Brawlhalla: Enlightenment of the Pros

This guide is to further the knowledge of players who have already read my first guide "ʙʀᴀᴡʟʜᴀʟʟᴀ: ᴇɴʟɪɢʜᴛᴇɴᴍᴇɴᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴇᴛᴀ".
The things we go over in this guide will hopefully help a player break that wall of understanding that is holding them back from peaking.

Please understand if you are a beginner this can still benefit you BUT this guide is meant for players going past the peak of only 2000+ elo.
As a player under Diamond Rank please refer to my first guide to help you reach 2000+.

Also check out the creators twitters @CosmicBH and @Savitar47

You can also get our coaching on https://brawlshops.com/collections/frontpage

Big Disclaimer Before you read on!

Please Read this Guide AFTER reading my previous guides:

1. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2280753550

2. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1832138621

The Power Of Repetition

The most obvious habit to begin with when discussing the Pros is Repetition. Repetition is needed for combo memorization, but not in the way you might think. The point is not to sit in the training mode and memorize a move list, or even memorize combos you see from videos.
You need to perform combos at repetition so that you do not have to think when doing them. Repetition leads a player into entering a state of complete flow. Thinking leads to hesitation, hesitation can cause a win or loss for you in situations where 1/60th of a frame is affecting the conditions of which the opponent can hit a kill confirm. You’ll need to set the bot to mimic situations that you are uncomfortable being in, so that you can obtain the muscle memory to react as optimal as possible. This ranges from basic things like setting the bot to jump randomly so you can practice anti airing, to learning how to defend against specific sequences that have been used on you. Reinforcement encourages the repetition of a behavior, or response, each time the stimulus that provoked the behavior recurs. The behavior becomes more automatic with each repetition. The more you practice the more it will come naturally.

Learning to ‘Hit Confirm’ and 'Poke'

The definition of a hit confirm is as follows: Mentally confirming, through visuals or audio, that an attack has landed or has been blocked, and proceeding into a combo or block string.
This goes hand and hand with The Power Of Repetition because once muscle memory has begun to develop this is the next skill you can practice. Since you should be able to perform your combos with relatively little or no thinking, you can devote mental energy to realizing if your combo has began hitting the opponent or not. This is also relatively easy to practice as Brawlhalla has 2 types of sequenced attack patterns, true combos or strings. True Combos have 0 dodge frames and is a guaranteed way to confirm damage. Strings on the other hand are based on the opponent not have a dodge to then execute a pattern of attacks that may have 1-16 dodge windows that if the opponent had a dodge they could escape. If you begin your combo and the bot dodged in the middle of it you must practice getting your combo true. If the bot has no dodge you must practice doing a string to a solid sequence to keep your advantage. Without this skill, you may be extending too far and putting yourself in a situation where your opponent can punish you by performing their own combo or string in response. A typical hit confirm is two to three hits before extending into your combo or read. At the advanced level, players are able to perform what are known as “single hit hit confirms.” That is, performing combos or strings upon seeing only one hit connect and proceeding to either react to the opponents dodge or just confirming the true combo and resetting Neutral.

Adaption and Pattern Recognition

After the previous two skills are developed you will begin to develop patterns. Everyone has these, and so it is time to learn how to recognize your opponents as well as your own. Pattern recognition for yourself can be developed by watching replays of your matches. If you notice yourself doing the same string of moves, long or short, at the same points in the match, opponents can gain foresight on you and develop or implement counter strategies. Learning to not fall into these patterns, or changing up the use of a pattern after it has been beaten once by your opponent, is key to being able to adapt. You have to be aware of this from the opposite side as well, and the easiest way to scope out patterns is through testing your opponent. Observing how they react to a specific situation may mean the opportunity to set them up for punishment when you repeat that situation. Another way is to be very defensive, let them come to you and play their hand first. Then you can start showing them the holes in their play you have found. Adaption is a difficult skill to grasp due to the fact that it comes down to relying on split second decision at high level play. If you grow too concentrated on certain expectations and your opponent changes things up, you can be easily caught off guard. Playing safe is the best way to mitigate problems like this, and try to keep your opponents options limited to a scale that is reasonable for you to deal with. This is when you incorporate Conditioning your opponent to get the result you want out of every situation. For example lets say you have spear: Neutral light once then see how your opponent reacts , Neutral light once more to see if your opponent reacts the same way as they did before. Remember how they react, once you understand how they react you Neutral light one last time but this time you punish the opponents reaction with a read. This is a simple but effective way to condition your opponent to feel safe with their reactions not knowing that they are being downloaded.

