Rivals of Aether

Rivals of Aether

Garchomp
Chrisy15 24 Jan, 2024 @ 11:50am
Number Rebalancing
Hey I like love this character and am very excited by the prospect of an update!

I've tested some edits over time to try and fix the imbalances I perceive with the character, and idk if you're interested in suggestions but I thought I may as well illustrate the main changes I made to a couple of hitboxes over the course of a couple of years of playing:

I nerfed the ftilt damage across the board, the ftilt3 hitbox especially by cutting the damage to 6 and the kbk scaling to .5; before I found it to be an incredibly strong kill move that could be thrown out with very little consideration, and the previous patch in 2021 didn't do enough to resolve this.

I elected to remove the sweetspot hitbox from nair entirely; I understand that the idea is that it creates a DI mixup between comboing soft nair into upair and killing outright with hard nair but in practice hard nair was just too easy to hit and killed too easily with no recourse. Nair-Upair is perhaps a little inconsistent to serve as the primary kill confirm, and hard nair's removal has arguably led to the character being too hard to kill with compared to other characters, but I've found it makes for a better gameplay experience for both players overall.

I removed the drift and SDI multipliers on hits 1 through 6 of UpSpecial to make it connect more consistently; I succeeded in stopping opponents from escaping from the spinning hitboxes, but ultimately I didn't manage to make these rising hitboxes combo into the spinning hitboxes; I concluded this was acceptable because it isn't difficult to position yourself to just hit the spin hitbox and being able to scoop opponents with the rising hitbox would be quite generous.

I elected to give hits 7 through 10 a Drift multiplier of 3 to give opponents a better chance at living the strong spike at lower percentages, and hits 11 through 14 a lower base knockback (7-3) so as to make it easier to wall-tech the soft spike in situations where the UpSpecial is used against the wall as the move otherwise proved to be far too easy an edgeguard option versus low recoveries. In practice the most frequent spin launcher you get is this soft spike which sends straight down, which is probably fair since the other two (the launch up and the diagonal spike) are both extremely strong and are practically guaranteed kills if hit in the correct parts of the stage.

Community members have noted that the Strong attacks have exceptionally high damage, and I found myself cutting their damage by a factor of a half or a third (Dstrong: 1, 2: 3 --> 1; 3, 4: 3 --> 2; 5, 6: 13 --> 7; Upstrong: 3, 4: 16 --> 10; Fstrong: 1, 2, 3: 18 -- 13); the issue I find more pressing though is how easy it is for opponents to DI out of the multihits in Dstrong and Upstrong, making them potentially negative on hit. I also reduced the damage on bair 1 (13 --> 8) and dair 1 (18 --> 12) to amicable results, as those are moves that are easy to hit and commonly used.

Finally, I removed hitbox 4 from Fspecial (the very last rising hit out of the ground) because the move felt unnecessarily active and this hitbox specifically lingered after the red visual effect faded and the attack appeared to have become inert.

I'm sure you have balancing ideas of your own that you wish to implement, and potentially entire moves that you want to rework, but I hope at least some of these suggestions can prove useful to you in making the character more enjoyable to both play as and against.
Last edited by Chrisy15; 24 Jan, 2024 @ 2:17pm