jabs against fast weapons

Sorry it took me a second to get back to you. I will do my best to give you a full explanation but there is alot of like nuance to a topic as complex as "timing" so forgive me if I generalize a bit and there may be some exception I didn't mention, if these are major exceptions ill do my best to name them but there are just so many factors at play its not really a topic where there is a single correct answer.

Okay, now to time your jabs I think the first key thing you should understand is that there is a clear, wrong way to go about jabbing since its alot slower and serves no purpose at all; if you hold block and press your jab, it will take time before the parry actually stops and it will only then start your jab. If you jab without the block being held it will come out a lot quicker than if you had held it so always let go of block before jabbing if that is something you had been doing.

(i use block/parry interchangeably and both just mean what happens with the block button being held down to absorb blows, active parry is another term with parry in it but that will have an entirely different meaning than when i just say block/parry but we'll get to that in a bit)

Besides that big point you should be aware of the fact you are actually able to outspeed jabs depending on (among others): your weapon-choice, if you or them have combo, and even how your inputs were timed. This is mostly limited to fast 1h weapons that are comboing after hitting an enemy (losing them their initiative because they were hit and you will be ) and they try to jab your combo'd attack, especially if they input their jab with a minor delay but depending on the exact "matchup" the advice "jab after getting hit to regain initiative" is very misleading and that advice, for more reasons than this specific one, shouldn't become a habit as good players can punish reflex jabs if you do these habitually.

Some of the weapons I have been able to jab-skip with consistently under the right circumstances are for example the pickaxe, rapier and mace but those are far from the only ones. I even believe some two handers are able to do this, but I don't think there is any like conclusive list on when jab-skips are possible and there are so many minor things / nuances that will allow weapons that normally can't jabskip to effectively jab skip on occasion (i.e. you try to jab on a riposte) and vice versa that its just not a "WeaponA will always be able to outspeed a jab" sort of thing.

Just understand the idea that you may not be able to jab certain attacks in the first place, if you jab too late on an attack from a slow weapon it will also lead to you getting hit before your jab interrupts it although the faster the weapon is and the attack ur trying to jab will be there are just some weapons you can't expect to retake initiative from by jabbing on their combo for example. Habitually jabbing after u get hit and want to retake the initiative is a bad habit to follow blindly as good players can try to take advantage of this habit and doing it when ur not able to / misstime it is just as big of a reason to not just jab when you get hit and instead jab more conciously if this was a habit you had developed unconciously.

If you want to get some more like reasoning on why that is a bad habit just ask ill cover it a bit better, but basically your jab can be dodged / you miss the jab leading to getting hit when u could have blocked otherwise & if u jab into ur opponents block and try to combo afterwards u will be trying to outspeed their riposte attack which is basically just leading to, once again, you being hit when you could have defended yourself another way.

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Okay, so now that I covered what I would consider the most important mistakes to avoid making ideally (don't habitually reflex jab after being hit, don't try to jab from having a block held (this also means you should be careful not to try to jab when feinting from an attempted counter too quickly as the block might still have to be stopped before jab will start which takes time, especially dont do it when you are just holding down the block though). Also don't try to combo after jabs when ur opponent has riposte for example as that will just mean they outspeed you in most cases.

There will be a few things I can say in terms of the actual practical timing part of this explanation. U should not try to jab against fast weapons if their windup has started already, if its one of the weapons I already talked about and/if your jab has been too delayed to interrupt it anymore, you should just rely on counters or at the very least parry to avoid taking damage instead of taking damage. Jabs can still be done consistently against these fast weapons though, keep your distance to the 1h-weapons with high speed and low-medium range in the sort of mid-range zone roughly during the fight - close range makes their accels more extreme while at long range these attacks need to travel more distance even if they accel so you have more time to respond than at face-hug range. Too far away to hit them though is also just not a good thing because obviously. You want to be close enough during a fight with fast weapons with lower ranges to close the distance quickly if you want to jab since your jab will be slower at distance or may even miss entirely so you need to close the distance if you jab assuming you are doing it at a time where your jab is capable of outspeeding their attack in the first place.

If you are at face-hug range though and you are both in neutral, you should in most cases still be able to respond in time to their attacks by jabbing, but if they expect this and (cancel into?) parry your jab their riposte will be extremely quick. If their attack is already to far into wind-up you need to parry / counter like otherwise. Keeping distance is the key to this whole thing, timing may be a very important part as well but if you keep your distance properly the timing will have less of an effect. You want to close the distance with a fast, short weapon when you (keep in mind once again this isnt true in all cases I just think its true in most cases) are attacking and they don't have their own attack they want to move in for or the initiative so that your attack hits quicker/they won't be able to dodge as easily.

Move away from them if you are using a long weapon and try to punish their mistakes in offense with solid defense, spacing and using effective mouse-manipulation to make use of their smaller counter-windows being less forgiving, if you keep good enough range jabs are often not even a good idea, its better to be out of their range than to force yourself to give them the spacing they benefit from unless you have no choice and they already closed it themselves. Jabs don't work if you are too far away, but being too close to the fast weapons when you shouldn't be is a large part of understanding the way you should approach fighting most of these fights. Jabs are useful when they don't have the clear initiative already and mostly should be used when you are in neutral. There are also 2h weapons like the war club I feel are considered to be extremely speedy and those are a bit of a weird one, keeping range isn't really an option since its probably outranging your weapon so closing the distance is contradictory to my previous advice but would often be the thing you want to do against this long and fast weapon.

I feel like there are things I may have missed but hopefully it has been somewhat good advice to give, its a topic with a ton of nuance to it and I think the better way to answer the question on how you can play better against the fast weapons you struggle against is going to come down to spacing properly as well as focussing on punishing their mistakes instead of going on the offensive trying to punish a weak defense because the playstyle 1h excels at is using speed to punish bad offense from the enemy, if your defense is solid and keep your distance you will be able to make use of their less forgiving counter windows, shorter range and their need to close the distance with you to your advantage. Jabs are a part of the equation but as you said it yourself, faster weapons are going to be harder to time consistently and the distancing you want to keep isn't worth closing just to land a jab because under ideal circumstances against most "fast" weapons. I recommend to use jabs only when you are close enough and in neutral so that your jab hits fast enough to interrupt or when you already have initiative (i.e. you have combo).

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TL:DR Even though jabs are a tool in your toolbox, sometimes it is also true that when you have a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I think that to improve your fighting ability against fast weapons (most of which are 1 handed weapons that have a generally worse range) you should get far more benefit from trying to maintain enough spacing that they can't hit you but you can hit them than you would get from staying close and forcing yourself to use jabs as that plays into their hand. Thats of course not as easy as it sounds, but keeping more range and punishing their attempts to close the distance or misses for example will mean that you are going to be, when the spacing is good, too far away to land jabs in the first place or have the need to interrupt them seeing as if they can't hit you, their initiative doesn't matter so the need for jabs is kind of lessened. Of course if they close the distance and you don't try to jab on attack when you can't be in time (anymore/in general). Instead you should block at the least (to riposte) or counter their attacks if a jab isn't viable. Understanding initiative is far from easy, but just keep your eye on their riposte, combo and make sure that you don't slow down your jabs with the parry or miss them entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vGECXZyrM&list=PLgBrZ6goXj9FMAQPTXpaTDrw5aDdW7Hse
This video may be a good watch if you struggle against fast weapons, notice how its almost entirely about spacing and it helped me out a lot when I was a new player. I also recommend this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1oVrd3bZms and this won't hurt either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-laMRcEE5bU