Habits

Humans are creatures of habit.  We tend to find things that we are comfortable with and stick to them.  Newer fighters have habits primarily because they have a limited set of options.  The inability to have many swings to pick from means they'll throw the same few shots over and over again.  A more veteran fighter tends to have more shots selection but they also tend to have much more ingrained habits.  If you can find a thing they do wrong it's much much easier to punish them for their mistakes because those habits are so deeply ingrained.

I am of the opinion that one of my greatest strengths as a fighter isn't my actual skill at fighting but rather the diversity of styles and shots that I know.  I've been fighting long enough that I can fight competently with florentine, long swords or shot swords, sword and board, with a strap or punch shield, red, whether it's a sword or glaive, spear, or with archery equipment, either running between the lines (combat arching) or standing in back and taking my time picking shots (sniping).  For each set of things that I've learned how to do I've also tried to learn a number of different styles.  For florentine I have several distinct styles for sword and board I have about 4, for reds there's 3, for arching 2, for spear there's 2 as well.

For the sake of clarifying terms a "style" is reflected by saying a default stance that is your "neutral" stance which makes certain swings/guards easier then others.  Truly mastering these different styles though means being able to switch between them seamlessly so that they aren't easily distinguishable.  Once you learn the bread and butter shots from each style it becomes easier to know where the swings will be coming from.  Even if you know every conceivable swing from any given stance, each stance is built from a number of design decisions (where you place your feet, how you position your body/hips, where your guard rests, where you position your melee weapon for strikes, etc) that make certain swings and guards more effective and other swings/guards less effective.  For instance, picking up a tower shield is going to skyrocket your board side defense, but the cost is that your board also limits some of your board side swings that you'd normally be able to take as well.  This post is about both using your opponents habits to your advantage and breaking your own habits so that you aren't as easy to read.

At some point I should write a post on "design decisions" to flush that out more... I don't think I'm getting to it tonight though.  In the interim the short version is the position of your body matters.  A hand that is further back is coiled, which means it has more reach then a hand out in front, and it can throw shots with a greater selection of angle.  An arm that's out in front doesn't have the same amount of reach as an arm that's kept coiled but it can make a straight slashing strike much faster then a coiled hand.  Neither one of these stances is INHERENTLY better.  It's all based on the context of who you're fighting and how they're fighting.  I have tended to prefer to be coiled because I like to make it hard for my opponent to predict my shots but that there are plenty of times where I'll switch stance to make a quick sniping shot easier.  It just depends on who I'm up against.  There are many more design decisions as far as where you place each piece of your body, that is only meant to be one concrete example.

Bad Habits

One of the easiest exploits is to determine your opponents patterns so you can exploit them.  Depending on who you're fighting and who they've been fighting they may be particularly vulnerable to certain swings.  I met a fighter who had been fighting for 5 years and had a relatively large shield but they never learned proper footwork.  It meant that I could consistently get them to step and then snipe their leg.  In a field battle this became my go to move since eliminating them as a person with mobility was good math.  It wasn't that my opponent was unskilled.  They won plenty of fights against me normally, but within the context of a field fight they always got murdered because I could simply return with friends and work angles in order to win.  Plenty of people have bad habits, his particular tell was that when he stepped he crossed planes, so he'd either have one foot directly in front of the other or he'd have his feet perfectly parallel which meant that when I swung at a leg he had no place to dodge.

There are innumerable bad habits that fighters have developed over the years so I'm not going to spend too much time on going through specific ones.  The point is that as a fighter you need to recognize patterns.  You can use feints (check under "The swing that wasn't") to determine what these habits are without exposing yourself to swings or you can throw actual swings if you feel confident doing so in order to watch how your opponent reacts.  If you notice that they consistently move the same way when you throw or feint a swing then you can plan around that.  There was a time when I was fighting Sir Shatosen where he'd bite hard on a high cross feint.  In doing so his shield moved away from his shoulder meaning I could lay swings down on that particular target zone.  By contrast Sir Cheeseheart still gets me with a darkside swing after he feints an opening with his shoulder.  I keep swinging for a shot that historically just hasn't been there and he keeps punishing that swing by railing me in the side because I have developed that bad habit.  And just in case it wasn't clear, yes, I too, after 12 years of fighting, have developed bad habits and a series of feints that I'll always almost bite on because I'm human too.  No one is immune to having developed bad habits and patterns.  Better fighters know more swings so they can often disguise these bad habits but I promise you they're there.

