As much as I enjoy having various limbs hacked off without so much as getting a good riposte in, I thought I should maybe learn how to not have a negative K/D ratio.
Any advice?
Spend some time watching Stridah and Soter Dave tutorial vids on YouTube.
Get to understand Initiative, it can be a bit weird to understand at first, but it is key to understanding the flow of fights.
The concept of Gambling is making an attack when you don’t have initiative, and gambling gets you punished when playing against better players most of the time.
Practice swing manipulation. This is the concept of turning your body during release phase of your attack to either speed up or slow down your hit. Speed up your hit by turning the same direction you are swinging, this is called “Accelling” your attack. You can accel overheads by looking down. Slowing down your hit by looking in the opposite direction of your swing and hitting during the end of your attack phase is called “dragging”. This is a little more difficult to learn and id probably learn accels first.
Learning to Counter consistently will end up putting you above most of the pub lobbies, it gives you stamina back without having to land an attack.
Feinting is important. Mixing up which direction your attack is coming will help you pass your opponent’s block.
Footwork, as well. Try and step around an opponent’s block.
Game sense will come in time…the flow of the maps, where spawn waves come from, when to take a fight and when to disengage and etc.
Once you practice all of these concepts (the fundamentals, more or less) you’ll be ranking top 10 or above in your Team Objective matches consistently and should very rarely have a negative KDR.
When you’re ready to step your game up after that, start playing FFA and Duel servers. That’s where the big boys hang out and you’ll be humbled until you start to hang, but your skill will jump exponentially once you start playing those modes.
The way I practice is picking one of these things, and then just spend an entire game practicing it. You’ll die more often until it clicks, but you start getting around level 60 or so and all the separate parts start to come together and you just start shitting on people more often than not all of a sudden lol.
Good luck, the game is a blast!!
So I had a good look at Stridah and Soter Dave’s stuff. They make countering look so easy!
I think I understand the theory a lot better now - it’s funny, I went and re-did the tutorial and it’s mostly all in there too but it just doesn’t make a lot of sense how it helps until you’ve actually got used to the game.
Now I just need to practice and learn to not panic…
I did that too when I started! I’d learn a few things on YouTube, then I’d try them in game, then go back into the tutorial to help further reinforce it haha. This was my first medieval slasher so it’s a lot of concepts to learn…I don’t want to admit how long it took me to fully understand Initiative, that concept just wouldn’t click for me haha.
Keep at it and have fun, game doesn’t take itself too seriously and just getting out and spamming warcries and not caring too much if you get killed and etc is a blast from day one, all the rest comes over time haha.
May also check out a channel called StripedSweater. He’s got some decent videos on the fundamentals and I forgot to mention him in the last response.
So I’ve had a couple of days now. Really loving the Knight with the one handed spear and medium shield. So much more effective - nice distance and the speed allows much easier interrupts.
This evening I rebound my keys slightly (after already rebinding alt attacks onto mouse buttons) - so that now my block is on shift, slash/alt are left/right mouse, stab/alt are top and bottom side mouse buttons, and overhead/alt are scroll up and down. Really feels more comfortable to vary attack patterns - only trouble is Left little finger fatigue from tapping shift a lot lol.
Thanks for your help - I’m already managing to 1:1 or even positive K:Ds.
What I’m not quite sure of still is how to score better - obviously PTFO but I still rank middle or bottom third of the team list and I’m not really sure how to score better aside from staying alive more.
And finally - countering is really tricky it seems in multiplayer matches. It’s hard enough reading an individual opponent’s moves, but with two or more coming at me I just have to pray. Have occasionally managed to survive a multi-person onslaught a few times now though, and even managed a multi kill from one which was very satisfying.
Nice!
That’s actually a pretty intuitive binding set up, i hadn’t heard anyone do it quite like that before. If I hadn’t already gotten muscle memory with default I’d be apt to try that out.
Knight is my favorite class too, I run with the Longsword the most but have been branching out to include the Messer and Heavy Mace quite a bit as well.
Countering is probably one of the more difficult moves to pull off consistently. I thought I more or less had the hang of them and started recording my gameplay to post some highlight videos online and realized I wasn’t hitting half the counters I thought I was lol. Was leading to losing a lot of stamina battles in FFA. Keep in mind you can change your counter attack all the way until your release phase starts and have success with counter feints, so if you’re quick enough you can adjust if your opponent fakes you out. But mostly it’s timing practice haha.
Also, you really only NEED that counter to generate some stamina if you’ve been riposting a lot and not being able to get some hits in. If you’re in that 1vX scenario, sometimes it’s better to take the riposte rather than the counter to guarantee your active parry window if you have the stamina to pay for it. That active parry is key to 1vX fighting.
Countering can also help fake your opponent out and is handy in that regard, but it can help to realize you don’t always HAVE to counter.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=lZcSJNn6scI&si=gCDG4QyIIjLhX3am
I happened to stumble on this video a couple weeks ago and it’s a coaching session from Soter Dave and they go over counters quite a bit, may help with your timing or etc.
As far as score goes, honestly if you aren’t running a class with warhorn or banner for the heals, it can be pretty difficult to stay in the top score-wise. You have to be killing consistently and at a pace for the score multipliers to add up, ie double kill/triple kill; kill streaks; dismembers and etc.
My buddy and I still have convos about how much our score can tank the second we don’t have a healing utility on and how hard it is to stay above the score curve just killing and PTFO. We’re both in the mid 100s, rank-wise.
Glad you’re making your comeuppance!
Finally getting around to watching the video and OH MY GOD countering makes so much more sense when explained fully.
I didn’t realise the enemies attack needed to hit within a specific time window of the animation (indicated by the yellow bars), so I just didn’t understand why my counters weren’t working most of the time.
Really appreciate your help and directions!
Excellent, thank you! I’ll take a look.