Real match execution.

[Winterkit]

More than just understanding basic combos from c. B/low jump attacks, it's also important to understand your characters' basic mixup options so that you have ways to open your opponent up (or with a zoning character, keep them at a manageable range).

Even if you're not always landing optimal combos, if you understand how to limit the opponent's options with your character, you can kill the opponent with repeated small victories instead of one or two decisive blows. Learn how to create traps for your opponent's common reactions (roll? DP? CD counter? keep blocking? mash from disadvantage? jump predictively or on reaction?), and exploit those with simple but consistent punishes to keep your momentum. (You bait your opponent's roll out of your corner pressure, but you don't know/can't do any good combo punishes for it? Then you can at least throw them back into the corner and try to counter whatever they try next to escape. Any punish beats NO punish, any day of the week.)

This game scares a lot of people due to the high-end execution requirements, but many new players don't realize how easy and rewarding it is to create a fundamental game to build on. If your combos are still developing, there are plenty of universal offensive and defensive tools to fill out your basic mixup and zoning. Worry first about learning how to poke, zone, move and mix up at the basic level, and grow into bigger and better combos as you get better at creating opportunities for them.

This is such a very helpful post, thankyou.

[cableG]

Why not look for some of the more simple method?

[rcorporon]

A lot of great advice in this thread already.  I come from mostly a SF background but this problem is something that plagues a lot of people getting into FG's.

As mentioned, don't just practice on a static dummy in training.  Rarely will a real opponent just stand there and let you hitconfirm into a combo.

Before working out combos (you should still try to get them into muscle memory) keep working on fundamentals.  Then watch a lot of your replays and think to yourself, "What could I have done better?"  When analyzing your replays look for missed opportunities where you could have started a combo.  I find that when I'm in the heat of battle you miss 90% of what you'll see when you watch the replay.

All in all, keep playing!

I'm in the process of learning KoF right now and if you play on XBL you can add me.  Gamertag: Yewni

[solidshark]

Like a few players have probably suggested, one of the best ways to improve on your offense and game overall is starting with the simplest combos and made use of each characters individual normals as much as possible. I've been devolving to focusing on zoning and strategy with my playing online and had to go back to the drawing board to make sure every character I had was viable. It's helping that a lot of the players I face never take it easy on me (lots of OCVs), so definitely don't practice with a dummy opponent. Maybe do that a little to check on your execution, but put it against the CPU at least to test how often you can do things.

[LouisCipher]

My philosophy has always been: Keep it simple. Do shit you know you can do 10 times out of 10. If you have to play basic than so be it, because really knowing fundamentals can get you very far in any fighter. In Final Round you could see even Bala trying to be fancy and dropping combos whereas being basic wouldn't have killed but definitely would've pushed it more than in his favor.

[zeech]

As a person who is bad at execution, my advice is this.  The first combo you should worry about are punish combos from a standing C.  You use it when someone DPs/supers/punishable moves and you block or it whiffs.  Once those are automatic for you in a real match, you can try attaching a hop C or D to it to make it an attack combo.

You might also want to learn hitconfirming, but I never really mastered that.  I just try to keep my combos relatively safe if blocked.