The thing is once you see the pattern you should be able to also see the exploit.  Against Shato I knew that once he flinched I'd have an easy shoulder pick.  With Cheese he knows that once he sees me swing at the shoulder that's not there he's got an easy side swing because that hand isn't available to block.  If I move my other hand cover that side he can just swing at the other arm.

Chess master

If you fight a person more then once and they aren't totally new then they'll try to learn your bad habits.  If you're conscious about how you fight and what swings you throw then you can teach them a set of habits only to then do something else (see the section labelled "mindfuck").  The 3 split is an excellent example of this where you (apparently) throw a high cross, only to turn it into a shield side shoulder pick or a torso swing.  If your opponent gets too used to a high cross they'll leave the other 2 shots open.  If the opponent gets used to the other two swings then you can go right back to using the high cross.  Baiting with your body (under "brought to you by admiral ackbar"), so long as you always do it the same way may also convince an opponent that they have an easy swing, when in fact you're waiting for it.  This becomes an expectation they have of an opening that they can try to exploit.  The longer you fight a person the better these tactics work because a person gets used to the swings they expect you to throw.  This means that when you break that set of patterns they are expecting it's even more effective then against a person who has never fought you before.

Flow like water

You can also go the opposite direction.  Rather then throwing shots that are easy to read and consistent in the hopes that you'll train your opponent you can instead throw none of the same shots.  I generally call this kind of fighting a "flow state" in which you seamlessly transition between as many styles as you have and throw shots that are unpredictable so that you cannot be read or reacted to effectively.  Up north Asher/Callous is an excellent example of this.  By switching between bizarre and seemingly ineffective stances he becomes VERY hard to read which means that most people can't tell where his swings are going to come from.  With a back shield and the experience he has doing this he actually has very good defense, so these things that look like they'd be ineffective don't actually leave him that exposed.  What he loses from being unpredictable is that he can't play chess by setting expectations and breaking them he gains in having people be unable to predict what shots he'll throw.  Especially for fighters that have never fought him before this off-putting fighting style leaves them feeling confused and often disrupts their own rhythm as they aren't sure how to respond to this.

Do what works for you

If you're a tactical fighter you may find that setting and breaking expectations is what works best for you.  If you just like to swing stick and don't want to think too much about it being an unpredictable or "flow state" fighter may be more to your liking.  Whatever you choose to do, play to your strengths.  It is infinitely more important that you fight the way that makes sense to you then that you go with well established knowledge or "the correct approach".  It's my personal opinion that there is no "correct approach", at best there's better and worse approaches to a given problem, but most of that's contextual.  I feel like for the most part it's all about mastery, any fighter can be good at using any weapons set in any way that suites them.  It is the case that certain weapon sets are more useful then others in specific situations but a good fighter who is skilled with their weapon set is going to do better in a situation where that weapon set is disadvantageous then they will picking up a weapon set that's better suited to the situation that they are bad with.  In particular I knew a guy who only fought dual daggers, and someone managed to make that effective.  I also knew a fighter who was somewhere in the vicinity of 300+ pounds who fought primarily dual flails, and in spite of having lots of mass to swing at it was nearly impossible to hit him because he was so adept at his blocks.  Don't let anyone tell you that simply because of what gear you've picked up you're doing it wrong.  As long as you're willing to grind at it you can be good with anything.  Though having said that, I definitely think some weapon sets are more optimal then others.  I may be competent at fighting dual javelins but I certainly wouldn't make that my go to weapon set :-P.