Majin Vegeta or Super Trunks further gain Super Armor with a 25% damage reduction in Sparking Mode. Breaking the Super Armor with any attack will get rid of the debuff for the rest of the remaining combo and flinch the enemy like normal.
Action Category Penalty
If you switch to an attack that is part of a different category than the one before, the game takes note of this with a penalty point. Your first two penalty points have no consequences, but your attack’s damage will be reduced by 10% for every point beyond a total count of 2 per combo. The maximum reduction that can take place is 80% which starts when reaching a total of 10 penalties. Any number of penalties beyond 10 will have no effect. This type of combo damage reduction is cumulative and only resets back to 0 once the combo counter resets or you do a very specific attack combination.
As an example, if you were to do a full Rush Attack string, then do a Step-In, use a Rush-In Attack, then do another Rush Attack string and end in a Heavy Finish, the last hit will lose 10% damage. This happens because you switched from doing Rush Attacks to a Rush Chain Attack, then back to doing Rush Attacks and then back to another Rush Chain Attack, hence why you passed the critical threshold on the last hit, resulting in it having its damage reduced. Any category switch after this would keep increasing the debuff.
The action categories used to group the different types of attacks are:
- Interrupt: Revenge Counter, Z Counter, Super Counter
- Ki Blast: Ki Blast, Charged Ki Blast
- Pursuit: Vanishing Attack, Dragon Smash, Burst Smash
- Rush: Rush Attack, Auto Combo Attack
- Rush Derivative: Anything else not listed elsewhere
- Smash: Smash Attack, Hyper Smash
- Step Derivation: Short Dash Attack, Dash Blow, Dash Rising
- Unique Attack: Lightning Attack, Ultimate, Super, Skill, Burst Meteor, Throw, Vanishing Assault
- Unique Move Derivation: Burst Melee Attack, Violent Rush, Burst Finish, Dragon Dash Attack
The following actions are standalone, so they always count towards penalties:
Rush, Blast Impact, Crash Impact, Jump Attack, Perception Counterattack, Power Impact, Speed Impact
Combo Penalty Reset
There is an easy way to reset your combo damage penalty count back to 0 once every combo, but only if your combo is currently in its 2nd B-Type Rush Attack string. If this is the case and you use a chargeable attack at its full charge, the debuff on your combo damage that is in effect is removed, making your attacks deal their full damage as well as setting the entire penalty tracking back to 0. This awards you the same 2 free category changes as before, meaning you’ll only start losing damage after 3 more category switches.
This mechanic can be used to greatly extend your combos, as long as you have more combat actions left to choose from without dropping your combo due to repeated actions.
All charged attacks are usually very telegraphed and can easily be vanished with a High-Speed Evasion within a sizable frame window. Due to this weakness, it is best to try to build combos with as few Action Group changes as possible that can only be stopped with Super Counters and only use charged attacks very late into the combo after it becomes not worth continuing otherwise due to the accumulated damage debuff. A charged Lift Strike into a heavy Air Combo finished with a Super is an example of a good way to salvage an imperfect combo that has dropped in damage due to the penalty system mechanics.
The ability to do a combo reset seems to be a feature that is only supposed to be granted on transforming or switching into a character. You’re supposed to unlock it mid battle to reward switching and transforming, but due to some internal oddities in the character data, this doesn’t actually work for a lot of characters so some start out with it right from the get-go even though they shouldn’t while others cannot get it at all.
I’ll add a list of how this works for each character when this is properly tested.
The in-game Combo stat
All of this information sure sounds interesting, but what about the Combo stat the game shows you in the character information image? What does it do? Funnily enough, not much at all. The only thing the Combo stat does is reduce the cost of the Short Dash. The higher it is, the lower the Ki cost. It has no influence on your damage or its scaling whatsoever, so the description on the official website seems to be incorrect.
