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Purely making this thread because I misunderstood/didn't understand some things about his kit immediately and I figured others might be in the same boat. Though keep in mind that I could still be misunderstanding something and that we won't know absolutely everything until his kit drops. For now though lets start with the easier stuff:


Basics:

Kyoshin has 2 hit chains and they behave similarly to Black prior. Superior block light openers with a chain bash and undodgable finishers. However unlike Black prior both his light and heavy finishers are undodgable. Kyoshin has access to a chain bash also like Bp, but the difference here is that Kyoshin has access to this bash more than Bp does. Bp's chain bash can only come from his light opener. Kyoshin's can come from any of his dodge attacks, zone, sprint attack, and both light/heavy openers. We were not shown his neutral zone attack nor were we shown the bash chaining from his heavy openers. But considering we see it chain from his side dodge attacks as well as his sprint attack we can safely assume anything the game considers a chain starter his bash can flow from.

Kyoshin like Bp also has access to a forward bash. However unlike Bp that bash has a forced window of 300ms-500ms of input. Meaning it should be more reactable and punishable than Bp's. Both bashes also end with finisher lights. Meaning you should have no worries about a bash spamming Kyoshin. They both have access to a forward dodge heavy. It hasn't been confirmed if he can feint his dodge forward heavy though. Considering the speed of it i'd assume not. And the forward dodge heavy will serve the same role as Bp's as a roll catch/peel tool. Hopefully it's much better at doing that than Bp's is because Bp's is awful.



Stance:
Kyoshin's stance further deviates him from Bp's general style of play and is also quite confusing to wrap your brain around. So i'll take it slow first. Kyoshin's stance does not work on bashes or unblockable attacks and is GB vulnerable. Bp's works on bashes and unblockables. But does not have superior block where Kyoshin's does. This means by default BP's FBS is safer from being peeled since a large majority of peel tools or target swapped attacks with good hitboxes are bashes or are unblockable attacks.
It looks like you can hold the stance like every other stance in the game barring Aramusha's. But he also can flow into said stance from any hit attack, whiffed attack, and block. Depending on the enter time from these situations we could be marrying the best of both worlds for stances here.


But onto the stance itself though. The stance can have 3 attacks come out of it. An unblockable top heavy, a light that comes from the right, and his zone that comes from his left. You do not need to block an attack with his stance to do any of these attacks and all 3 are confirmed if you do block with the stance. The top unblockable is feintable. This next part might be a bit confusing as it was for me. Kyoshin anytime he lands a move from his stance be it from attacking out of it or superior blocking with it gets 3 guaranteed hits. Similar to Peace keeper's triple stab on guard break or shinobi's sickle rain.

The part that confused me here is the fact that you can throw a light or a heavy at anytime during this 3 hit chain. By anytime I mean right after he lands a light in the chain or instead of the light he tosses a heavy. Both of these instances will see you superior blocking which means people trying to stuff him out of the 3 hit chain without a bash or unblockable will not succeed. I would also assume that because he can do this that he should also be able to fast flow into his stance off of landing a hit. But i've no proof of this.



Feats:

Finally his feats. This is where i'd like to point out some details that are very important.

Feat 1: It is a passive that on superior block gives him the ability to apply bleed to his opponent. Now this is only active for 10 seconds and doesn't refresh naturally. What i'd like to point out here is that the bleed seems to be a single tick of bleed for 3 damage. Meaning if he applies bleed with his FBS light and does his chain light combo that's 4 instances of bleed damage for 12 damage from bleed. This is important to note for reasons I will get into later.

Feat 2: It is a passive that on superior block gives him the ability to heal whenever he lands an attack. This also lasts for 10 seconds and doesn't refresh naturally. Eyeballing the footage seems to indicate you get somewhere between 20-25% of the damage you dealt back as health. Since Kyoshin does low damage in general this means he won't be sufficiently healing even in outnumbered states due to chip damage alone. This also means his triple light combo doesn't heal him except for the final hit as it does 8 damage where as the other two only do 1 damage.

Feat:3 it's an active ability that automatically lets him have both his bleed buff and his heal buff active. This alone is nice to have because getting a superior block to happen isn't super easy to get when in an anti gank scenario thanks to a lot of gank setups working off of bashes or GB/CGB and parry setups. However the main benefit is that when you superior block with this feat active it refreshes the 10 second timer for your T1 and T2 but it also refreshes itself. Meaning as long as you can continue to superior block you can keep refreshing your T1 and T2. We do not know if this feat works without having his T1 and T2 equipped.

Feat 4: Finally his last feat is yet another active feat. It targets multiple opponents (depending if they are within range,) similarly to Zhanhu's unique T4 fire storm feat. If the feat hits you you take 25 damage and are trapped for aprox 3-4 seconds and immediately leave the trap upon taking a hit. This feat has the potential to be very strong because it enables meta heros that have strong displacement tools like Goki and Warlord. It also makes more lethal feats like spear storm and fury flask that much stronger. We don't know if you can CGB while stuck in this trap nor do we know if it resets hitstun. Both of those things would be key factors in how good it would be at enabling ganks.



Closing thoughts:
So the last thing I wanted to bring up is what I eluded to in his T1 feat but is applicable to his kit as a whole. If you'd been paying attention to the damage numbers you can see that Kyoshin does not deal a lot of damage. This means the amount of revenge Kyoshin would actually be feeding (especially since a lot of it would come from bleeds assuming he's landing hits often) could be small enough to make him one of the few characters that can attempt to peel someone a lot safer when said person is close to death. Thus far only Nobushi can do this as her dodge poke lights do absurdly low amounts of direct damage.

However this also means Kyoshin might not be a decent choice for ganking since he himself won't be doing enough damage to kill an opponent fast enough for rotations to occur. This is also not helped by the fact that Kyoshin's stamina costs are absurd for how little damage he does. While Kyoshin seems to have a lot going for him I think he might release a bit on the weaker side simply because he lacks any strong damage mix ups or strong punishes of his own that would bolster his defensive oriented kit. That being said there's some arguments to choose him. His T4 for one. That and his triple light combo are valuable. The triple light because it holds the person being hit in place which allows for an easier setup gank. And while we have no confirmation on it we could see those lights be target swappable. Which could be huge.
almost 3 years ago - UbiYubble - Direct link
@Knight_Raime Masteful breakdown. Super rad! Stoked for everyone to get their hands on Kyoshin.