What justifies a reset?
A reset is basically dropping a combo on purpose to potentially gain more unscaled damage. Great, so why do you not always go for reset then? More damage right? Well, for a reset to be "worth it", you should, first of all, have a strong mix up incoming, so that the probability of your opponent blocking that reset is as low as possible. If your mix up is weak, the opponent will block your reset attempt and you just threw away guaranteed damage on a reset, weak mix up and a dream.
The other factor is the "potential damage vs the guaranteed damage". If you do your reset after the first 2 hits of a combo, you are probably sacrificing guaranteed damage that would equate at least 60%-70% of the potential damage. Is this worth it? Should you be giving up 100 guaranteed damage by stopping after 20 damage, and potentially get 100-110 more damage (120-130 damage together)?
The rules that will tell you if your reset is worth going for is. If your mix up is strong AND you are gaining more than 50% more damage if succeeding with the mix up, you should probably do it (This is not an established rule, but it's something I think personally). These 2 factors will affect each other of course, so if the mix up is insanely strong, that might justify going for the reset even if you only gain 30% more damage by landing it. If the potential damage you can get is 100% more than the guaranteed damage, but your mix up is kind of weak, maybe it is still worth going for once in a while.
How does this relate to Zod:
Usually when landing a trait grab in the beginning of a combo, you have a 40-45% combo coming. If you decide to reset the opponent after dealing 10-15% and therefor sacrificing 25%-30% damage for a potential "new" combo that does 45%, you are basically placing your guaranteed 40-45% combo in a wager and hoping to win 50-60%. If you lose this bet, you will be left with 10-15% damage.
When I looked in to trait combo resets yesterday, I was doing 30-39% damage in to resets that had both ambiguous j2 and mix ups in the reset. Here you sacrifice 10-15% guaranteed damage for potential 70-80% damage from a stronger mix up. In my head this might be a risk that I would be willing to take.
At the end I would like to add a point that speaks towards the use of Zod's mix up: Zod's trait grab will throw the opponent to the ground at the end of the animation, usually leaving no room for a reset, while stuff like Frost's freeze and Superman's freeze will reset the opponent standing if they don't do anything. Because of this people might not expect a reset out of the trait grab at all, while they in frozen states are "on the look" for resets. This is kind of a gimmick though, as at a high level players will learn to recognise that the zod player has whiffed something in order for a reset.
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