Super Armor and its ramifications: kind of bad

[Fighting Type]

Super armor is a mechanic in the game where you can't be interrupted by damage. The player has super armor while using plague weapons and Reaving. I assume it's primarily to serve as a signal for the player to stop attacking and go on the defensive, either with deflection or dodging. From what I've observed, super armor is uninterruptible except by depleting all of an opponent's wounds.

Every enemy in the game has super armor. This is demonstrable even with the many common trash mobs you fight, from the knife-wielding women who scream really loud for some reason, to the axe-wielding dudes with really slow attacks. While Thymesia heavily emphasizes aggression with how wounds work, super armor makes combat feel random. Not by itself, though - it's the fault of another seemingly random mechanic.

Sometimes enemies will break out mid-combo to start an attack, gaining super armor in the process. I'm not talking about the counter mechanic, or enemies deflecting attacks; one moment a boss could be flinching from the basic combo, and then suddenly he's starting up an attack much faster than the next attack ends. This sucks. Sword attacks in Thymesia are committal; you can't cancel out of the beginning of an attack with a deflect, like you can in Sekiro, so these moments pretty much guarantee that you'll eat a hit. This is a problem with a boss like Odur, who has a combo that ends in him kicking you in the gut with a really long, annoying recoil animation that takes a while to resolve.

While Thymesia and Sekiro share the same fast-paced combat, Thymesia feels more chaotic than Sekiro's because of this. Sekiro's offense and defense phases are clearly defined, where enemies transition from being hit by your attacks, to deflecting, then finally parrying with a loud flash, indicating that it's their 'turn' and that you should start going on the defensive. However, because of how there are gaps in the basic sword attack that lets enemies start their attack and acquire super armor, I've rarely encountered the actual mechanic where they do a proper deflect-counterattack. I've maybe experienced it once in about a dozen attempts against Odur.

Ironically, Odur's mutated form was way easier than Normal Odur simply because Mutated Odur has permanent super armor. It's way easier to understand than being baited by inconsistent staggering. Unfortunately, permanent super armor carried with it another downside; the swift claw upgrade was pretty much useless, and the short windows of time afforded by Mutated Odur's moveset meant that Long Claw was the clear choice.

TL;DR - super armor isn't a bad thing, but it feels really unsatisfying when enemies can break out of combos at seemingly random to acquire super armor.

[wbk]

Yeh I think it could be better here too. And that a lot of the fixes for this should actually be found in better feedback animations, and SFX to communicate some of the subtle aspects of the super armour state.

At points it does feel sometimes like you are hitting an indeterminate brick wall.

[Gui]

Yeah, I think they made this way to make impossible to stunlock enemies. It made me be more careful, so instead of just smashing the attack button, I would attack more slowly and see what the enemy is doing, if he's still staggered or not.

Agree about the attack no being cancelable, I think the game would gain a lot from being able to cancel a attack into a deflect.

[Vinchucca]

I see what you're getting at and maybe I haven't played enough yet to see how broken or not this mechanic is.
But being used to soulslikes I never expect enemies to be stunned more than maybe 2 or 3 hits, let alone being able to interrupt an attack at all.
So in my experience Thymesia feels really forgiving in how much it lets you stunlock and interrupt enemies before their counter-meter or super armor even comes into play.
And if we're comparing to Sekiro I'm glad the enemies don't have these godawful grab-hitboxes (remember the chained ogre?) so let's not pretend Sekiro was perfect

[Shizofrend]

it's just a thing. if they fine tuned everything to be as perfect as possible then they'd have to raise the difficulty of enemies drastically too. balance of both is rarely achived and hard to do so ppl sometimes use such aritfical ways as this.

also, the counter attack gaige doesn't have to be same for each enemy and always raise or lower at same speeds. they are probably many hidden parameters that affect it. so you get such counter attakcs when you are swinging your sword even though you thought they shouldn't have their counter atack gaige full nor super armour.

[MarkedMarkyMark]

I can't say i mind it for anything except the shield bash, it gets me every time, mostly cause its harder to see their movement, but like, overall you can just dodge when you see them moving, it's part of the learning process.

[paladin181]

The worst are shield soldiers. They have a poke that has a very subtle animation, as in it is exceptionally hard to notice the slight change in stance before they poke. I don't mean the bash either.