Succession: Advanced

Okay, i hope you got your coffee ready, and your reading glasses on, because now it's time to LOCK-IN and focus on the contents of this section and the next one, as i'm going to pin-point absolutely crucial parts of performing well in 1v1, i'm not going to write inputs for every skill in this section, i assume you already more or less know which skill is what input if you're actually commited to learning PvP on our spec.

Movement in 1v1

So first of all, for proper movement in combat i highly advise tracking cooldown of:

• Prime: Evasion (iFrame)

• Solar Flare (Unprotected)

• Spinning Slash (SA)

• Chopping Kick (SA)

• Frenzied Dash (FG)

• Counter (FG)

• Shield Charge (FG)

• Shield Tide(SA into FG on latter portion of the skill)

Now that you got your cooldowns ready, let's get to it:
First of all, our engages revolves around Solar Flare, Jump Slash and Frenzied Dash, as they're super fast and  they can be cast into any direction camera faces, here are some examples:

1. Solar Flare

2. Solar Flare > Jump Slash

3. Frenzied Dash

4. Frenzied Dash > Shield Charge

5. Frenzied Dash > Jump Slash

6. Frenzied Dash > Solar Flare

7. Frenzied Dash > Solar Flare > Jump Slash

Because of our innate lack of SA protection on movement, and only having 1 very short iFrame which we utilise as a pseudo-cancel for a lot of our abilities, we have to pay attention to our cooldowns to properly chain movement. In general, you can allow yourself to move unprotected when you determine it's safe to do so, but that comes down to you knowing your match-ups, and that's something that comes with experience.

Movement in group PvP

Here, the principle stays the same, you want to keep track of your all the skills from before, but now you want to make sure you're chaining it properly to ensure you're protected majority of time when you're moving, example of a semi-protected movement chain would look something like this:

• Charging thrust > Shield Charge > Prime: Evasion > Chopping Kick > Fast Counter > Whirlwind Slash > Jump Slash > Shield Tide > Shield Charge

If you however want to stay fully protected(as little non-SA movement as possible), you'd do something more like this:

• Q-block > Fast Counter > Whirlwind Slash > Jump Slash > Shield Tide(Only the SA portion) > Prime: Evasion > Frenzied Dash > Earth Tremor

Unfortunately, our class lacks fully protected movement, therefore we need to transition between FG skills to chain into our SA movement sequences.

Engage

Because of massive variety of flows our spec has, pseudo-canceling and lingering crit, we need to wisely manage our cooldowns and keep our options open for engage and disengage while not leaving ourselves fully vulnerable, there are many ways to approach engage and fish for CC, and now I'm going to explain on how I engage and look for catches.
Here's an example of an engage:

• What I personally like to do while in Q-block stance is:
  Fast Counter - Earth Tremor (reposition) - (could go for a frenzied spear attempt here if safe, and then follow up with one of combos from combos section if you hit it) - Chopping kick - Shield Charge - Solar Flare - Jump Slash - Grab > follow up combo
  
  Explanation: This allows you to try for 3 CC's, first CC attempt is fast counter(Float), then you can try frenzied spear(stiff), and at the end you go for a really fast engage with Solar Flare > Jump Slash flow, if you fail grab, you still have your iFrame off-cd to dodge, if you do hit the grab, you already have Lingering Crit, therefore can maximize the damage of heavy strike and ground slash, this is one of VERY few occasions where you can do Heavy Strike 3x > Ground Slash at the beginning of the combo, although i still recommend saving it until the end of your combo for reset potential.

Catches

Our primary catches are:

• Ground Smash

• Counter

• Shield Strike

• Grab

Looking for catches with Ground Smash, it's our main block-jump punish skill, when you see a blockjump coming your way, you can try to punish a small gap it has by using this skill, for example if you see Ninja/Kunoichi use theirs, you should either:
A) Instantly disengage and reposition - i usually do Sidestep - Chopping kick - Frenzied Dash - Back to q-block(this is an example, any disengage you can chain, that will leave you protected is fine)
B) Instantly use Ground Smash - if you timed it well, you will CC your enemy, i don't recommend as there are many factors that will decide whether it connects or not.

Generally, you always want to look for a Ground Smash catch whenever you determine your opponent can't instantly punish you with grab(or you're sure their grab is on CD), when they're postured close to you, even if you don't manage to land a CC with it, it's still a -20% movement speed debuff + addon proc, which will make punishing any mistakes your opponent makes easier.

Looking for catches with Counter, should usually be done only with the fast counter version, as it allows you to keep a safe distance from your opponent and lets you choose from one of few flows which instantly allow you to follow-up with one of the combos listed in section above, or to reposition to keep safe distance.

For Shield Strike, we approach it a bit a bit differently, we don't want to use it randomly, only in specific scenarios, as AoE isn't big at all, i personally would use it a bit more defensively, here are couple instances where i would use Shield Strike as a possible catch:
A) We're 100% sure our opponent is in a FG skill right now, then what you wanna do is use Solar Flare to get behind their FG, use Chopping Kick into Shield Strike so you flow straight to 3rd hit of Shield Strike.
Another way to approach this, if our enemy is close to us, is use Prime: Evasion > Chopping Kick > Shield Strike, to go around them into their back trying to land our CC.
B) We're getting pushed into, our cooldowns are still up, and we think there's a chance our opponent will try to use an unprotected skill, then we can use Chopping Kick Backwards straight out of Q-block stance, and go for a Shield Strike KD attempt

Grab is pretty self explanatory for every spec that has one, so no point in going into excruciating detail about it, as we've talked about engaging with it already a bit. General rule of the thumb is, we go for a grab catch whenever we think our opponent is gonna be caught off-guard by our fast movement, or when our opponent postured themselves too close to us, letting us punish their poor position.

• Always use A/D + LMB inputs for Prime: Evasion, for unknown reasons, it's faster than using A/D + Shift, which could potentially mess up your timings or leave you vulnerable.

• When your BSR reaches 100%, but you don't want to use your ult yet, you can use ALT + B to block your BSR usage, another way to do it however, is by using one of movement skill into jump slash flows, which would be:
  Charging Thrust > Jump Slash
  Solar Flare > Jump Slash
  Frenzied Dash > Jump Slash

• If you ever hear someone say "Whirlwind Slash" and you're confused what the hell is that skill and why you can't find it in your skill tree, it's very simple, it's Spinning Slash after using Quick Counter, the reason some people still call it that, is because pre-reboot in 2021, that was a separate skill, sharing the same cooldown as Spinning Slash, which was just integrated into Spinning Slash as one skill, why it was ever a thing, we shall never know.

My take on succession warrior is that it comes down to mastering 4 aspects of the class:

1. Cooldown management, due to class's unique interaction with lingering crit, pseudo-canceling and class being extremely flow reliant to feel smooth and stay properly protected, good cooldown management is a crucial part to performing well on the spec.

2.  Knowing your flows and chains, due to us utilising skills in a manner where we often have to use DMG skills as movement abilites to stay properly protected and on the move, you need to constantly keep cycling follow-up options in your head, in case of you landing a stray CC on your opponent, i'm gonna record a video in future with examples of this applied in combat for showcase purposes.

3. Finding your own playstyle, while this of course is true for majority of specs available in the game, succession warrior leaves way more possibilites for adapting it to your own needs, many players adapt more reactive-defensive playstyle, while some prefer playing more proactive-aggresive playstyle, in my opinion, it's absolutely crucial that you find that balance that best suits you, every succession player plays the spec differently, and it's completely up to you to find what works best for you, by yourself.

4. This applies to virtually every class in the game, however, proper posturing is absolutely crucial to performing well in PvP