Tony at Home
Noob
Jumping in Mortal Kombat X is ridiculously safe. So much focus has been on 50/50's, but little given to the actual neutral game that leads up to said 50/50's. I'd argue THIS is what really ails the MKX meta-game.
1) Given the hitbox of jump attacks, the only way to anti-air in many situations is to trade, resulting in a net-gain of a measly 9% damage
2) Active Frames on jumping attacks are MUCH longer than Active Frames on anti airs. So not only do you have to go for a trade, but the chances of the opponent's jump attack winning is MUCH better
3) Jump ins lead to extremely high damage, often netting 30%+, while anti-airs (remember, I'm subtracting from the trade) often lead to 9% net gain. So 3 successful anti-airs, and 1 missed anti-air means a net loss for you.
4) The active frames of many jump attacks are so long that they make trip guarding overly difficult in many cases. The trip-guard punish attempt needs to come VERY late in order to avoid getting hit by the jump attack active frames. This makes neutral jumps and jump-backs MUCH safer than they should be.
I did many experiments to narrow down what the issue is, and I have to say, I'm at a loss for how this can be solved easily.
Here's an example of an absurdly large ghost-hitbox on a jump attack. Mind you, this is not limited to Kotal Kahn, it is pretty much universal. This is generally what leads to issue 1)
Full test video:
On the flip side, here's an example of an extremely good D2, against an average jumping attack, and still the D2 loses the majority of the time. The ONLY Kotal Kahn's D2 wins in this video, is if it trades, so he doesn't really gain all that much damage.
** Yes, I'm aware Kotal has an EX AA grab, however, 2 points: 1) I am just using these as general examples and they should be taken as such. Try to think of this from the perspective of all characters, and note many can't deal with this. 2) Kotal shouldn't NEED to spend a bar of meter to AA. No character should. It only proves my point that AA-ing is resource intensive and risky, while jumping is free and relatively low-risk. **
One more example, and I'm not even sure what's going on here honestly. I set an AI to record doing this repeatedly and just could not for the life of me even get this to trade. I'm not sure I can possibly give a better example of how jump-ins vs AA is absolutely broken in this game than this picture:
Full test video:
... I'm not even sure why I try....
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