This isn’t the most urgent problem with balance in the game by any means, but I think giving Clairen’s recovery a bit of refinement might be a good idea. While Clairen has historically had a less than stellar recovery, and that’s no issue, it feels like some of the mechanical changes made in Rivals 2 have worsened it a fair bit.
Back in Rivals 1 the landing lag she has was exploitable but not unfair given the massive size of her up special hitbox, and the fact that you could wall jump to refresh it and mix up your approach more.
However, it seems like Clairen’s recovery was pretty negatively impacted by the ledge mechanic and the removal of the wall jump refresh. In order to reliably ledge grab, Clairen needs to use side special, or pretty carefully time her up special. Timing the upspecial can often require brief delays, which are heavily exploitable given how linear her recovery already often is. If the up special is mistimed, it’s really easy to overshoot the ledge and be hard punished for landing thanks to the high landing lag, and it can be just as easy to undershoot the ledge and just lose a stock if you’re trying to be careful and not overshoot.
My suggestion would be to either add some greater ledge magenetism for Clairen’s up special, or reduce the landing lag of her up special so that if she misses the ledge it isn’t quite so punishing, or even extending the input timer for the second swing of upspecial so you can get more variability in timing the brief second upward boost.
Perhaps a middle ground would be to reduce landing lag if only the first swing was used, given it has fairly limited offensive capability, and keep the landing lag after the second swing intact to remain punishable?
In any case her recovery should still remain fairly limited, but it would be nice to see some changes to help her adapt to the new gameplay mechanics coming into Rivals 2 from the first game.
I should inform you in how ledges work, and how they work in melee as well: You can’t grab ledge travelling upwards, only downwards. So the only way to overshoot ledge is if you go excessively high over it or if the ledge is currently being hogged.
I’m aware of how ledges work, and I’m not asking for Clairen to get Smash 4/Ultimate ledge mechanics.
The issue I’m describing is a consequnce of the angle and height from Clairen’s recovery. She has to be in a relatively precise position to make it to ledge due to the trajectory of her up special and lack of other recovery options. The forward momentum can pretty easily make her over shoot the ledge if you aren’t careful, and being careful can easily get you killed by characters with stronger offstange presence. Can make getting back to stage pretty nightmarish. It’s possible to go high and drift back to ledge but that can often be really unsafe too.
It just seems a touch disproportionately more punishing to land recovery on stage for Clairen vs other characters in this new game. Feels like a bit of a holdover from Rivals 1, where her landing lag was way more reasonable given wall jump refreshes. Fully aware the 30 frames of landing lag isn’t even unique to her recovery either, but most other characters can much more reliably hit the ledge with more straight verticle movement, aside from Fleet.
Doesn’t ruin her imo or anything, like I said this is far from an urgent balance request and Clairen’s recovery should still stay relatively weak. I’m just playing armchair game designer like everyone else here ;P
Leaving a link to a gif that demonstrates what I’m talking about a bit.
https://jumpshare.com/s/mY4hQ9sYxQMDLOuMQXD8
This happens pretty often, Clairen just kinda snapping on stage when you try to space for a ledgegrab. Really easy to punich on reaction, a bit frustrating to experience.