I’m fairly sure that they’ve reshaped the devil’s chessboard at laggan recently btw, it seemed way less awkward than I remember when I rode it the other day, I could be wrong but now it feels much more like a nice run of slabs than a pile of rocks as it did in the past to me, maybe shorter too? So maybe that’s the solution, brake at the top and wait til someone comes along and rebuilds it 🙂
Anyway- I reckon this is half brake and half body. Instead of having the bike basically fall down the steps and the suspension has to deal with all of that, with you perched on top, thump thump thump which leaves you with much less grip left for braking, if I want to brake I’m trying to help the bike “into” the step, keep body fairly stable and let the arms and legs lengthen as the bike falls and suck up the impact. The more you do, the less the bike has to. Suspension gets a much easier job which means it’s making more grip for you and the whole deal is more composed.
(if you’re doing it down a single small step you can visualise this as being like trying to keep your head completely level, like a chicken or a steadycam. That gets impractical with bigger steps but the same basic theory and technique applies. You’re putting the wheels on the ground more, and you’re smoothing the progress of the wheel and reducing the reaction of your body and the more you do those things the more grip there is, and the more you’re personally in control rather than making the bike do everything)
Brake wise, front is definitely about the braking points thing, brake only when there’s good contact and traction, and yes sometimes that means don’t brake at all or very little. But you can still generate a useful amount of front even on pretty steep stuff as long as you’re not also turning or doing something slippy, and it’s worth practicing on easier steeps so you can apply it on more technical or slipper steeps. You do want to be subtle about it, not big jerks of brake, it’s a fast process but it should still be smooth for the same reason of not upsetting the fork and not throwing your weight forward. Pull don’t grab. Honestly this can be hard with some brakes.
Rear is still wanting to be smooth but it’s not so essential, just becuase it doesn’t have the same big impact on the bike, it’s not diving the fork the same way or rotating you forward as hard. And because you can afford a little slide- by the time it gets really easy for it to slide, by definition it’s also got so little grip that the slide isn’t that big a deal. Also, of course it takes longer to actually get into the feature- if you’re braking “before” that can actually continue even when your front wheel’s well into it, the back is still basically up on the trail behind you and hasn’t experienced any change at all. When going really slow this smooths things out massively, you can even turn the front wheel’s movement from “fall down step” to “crawl down step”. On Top Chief a lot of the features or the cruxes of the features are actually really short and only one wheel’s ever really in it at a time (this is a wee bit deceptive, because you can have a couple of metres of rock but actually only one short bit is really working you hard. But it’s quite hard to reset the brain to thinking that way if you’re not used to it
Oh one last thing, you mentioned damping, steps are low speed compression not high. As a general rule, high speed compression is for when you ride into stuff, it’s the difference between dropping something vs throwing it at a wall. Lots of forks don’t separate the two out well but if you’re finding it divey down steps add low speed. I reckon a lot of people run too little rebound too if they’re not used to steepy techy stuff, it feels great for fast trails and jumps and that as it gives you pop but it makes it harder for plopping down stuff.
