Asdi diagonal down bug(?)#890

Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it seems that asdi diagonal down does not allow you to floorhug vs moves that sends straight down. This complicates the input needed to amsah tech roll these moves (in the percent ranges where a spike knocks you down but doesn’t pop you up).
Rather than just doing diagonal down to hit an amsah tech roll, you must DI down/away with the left stick and hold straight down with the right stick.
Afaik, vs every non spike move asdi diagonal down allows you to both do a successful floorhug and also force a knockdown/amsah tech. So this quirk of spikes (ones that send straight down at least) hurts the parity of the amsah tech input and probably needs looking at.

Can you show it..

that sounds like a weird bug, but also like a chance to make FH less opressive: in order to successfully FH a move they should explicitly make you press the right diagonal direction. This would also make cross ups much more scary since they move you in the opposite direction. This would introduce a nice guessing game for the person trying to FH without any strict timing or mashing like we had before with the timed FH while at the same time FH would not always be free.

If it is a bug I’d like it to just be fixed/normalised

This is not a bug, it is merely a side effect of how floorhug techs work. In order to floorhug a move, you have to ASDI enough into the ground that your absolute position is still inside the ground after 1 frame of knockback is applied. If the knockback is greater than the tumble threshold, you will go into knockdown. ASDI has a strength of 30cm, and the tumble threshold is 26cm/f. If a move launches you directly vertical and you ASDI straight down, there is only a 4cm/f knockback range where you can floorhug tech the attack. Lower knockback and you simply floorhug it, higher knockback and you get launched into the air.

For diagonal ASDI, you are splitting the strength of your 30cm ASDI into two vectors, reducing the vertical vector from 30cm to ~21.213cm while increasing the horizontal vector from 0cm to ~21.213cm. This means your vertical ASDI vector is lower than the tumble threshold; for a vertical spike, if the knockback is low enough that 21.2cm is enough to stay grounded, it will be too little knockback to go into tumble, and thus you will simply floorhug it (which puts you into the Flinch state because it is a spike). If the knockback is above the tumble threshold, meaning you can floorhug tech it, then the knockback is necessarily higher than 21.2cm/f, and thus you will be launched too high to remain grounded if you only do diagonal ASDI.

As far as I am aware, this should be true for all moves that send directly vertical, whether up or down (note: spikes have a lower tumble threshold, so actually there’s a bigger window for floorhug techs on spikes, but I think it’s still not possible with a fully diagonal DI, or maybe only possible at a very tiny percent window). If you want a floorhug tech roll on a move that sends vertically, up or down, you will need to do double stick DI. Moves with shallower angles are easier to floorhug tech because their knockback is also split between horizontal and vertical, and your vertical ASDI only needs to be strong enough to counteract the vertical vector of the knockback.

Thank you for the detailed response. I vaguely suspacted some of this, but I am glad to hear it confirmed in detail, and that it’s not a bug or an unknown quirk, etc, of the mechanic.

@Menace13
Thanks for the detailed response. But an honest question: Don’t you see how needlessly complicated all this is? There is a very simple and important rule in game design: the more exceptions and additions your rules have, the worse they are. And FH is just a giant collections of exceptions, additions and tons of mayhaps. it goes so much against everything rivals 1 original did stand for.
I understand that you are hell bent on keeping the mechanic, but can it at least be reworked to something that can be explained to its full extend in a few sentences?

@TemptingActor769 Here’s your explanation in a few sentences:

• To floorhug, your Location must be inside the ground after calculating the effect of 1 frame of knockback.
• If you floorhug a move that would put you into tumble, you will go into knockdown.
• ASDI shifts your position by 30cm at the end of hitpause, and this can even push you into the ground.

There’s no exception here, and my explanation was only as long as it was to fully explain how those simple rules combine to result in the witnessed phenomenon.

And for what it’s worth, RoA1 had just as many niche mechanics and exceptions as RoA2 does now, just not as prominently on display. For example, RoA1’s crouch cancel works against these categories of moves:

• Moves that force flinch: most jab1s, Absa Uspecial, etc., but NOT moves that have a force_flinch value of 2, which prevents flinching (mostly used for linking hits of things such as Zetter strongs and Ori team-up strongs), or moves with a force_flinch value of 3, which specifically also forces crouching opponents to flinch (rarely used, but for some reason present on multiple Mollo moves)
• Projectiles that do less than 8%: most projectiles, but not things like Elliana big missile, Absa thunderline or Dspecial, or Kragg rock (unless the rock was stationary and then started falling in which case it only did 7% instead of 8% and thus could be crouch canceled)
• Moves with very low knockback: for example, you could crouch cancel a late Ranno Nair if you were at 0%, but not at high %s

I would argue that is more complicated to explain than RoA2 floorhugging.