The Three Yous

As you begin to play at a higher level in Brawlhalla it can become much more mentally taxing. All of your attack and defense actions are in the back of your mind, while the functioning aspects are devoted to more real time decision making. This is where The Three Yours come in, the “Memory” portion of your mind and the “Delta” portion of your mind work in tandem. The Memory YOU takes care of the things you’ve done before, which are ingrained into your muscles. The Delta YOU is the part of yourself that has to live with what Memory has done (training), and is the only one that can cause changes in the match (adaptations) to steer yourself towards victory. This not only includes recognizing your patterns, your opponents, and hit confirming, but things like resource management, weapon comfort, and space awareness. This is where things become even more difficult, as you need to maintain the mental fortitude to continually out-think opponents. The third YOU is Fantasy this is the YOU that has to live with Delta’s decisions. This is where the losses can start to be highly effective on yourself. Fantasy may be very disappointed in what Delta has done. You spent all this time learning so many things, but you still lose.

Excelling vs Winning

“How is it fair that I am still losing?” is a question that I found a vast amount of players asking even if they have played anywhere from a few months to years on the game. The blunt answer is, like life, the game isn’t fair. While a big win will make you feel accomplished, the best mind set to have when playing the game is to remember it’s about the experiences you can have along the way that can help you achieve the goals you may set for yourself. Brawlhalla can be a great source of growth for those who play them seriously. It is easy to become blind to that growth when you get to the point where a lot of losses can happen. It is because of this that I recommend everyone to view every single round as a stepping stone in your journey. When it comes to pressure always keep a cool mind and know you are both aiming at the same goal. When tilting happens it because we can not handle the fact we have lost the mission we sought out to win. Just keep confidence in how well you can preform and you will not have nerves if anything you won't panic as much as your opponent and you will bring the game back for the win. Every time the announcer shouts for the match to begin, you are taking another step towards improving yourself. When Brawlhalla is viewed in this light, it makes for a much happier, passionate player, who will always look for the good in a match, win or loss. Mastering this aspect can be carried on into your normal life, improving it in ways you may be surprised.

Flowcharts and Game-plans

Flowcharting is simply developing a in-match game-plan. You’ll react to things more quickly if you already know what to look for and what to do about it.
Remember that responding to your opponent’s inputs is a three-step process.

You have to:

-Process what they did (jump),

-Decide on the correct response (DLight on spear)

-Execute the correct response (DLight input).

That’s a pretty good model for improving reactive play waiting for your opponent to do something and then counter it but that’s only really half of the game-plan. Your goal in playing games is to beat your opponent, either by a) stacking damage on their stock until they die before they do the same to you, or b) having more stocks than your opponent when the timer runs out. In order to do this, you’ll have to make a bunch of decisions about what attacks you’re going to do, when, and why. When we talk about reacting to your opponent’s attacks, this part is pretty simple: You practice until you learn what attacks beat theirs and when to do them, and you don’t have to worry too much about the why. However, unless you are a God of Reads or Reactions, you’re not going to win based only off of reacting to your opponent. You can test this pretty easily: Just stand in one place and try to beat everything your opponent does. Unless you’re much better than your opponent, you won’t win.

This is where it helps to talk about a game-plan. Newer players in Brawlhalla often have no idea why they do something, and even experienced players may play with a game-plan in mind but might not necessarily realize that’s what they’re doing. Over the course of the match, you’ll have to make constant streams of small decisions. Where should I stand? Should I use my resources? Should I be aggressive or defensive? Should I go for guaranteed damage or a read? And so on. Thing is, that’s a lot of nuanced thinking to do in the middle of a match. It’s even harder to do that kind of thinking alongside making reads about your opponent’s behavior and reacting to their actions. So, a game-plan is the kind of thing you want to develop even before going into the match so that when you’re in the match, you can focus on executing the game-plan. In fact, the funny thing about low-level to mid-level competitions is that most matches are about who can execute on their game-plan better, and it’s not until higher levels that you really get into good mind games.

What does a gameplan look like, and how do we develop it?


This is just an example of a Flowchart.

So that’s the trick when it comes to developing a game-plan. A good game-plan has two properties:

-Comprehensive enough that you never have to search for an answer for “What should I be doing?” mid-match

-Versatile enough that you shouldn’t lose once your opponent figures out what you’re doing.

This is just a brief run down of what this all is. I will go into a deeper explanation in a later guide.

Above All, Become Consistent

Like any practiced skill, if none of these habits are worked on consistently, improvement simply will not happen. If you consistently practice some but not all of these, you will hit a wall somewhere. If you’re reading this article for the first time, I sincerely hope you bookmark it for the future should you find yourself lost. I have found myself needing reminding of my own advice from time to time, so I am sure some others may need the same.

Thank you!

Thank you for viewing my guide so far!

I hope it helps a player that is feeling stuck.

Please follow me on twitter @CosmicBH

I also Coach players all links will be below if interested.

Again thank you for reading this guide and have a great time improving in BRAWLHALLA!

Links:
Coaching- https://mfy.gg/@cosmic

Twitter- https://twitter.com/CosmicBH

Coaching Server- https://discord.gg/zqzrYTN

[FlynnTaggart]

why the fuck would u take this game THAT seriously?

[unwashing]

Good guide!

[JuandalePringleton]

thanks

[snake]

ok