• As part of the relaunch of Skullheart, ALL previous threads have been archived. You can find them at the bottom of the forum in the Archives (2021) section. The archives are locked, so please use the new forum sections to create new discussion threads.

A word of appreciation for the beta

pegglefrank

I am 5000lbs of folded diamonds and sex appeal!
Joined
Sep 13, 2015
Messages
140
Reaction score
46
Points
28
Steam
PeggleFrank
Big Band Beowulf Cerebella
I'm not sure why the beta is still being worked on and not Indivisible, but it's much appreciated. The release build of the game right now is great, but the beta's made it even better; almost all of my complaints with stable have been fixed in the beta.

I only really play 4 characters (Bella, Band, Beo, and R.Fortune), and yet just about all of them have had amazing improvements that open up unimaginable possibilities. A couple friends of mine who play various other characters have also had fantastic changes to their characters. It's almost unbelievable how much more refined this version of the game is. Despite all the changes, I haven't really been able to find any changes that I don't agree with or that affect the game negatively for me. I could, of course, just be lucky as hell, but I think it's more up to the dev's and the community's fantastic balance improvements. These changes alone have pretty much revitalized my interest in the game, after being on an afterburner for 600 hours of Skullgirls and then finally losing interest, which is pretty damn impressive.

For Band:
  • j.mk doesn't deal an insane 350x4 anymore. It's extremely difficult to pull off chains where you cancel j.mk with j.hp, and doing so nets you quite a bit more damage. I'm probably the only person that was bothered by this, but it was hellishly hard for me and many others to pull off these chains. Now, they practically no longer exist, except for stuff toward the end of chains. Combos using as many j.mk's as possible usually out-damaged other, similar combos by quite a bit, so I'm glad this was changed. It reduces the damage ceiling on Band's combos ever so slightly which makes some of my dumber combo ideas a touch more practical in comparison.

  • HK Giant Step has 1 hit of armor. This move is really only good against zoners, but it's just awful because it has no armor. Now, it can actually deal with zoners, because you won't get hit out of startup as often. What I like about this is that zoners (really only Peacock and maybe R.Fortune's H beam) have to pay a bit more attention at long distances, since mindlessly spamming your pattern as fast as possible could lead to you getting hit, which leads into H Brass, which leads into SSJ and a whole lot of damage.

  • HK Giant Step can't be reflected anymore. This was dumb and kept Bella both safe and in an almost advantageous position at fullscreen, especially if she had any kind of ranged assists. I'm glad it's gone.

  • LK "A" Train is now good. This might be the change I love the most, and I'm so glad it was done. I posted some LK "A" Train resets here awhile back, and ever since I've incorporated a few of them into my play, but I've been gradually phasing them out because they just don't work a lot of the time; they're clunky, they're slow, they're weak, and even if they work, they don't let you convert, unless you do some kind of crazy meter conversion into another character. The move is now actually usable, which, as far as I'm concerned, is a bit of a game changer, because it gives Band a relevant grounded command grab. It's lightning fast (although this actually makes it harder to pull off, because before the timing was so perfect that you could just throw out any light/medium and then do LK Train and the active frames would come out just a few frames after they leave recovery). It can be combo'd out of. It doesn't push you halfway across the screen when you use it, which is one of the big reasons it was almost unusable both midscreen and in the corner. I haven't looked at the damage, but I'm guessing it's still the same, which is good because it dealt a noticeable chunk of damage.

  • Charged Timpani can now be combo'd out of midscreen. This is another pretty neglected move. Its two main advantages over regular Timpani are that, one, it deals more damage, and two, it gives you more time in the corner to catch your opponent. The first isn't even that good, because taunted SSJ deals much more damage, and the second isn't terribly relevant since I did some research and found out that you can essentially catch the opponent in mid-air after a regular Timpani and then convert into pretty much anything without using OTG (allowing for weird ass Timpani -> sliding knockdown conversions, which, unfortunately, I never really bothered to research), and against some characters you didn't even need sound stun to convert. Now that charged Timpani lets you combo your opponent at midscreen, it's become a lot more efficient and a lot more flexible, which I like as opposed to how SSJ almost always ends your combo. You can do a little combo into charged Timpani, and then use the undizzy you have left to push your opponent to the corner and do a sliding knockdown, essentially dealing a hell of a lot of damage, using a meter, and using your charge all while leaving you with an insane frame advantage. Something I'd like to maybe see is allow you to convert off charged Timpani even if you've already used sound stun (I believe Mike said that that was actually a mistake), as that would really push charged Timpani into being good enough to use in a lot of combos, which might spice things up. That said, with the current improvements to Timpani, that might be a little over the top -- and actually, now that I think about it, Timpani might've been changed in this way as an alternative to making it convertable even after using sound stun.

  • Charged Timpani/SSJ can be skipped by holding their respective buttons. This is great for a few reasons, but the biggest reason I can think of right now is that it lets you mess with the order of your supers in your combo without changing the combo itself. Say you haven't used OTG or sound stun, you have a charge, and you're ending your combo with SSJ. Before, you'd be forced to do a taunted SSJ, but now, you can do a regular SSJ into HK Giant Step into taunted SSJ, which deals much more damage without changing the combo at all. Additionally, you can mess with Timpani and use a bunch of untaunted Timpanis in your combo before ending with charged Timpani. I had a fantastic combo that had mind-bogglingly high damage, but it just didn't work because I couldn't use multiple Timpanis, a charge, and sound stun all in the same combo. Now, I can. I'll have to go around and look for that combo so I can update it. This is a great change.
For Robo:
  • c.mk and s.hp now have a vortex effect. This is an absolute godsend. Robo can now combo on any character from extreme distances, whereas before, she had no way to convert off a distant c.mk other than a magnet.

  • I take back what I said earlier about not not liking any of the changes in the beta. From what I can tell, it seems Robo's damage was seriously nerfed. I would imagine her damage off c.mk is probably a lot less or something. My BnB that normally deals around 8k is now just over 6k.
For Beo:
  • s.hk now staggers assists. For some reason or another, I'm almost completely unable to pull off s.hk stagger chains, as s.hk comes out late 100% of the time; I'd imagine it has something to do with playing on keyboard, because no one I've ever talked to has ever had this problem. Still, this is a nice change, and it makes Beo's normal combos work just a little bit longer on assists before dropping them. A change that's much welcome.
This is only for the characters I play, and the list of positive changes is immense. I've heard a lot of interesting things about Fukua in this build, too, which I'm sure the one two Fukua players out there would enjoy.

Thanks for continuing to update this game. I know fighting games rarely ever "die" in the typical sense, but it's still impressive the game has lasted this long and had this much support.
 
who said lab zero wasn't working on Indivisible? Is it so shocking that Mike can do programming and also balances on the side?