How To Counter Darius!! - 2XKO Guide

I did not know it at the time of recording, but Darius can delay the Hook options to change the timing, also the defender can Superjump to avoid Hook completely. So there are even more options to play around the blockstring specials.

**Timestamps**

0:00 - Intro
0:43 - 2.s2 (Armor special)
2:11 - s1 series (Hook special)
6:30 - What if you get Hooked?
7:35 - What if he tries to counter your s1 counterplay?
9:22 - s2 / 6.s2 series (Red slash / Approaching slash special)
13:05 - Counterplay Summary
15:17 - Conclusion

[Zedd_FGC]

Apparently, Superjump after his Heavy attack completely avoids the hook LOL!

[mikebenny]

Would love a darius guide now. Best buttons how to approach neutral etc.!

[tchbast]

Alternative title : How to counter the one and only move everyone struggle with

[Metallica]

Good video, but I have one major comment: you cant block during prejump in this game so if you always try to fuzzy jump for the low/hook mixup, darius can target the prejump frames with a slight delay on the first hit of s2, sort of like IB targetting in BB. I have tried it on a cpu set to all block and jump back out of block.

That would then open up parry as an option to beat delayed s2/ hook. That would then lose to doing nothing.

I think this game has a lot of these little 50/50s that are only 50/50s if both players know they're happening, which is probably not happening in an alpha

[SirenXD.]

For the hook:

Darius can delay the command grab to react to the jump. That sounds like some weird precise thing, but I did it on accident. Someone braindead mashing isn't likely to do that. Someone going out of their way to not mash is very likely to do it (assuming they know about it). The only reason I know is that I did it first try on accident trying to record the combo (L > M > H > S1 > H) for the bot in training. Similar to your argument of "the hook is really easy to see coming", it's really easy to react to if they jumped or not.

The slide is cool and works if you're not backed into the corner. But it resets neutral, and you're that much closer to the corner after. Not to mention that it has direct counter-play (he can hit the low like you showed) so you can't just always do it.

Parry works always, but has super high damage scaling, so you're going to get like maybe 25-30% damage. And the reaction timing is tight before Darius can just block again since you have to close the gap some to begin your combo. Risk/reward isn't really great for this. You risk taking way more damage *and* losing meter.

So basically hook counter-play is: Hope he doesn't delay his command grab even a tiny bit. Slide if you're not in the corner. Take a huge risk to get a tiny damage (relative to the damage you take if you mess up the parry) punish.

Can't jump if they're not mashing. Can't slide if you're in corner. Biggest complaint people have for this character is how safely oppressive he is. This "counter-play" doesn't help. He's not spending meter to floor you halfway across the screen. You shouldn't have to spend meter to avoid it.

For the Red Slash:

You cover in the video why "just jump" isn't good, and the "just jump" when it does work disregards the down-side to taking chip and bleed damage.

You can slide back out of (L > M > H > S2 > S2), but only if you slide *both* after H and after the first S2. This combo has a ton of knockback in block, so this is almost never applicable just because of how far this block-string pushes you back, but if you have the space to do it, you can avoid the bleed.

You can parry, but he's so far away from the parry knockback that you cannot punish him. This is to his advantage, because a lot of the matchup is working on closing the gap to begin with.

Again, the biggest complaint is how safely oppressive he is. The parry is a tight window. Even if you hit the few-frame skill check, your reward is getting to keep the maybe 5% of your health you would have lost to bleed damage.

The *only* things above that lead to any type of punish due to outplay is if they're mashing and you jump the hook (which leads to a lot of damage, to be fair), or if you parry the hook (which leads to very little damage due to parry damage scaling). Games like this are very much 2-3 hit games (2-3 combos will kill).

Darius is the only character I have no fun playing against because there is no punishment for him throwing attacks out across the screen, and I get punished for blocking his large attacks (due to both bleed and chip damage).

[AcrossTheSea]

So best case scenario we return to neutral? This character is so oppressive ...

[Dkng]

Make one for ahri she seems to have infinite strings

[Pepe-vhxx]

I can't beat Darius if I can't play the game. 😢