Putting this Knowledge into Practice
Bypassing Penalties Using the Tri-Rush
A limitation with combo damage is the amount of Rush Attacks you can do in a row. You can normally only use 5 Rush Attacks in a row and are advised by the tutorials to use Rush-In Attacks to be able to combo them into a 2nd Rush Attack string and then a final 3rd. What the tutorial does not tell you is the fact that these attacks are part of a different action category and as a result greatly reduce your combo damage for each time you use them to chain Rush Attack strings together. It’s better to avoid them for long combos.
You can alternatively chain Rush Attack strings together without using any additional attacks by just taking advantage of A and B-Type Rush Attacks and the fact that your combos continue if you alternate between them manually. If you start a B-Type Rush and finish the 5th hit, you can hold forward, wait a few frames to avoid doing your Auto Combo and then start punching again. This will chain an A-Type Rush Attack into it, meaning you can do 10 Rush Attacks in a row without damage scaling. You can then finish this 2nd Rush Attack string, wait a few frames, use a Step-In and follow up with a second B-Type Rush Attack string. You end up going B-A-B. You can do the same thing by starting with an A-Type and doing the Step-In on the 2nd and 3rd string, resulting in an A-B-B combo. A-B-A and B-A-A are possible, but should be avoided because they will deal slightly less damage due to favoring A-Type. Some characters may have to forgo an extra B-Type Rush and actually use these setups with two A-types instead though. Some are just too slow to reliably hit their 3rd Rush Attack string in time before the enemy turns around. A bad connection in an online match might also make it too risky to actually go for a Tri-Rush with two B-Type strings.
Completing the 3rd Rush Attack string would drop the combo due to the rule that you cannot repeat two Rush Attack strings of the same type, but by simply not using the very final Rush Attack input you can do 14 Rush Attacks in a row and then just combo into Rush Chain attacks with a Grand Slash, Lift Strike or whatever other Rush Chain you have on the 4th hit on your character to continue the combo without losing any damage. I call this maneuver a Tri-Rush for simplicity. It is universal, works on any character and is a great combo starter for using attacks from the back because it can only be escaped with Super Counters.
Extended Rush Chains
Like we already established, all the penalty mechanic cares about is if attacks are part of the same action category. This means that you can sometimes combo attacks that are unrelated to each other and receive no damage drop off. This mostly applies to most Rush Chains. You can for example use a Lift Strike, then use an Aerial Heavy Finish, then use the follow-up attack Heavy Crush, stop midway, do a Sidestep, then use a regular Heavy Finish, another Heavy Crash, stop midway, Sidestep, Grand Slash and then a full Tornado Slash follow-up. All of these actions are part of the same category, so all deal full damage. This strategy is impractical due to the large number of attacks that can just be guarded or vanished though.
A far more practical long Rush Chain combo is the basic light or heavy Air Combo as the Lift Strike, Aerial Heavy Attack as well as the Air Combo attacks all are part of the same action category, meaning the entire attack string has no damage scaling penalties applied. Just take note that using your Aerial Heavy attack at the end of an Air Combo is suboptimal as it can be guarded and a hard knockdown will reduce damage of any following attack you may want to add at the very end (like a Super or Ultimate).
How to Reset Combos
Now that we have thoroughly established how combo damage scaling works, a different question arises. What is the point of doing combos if they only reduce damage instead of increasing it? The answer is plain simple, there is no actual point in doing combos. Your in-game combo counter is essentially just eye candy to give you an estimate of how seamless you chained attacks into each other. This has no real benefit.
A true optimal combo from a competitive perspective would be one that is universal and resets the combo counter back to 0 but still keeps the enemy staggered for long enough to start another combo from a safe position like their back. One universal tool every non-giant character has that can be used for this purpose is the Grand Slash attack which can be used to trip the opponent. Unlike other attacks that put enemies into a stagger, the Grand Slash quickly fades out the combo counter and also does not feature the attack type switch from A to B and vice versa which is part of other Rush Chain attacks. This suggests that it is truly intended to be used as a combo reset tool rather than an action to follow up with Rush Attacks.
