General combo theory

This section will cover the how and the why of Labrys' combos. Not necessary if you're just interested in doing the most damage, but will give you some nice background, and may help you if you're interested in coming up with your own solutions or experimenting.

Combo theory

The goal

It's worth keeping in mind that in a match, there are two types of combos - those that will kill your opponent, and those that won't. Labrys is all about setting yourself up with combos that won't kill until you open someone up in a way that will. While this is technically true for all characters, the main difference for Labrys is that her setup non-kill combos do very little damage but provide great setup, and her kill/damage combos provide very bad setup, but in the right scenarios will deal incredible damage. That is to say, you can't just run your damage gameplan like most other characters - choosing your combo wisely will be the difference between a win and a loss.

The secret is knowing when to go for each type of combo. There's no point leaving someone on pixel health but without a knockdown, if you could instead leaving them on 1000 health and set up an orb and a safejump/mixup. Labrys has enough damage that any hit confirmed correctly can finish someone off, but getting that hit can be hard. This will sometimes mean giving up the last part of your combo to create a better scenario, or even holding back to keep someone out of awakening. If you're in red axe, nearly any hit will kill someone just outside of awakening, so why even give the opponent that extra option?

Also - Labrys has the unique strength of having shadow-level damage, (although burstable unless you're playing Stabrys), so it's important to know exactly when you can kill. If you land a green axe j.B midscreen with 30 meter and the opponent has no burst, that's 7.2k damage with an OMB combo. It's almost tragic how many games will be lost because the Labrys player didn't see lethal - so make sure to learn what's possible!

2.5 changes

As of 2.5 - Labrys has much reduced proration on a lot of her moves, and her persona options for combos are now much more viable. This has come at the cost of D beast doing a lot less damage than it used to (minimum damage is now 2,160) and SMP being much more punishing, meaning that you must confirm correctly in order to see her damage.

That being said, the option of 5D in combos creates incredible damage potential, it's just a case of finding ways to reach it. 214AB has also been made much faster, allowing for axe gain/increased damage combos with only 25SP, which is a welcome re-addition to her arsenal.

Midscreen

In general, Labrys has a few priorities to balance, which are:

• Knockdown/setup

• Damage

• Axe level

Which ones you want to go for will vary based on the situation, but in general, in green axe you're looking for knockdown/setup, and if possible an increase in axe level. In orange, simply finishing your combo will likely land you in red axe, so you can focus more on how your combo ends and they damage you're doing, in case it's possible to end the match with a D beast. In red axe, you're pretty much always looking for your kill combo.

So, as for how this translates into combos and what routes you're looking to take when in green axe midscreen:

• Combos ending with ground or air guillotine will give you damage, and are also best for if you're intending to use SB Beast to get to red and get excellent setup

• Combos ending in sweep will give you excellent setup, but not much else

• Auto combo will likely get you much closer to the corner, which is a type of setup in itself. Also may gain you enough meter to SB beast

• 25SP combos can be used to gain a lot of axe meter as well as strong setup by reaching the corner and setting up of her projectiles

As you can see, there's a lot to think about. This is slightly made easier by the fact that not all initial hits will lead into all options, meaning the choice will sometimes be made for you. Nevertheless, it's important to get a feel for what works well against certain characters/players, as well as what you as a player tend to achieve on each option.

Once a hit is landed in yellow or red, the high damage options also provide excellent corner carry, and thus will set you up well to kill in the next hit. Therefore, using the autocombo short hop routes will usually (but not always) be correct.

Corner

Once you have an enemy in the corner and score a hit, your priorities remain the same, but the options and payoffs change slightly. 25SP combos will now do more damage and/or provide greater setup. Also, crouch confirms and yellow axe combos will be able to do more damage due to the use of j.2B, making them a better option. As an aside, D orb becomes better (reaches enemy faster than normal), C orb becomes unusable outside of combo (will despawn when it goes off screen), and A spike, while it still works, may not catch enemies properly if too far off-screen.

In red axe, any hit other than 2A will lead to over 6k damage if confirmed correctly (and 2A can do 5.6k, so not far off anyway), so be ready!

Other notes

Punish combos will almost always be the correct choice if you know they will land due to the damage they do, and the main midscreen punish combo also has extremely high corner carry.

Comboing from C beast midscreen is possible with OMB, but is only correct if it would kill (and it wasn't possible to OMB before C beast hit)

Comboing from gears is possible midscreen, but a long combo is not possible and damage is quite low (2871 in green).

Fatal counters outside of red axe lead to a route that provides both damage and corner carry, and should be used if possible in nearly all scenarios.

Combos on Labrys tend not to be character specific, however with the introduction of 5D and increased use of charge 5B/2C in combos, there are increasing numbers of combos that will work differently on different characters, if at all on some.