MKX Kombo Lab Kitana (Royal Storm) BnBs

Ever since MK2 I've always been a... fan... of Kitana. No but seriously, those fans give her so many combo options that she's a really fun character to experiment with. Unfortunately, that also makes it incredibly difficult to optimize her damage. This is the best I could come up with after a couple hours with her but I'm sure there's something I'm missing that would give me a few extra % of damage.

She has a lot of safe strings that are hitconfirmable, but no high-low game to speak of. Honestly, I'm not sure what she's supposed to be good at. Probably zoning? Fans have always been one of the stronger projectiles in MK. I don't know why I can't do instant air fan in this game. I mean, I have zero execution, but still.

On the bright side, I'm getting a lot more used to dashing and running and run cancelling so it's more-or-less second nature now. The movement in this game is really interesting, and now that I've had a chance to understand it I feel like I'm in a much better place to appreciate high-level play than I ever was with MK9 or Injustice. Still not a fan of the kind of insane amounts of free pressure certain characters get. It boggles my mind that a character can perform a pressure string and still be +frames on block, but maybe that's my SF blood talking.

Part of me feels like I should be exploring the other variations of each character before moving on, but in the case of Scorpion and Kitana it's mostly just the same moves with fewer options. I think I'll pick up a less familiar character next.

Kitana is definitely pretty good at zoning, the lack of an overhead/low combo is a huge bummer though and her jumpins aren't very good. But hey fan lift massacres people online for the most part, and if you don't like doing run combos just doing kick/fan into kick/butt bump does almost the same damage off of the forward 1, 1, 2 fan combo. Every air hit that you land with fans can lead into 2 more fan hits (maybe 3 in some situations? had a weird one earlier) if you do it correctly, at any distance; so basically if the opponent jumps when you think he will you get twice as much damage out of it. The air fan is very good if you do it right before you land off a jump, the opponent can only duck it (similar to King's air fireballs in KOF XIII) and she has a weaker version of Lex Luthor's ridiculous Air Charge which is also pretty decent on wakeup. I want to see some dumb air float combos.

Man, I feel like NRS made a deal with the Devil to channel all of their "games that animate like butt" curse directly into Kitana. Most of the game looks pretty alight but Kitana is beyond fucked up.

@starvinggamer: I feel like Kitana in motion looks vaguely passable, but her posture is pretty damn hideous. At least the Revenant Outfit's face doesn't look so scary.

Assassin Kitana is basically Catwoman so maybe we'll see some GGA-16Bit action on that front? Making a not particularly good character look great is always fun to watch.

Edit: Yep.

I did this one earlier. You could probably get it up to 40% or past for if I bothered to start of with a string to fanado but I was feeling lazy. I think she has potential to be the best zoner in the game in Royal storm. She's got her fanado to shut down any attempts to run in combo attempts to get in via air can be shut down with fans her rising fan attack and throat slash is really good for catching people out of the air. Also she has the ability to bounce back projectiles if someone is trying to trade with you in the zoning game.

I wish I was good at this game. Awesome stuff.

@demoskinos: IIRC doing hits > Fan-Nado would increase gravity scaling so that after the second f43, you would only be able to get a d1xxFan Throw with really strict timing instead of 21xxFan Throw. In that situation you could just replace the second f43 with f33xxFan Throw and end up with the same damage which is why most of my combos ended up looking like that.

I think Sorceror Quan Chi might be the best zoner though, because of the fact that he has a portal that gives him continuous armor as long as he's standing in it. Also Inferno Scorpion deserves a mention. With the right timing you can totally shut down another zoner using Hellfire.

@demoskinos: @starvinggamer: I'm pretty sure a butt bump would still do 1% more at the end regardless.

I think our definition of Bread and Butter is drifting tremendously, meterless doesn't necessarily mean BnB; it's just a combo you can do on demand and execute relatively easy that does good damage and leaves you in a favorable position at the end of it (it's also very ubiquitous, think Green Lantern's or Killer Frost's 40% combos). Pretty much anything that starts with Rightful Heir is not going to be a BnB just because of how many things it loses to. Also one character isn't going to have 15 BnBs in general. Balance is such in this game that one character's common combo will do 30% and another will do 40% and the one that does 40% might well be easier than the 30%, Henry Cen had a pretty good bit at the start of NLBC bitching about how easy Liu Kang's combos are, basically some characters are a total cakewalk to play in these games and others are extraordinarily difficult if you want to stay competitive (I'd put Kitana in the "easy" category). MKX does look like it's going to be pretty huge (like, bigger than USFIV if there aren't foreign players present) if there's not a game breakingly good character at EVO so hopefully NRS works on the balance front a lot.

@fredchuckdave: Possibly, but I'd much rather trade 1% damage for the hard knockdown.

Also like 50% of the cast is game breakingly good with the OS bug. If they don't fix it MKX is going to suffer from SFxT syndrome where everything is 100% safe and matches look boring as shit.

@fredchuckdave: I'll agree with you on that. It has the potential to have a much bigger scene than MK9 or Injustice.

@starvinggamer: I'm assuming OS = option select; could you let me know what bug you're talking about? I'm out of the loop.

@starvinggamer: Since Kitana's a zoner if you're not playing against a fast teleport character then the distance created is often more useful than the knockdown, depends on the matchup and the situation.

@redyoshi: Can't linky properly cuz I'm on phone but here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXd_Wdu4xSA

It lets you do stuff like special on hit, nothing/chain on block.

EDIT:

@starvinggamer: Interesting, has it been confirmed as a bug (other than Option Selects always being a bug/intentional bug)?

@fredchuckdave: No, not a verified bug, more an unintentional exploit of a possibly intentional design decision.

@starvinggamer: I listened to the Ultrachen episode, I do think they're overstating it a bit but it does seem pretty broken in certain situations. MK isn't so much about footsies and neutral game though so it's not as huge of a deal as you'd think; also the discussion sort of implied a parity of skill levels and I don't think we'll be there for a while yet; it'll be the handful of extremely good MK players (who right now are quite far apart from each other) and then some beastly all around guys I imagine.