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Kombat Kast Recap 6/5/19

After a billion years, we have a new Kombat Kast! A real one! Talking about MK11! This time around, we have a breakdown for Shang Tsung, the next DLC character coming out sometime in the near future.

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Once we got started, the full crew of Derek, Tyler and Stephanie opened up with some Combo Breaker talk. Nothing crazy, just a "what did you like from the event?" and "how about Sonic Fox not breaking the Combo Breaker curse?". After the first Stephanie's Lore Minute (apparently this is a modern Shang, he was revived as part of Kronika's time shenanigans, but not drafted to her guard) we got into it with our look at the first boss of the Mortal Kombat franchise:

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On a quick aesthetics note, you can see that Sub-Zero has his classic costume and Shang is fighting in his old-school "snake stance". Something unique to the character, his forward throw gets him health back, in exchange for doing less damage than a normal throw. He has some flashy strings with some solid mids and a real easy KB. Getting to his base specials, he gets his flaming skull projectiles, which he can shoot out or throw downwards. Something we saw in the trailer, we have confirmation that he gets his opponents krushing blows upon stealing their soul. So his krushing blow pool will be absurdly high, but the stolen krushing blows do less damage than they normally would.

Moving to variation moves, we got an explanation on something else we saw in the trailer: he can turn into various characters across the series to use their specials. 16 Bit showed off Shang using Smoke's shake parry and Rain's roundhouse kick. Something fun but not ninja based, he can switch spots with the opponent on the stage for better positioning.

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Along with getting the Old Man Shang skin, you can get moves that use the flaming skulls in different ways, like the ground skull summon thing that extends combos.

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Some other moves he gets is Reptile's slide (which also KBs are full-screen) and he can summon up a fire wall that does DoT and can be amplified to move it to a better spot on the map.

After the showcase, the crew played some matches. Stephanie got some games in with Shang against Derek, which went about as well as you'd expect for Derek. Tyler came in to avenge him, but that also went about as well as you'd expect. Closing the show out, we did get acknowledgement that the Kombat League (the thing that you see whenever you go to play online) does exist, but they can't talk about it yet. There were 100+ birthdays Derek covered, and the belt battle ended with Tyler winning 2-1. Which would have been a 2-0 if he didn't throw out a Mercy at the end of game 2 that resulted in his loss.

So that's it for this Kombat Kast. We didn't get information on anything else, but we have promises of things happening soon. So lookout for that and get back to playing MK11 in the meantime.
 

Comments

Shame we only got a glimpse of one tournament variation. Other than that, 16bit said that he might be a zoner but we didn't see much of the zoning :(
 
From what I gathered that his fastest mid was 13 frames maybe? Yeah....hes not an up close character at all, but im looking forward to using his 2nd variation :)
 
They were calling Shang a zoner, but I have a feeling he's going to end up like Noob: labeled a zoner but no one plays him as one.
Shame we only got a glimpse of one tournament variation. Other than that, 16bit said that he might be a zoner but we didn't see much of the zoning :(
Wasn't the variation with triple skull, ground skulls, and flame wall enough zoning for people?
 
We also basically got confirmation that they're altering Krushing Blow requirements. They confirmed when you morph, KBs have the same requirements which means trailer Raiden has been updated.
 
Not sure how I feel about ground skulls being tied to a variation and this new corpse drop apparently being the replacement for upskulls but overall I’m so hype. His aesthetics, his animations with the incorporation of all this new sorcery, his 11/10 god tier fatality, and his footsies/zoning focus are all looking ideal.
 
They were calling Shang a zoner, but I have a feeling he's going to end up like Noob: labeled a zoner but no one plays him as one.
He has very clear zoning moves, he will definitely be played like a zoner. He looks to control space very well, reminds me of Shinnok from MKX.
 
Biggest impact is the KBs for Shang I'd say. In MUs where he is facing a character with KB's that are more easily accessible (Geras/Baraka/Kabal types), he can use soul steal and active their KB in combo or counter or whatnot. Then will have access to all his Shang-exclusive KBs when the morph wears off. Could be a game changer for some MUs with many KBs accessible.

They were calling Shang a zoner, but I have a feeling he's going to end up like Noob: labeled a zoner but no one plays him as one.
Shame we only got a glimpse of one tournament variation. Other than that, 16bit said that he might be a zoner but we didn't see much of the zoning :(
Not sure if we watched the same thing, but Shang's potential space control looked very, very solid. Unless you're talking about full screen pew pew which isn't the end all be all zoning strategy.
 
I don’t know how to zone at all. It’s going to be hard for me to learn him but I can’t wait, he looks great.
 
They definitely said one of the variations was tournament, and I feel like that was the one she said it for. I could absolutely be wrong, I was doing other stuff while the stream was on.
I believe 16 bit said the one with subzero and smoke was tournament. i don't know about the others