Most resets can be infinitely repeated and can only really be stopped by using the correct properly timed defensive option, like Low Guard, Super Perception, High-Speed Evasion or Super Counter. Just keep in mind that all Grand Slash setups only work in the air and not in the ground since a Grand Slash attack on the ground causes a hard knockdown instead of an automatic recovery animation.
Resets from the front to switch sides:
- A simple example of a very easy Combo Reset is to use a Grand Slash, then a Step-In and immediately follow this up with a left or right Sidestep. This works against most enemies except giants and allows you to start attacking right after the Sidestep to start a fresh combo from the enemies back.
A more complex version involves using a Dragon Dash at a 90 degree angle to the left or right after using your Grand Slash which can then be canceled into a Short Dash at a 45 degree angle to move behind the enemy and start a new combo. You simply need to make sure to wait a few frames after the Short Dash to not do a Dash Attack as this would reduce your damage due to the damage scaling. This reset is harder to do, but works against even more enemies than the simpler Sidestep version. Additional Ki Blasts may be used after the Short Dash to give you a much larger time window to pull this off without the enemy turning around though this is a trade-off as it does increase Ki cost and reduces the following combo’s damage.
You should use a differing amount of Rush Attacks every time when attempting these two strategies to not give away when you’re going for the trip. Otherwise your opponent will learn when to guard low.
Like one of the prior paragraphs described, Rush-In Attacks are a poor choice for high damage combos because they quickly inflate the combo damage scaling. But this does not mean that they have no uses. They can be used to set up side switching resets. A tiny problem is that almost anything after your Rush-In Attack can be guarded. One major exception is charged Ki Blasts though. A lot of characters can use their charged Ki Blast after a directional Rush-In Attack before the enemy has enough time to block. You can use this maneuver from a front facing combo in order to attempt to get behind the enemy and start a new combo from their back. From the ground, you can follow up the Ki Blast with a Step-In, then a Jump and then a 2nd Step-In to jump above the enemies head and attack from the back. In the air or from the ground, you can use a Z Burst Dash to accomplish the same thing. Non-paralyzing charged Ki Blasts fling the enemy out of the Step-In barrier and create a smoke screen, making it hard for the enemy to see what you are doing next. This can easily be taken advantage of by switching between both of these setups or attempting something entirely different.
Resets from the back:
- Resetting a combo from already attacking an enemy from the back is easy and simply involves using an uncharged Grand Slash, then a charged Ki Blast and starting a new Rush Attack. The charged Ki Blast is technically unnecessary, but adds extra damage and is impossible to vanish or counter in any way.
If you have the move Heavy Finish as one of your Rush Chain options, you can extend the prior setup by using the maximum amount of Rush Attacks you can in a chain before finishing with an uncharged Heavy Finish. You then need to immediately follow this up with a charged Ki Blast, a single Rush Attack, then an uncharged Grand Slash, quickly shoot a second charged Ki Blast and repeat from here on. If you don’t have Heavy Finish as an option, you can still do this combo and just skip straight to the Grand Slash after finishing your maximum length Rush Attack chain. This extended infinite combo is especially powerful on characters with very strong multi-projectile charged Ki Blasts. The reason this works is because charged Ki Blasts do not fling away an enemy if they’re still inside a Heavy Finish stagger, just like when tripping.
Another option with a way harder timing requirement is using a Rolling Hammer Chain Attack and then this up with a Rolling Hurricane, waiting just a blink of an eye and then starting to do Rush Attacks again. This setup is extremely simple on paper but fails if you wait for too long or not long enough and may be hard to do during laggy online matches.
If your character can use charged Ki Blasts that can paralyze an opponent or you have a Skill that can do that as well, you can just build one of these into a combo, move around, wait and start a new combo.
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