Forsburn Clone post 1/7/25#1833

Forsburn clone was undeniably a very powerful tool that had no real drawbacks to using. The most that would happen is your opponent gets a read and parries the explosion (or up special hitbox) and rightfully punishes you. Otherwise if they hit the clone then all it really did was lockout Forsburn from using another one for some time.

Offensively the clone provided several mixups especially in conjunction with the smoke mechanic but this made sense given the deceitful nature of the character.

Defensively the clone was a great bait and switch tool as well. If the opponent just swung at it then that can help create an opening and even sometimes you would yield one smoke cloud as well.

The clone also offered great recovery mixups and can clone toss.

With the changes that came about in the 1/7/25 patch, it made sense that clone would be toned down. One of the goals of the patch was to hit recoveries and adding recovery frames as well as the whole thing with the fast fall lockout, it was a good change that helped achieve that goal. Making the clone detonation auto floor huggable was also a nice way to tone down the offensive aspect of it aside from having additional frames of lag.

However adding the additional 6 frames of startup as well as 4 frames of recovery seems to be a bit excessive and may not yield the results the dev team wants. I say this because now the move is going to be perceived as “this can’t be used up close now”. Naturally, especially newer players, will start gravitating to using this move from further distances. This can lead to an increase in players using this while smoke-camping but probably less so in higher levels of gameplay. This seems to contradict the previously stated patch philosophy of toning down tools that promote non interactive gameplay.

With that being said, keeping the 4 frames of added recovery frames still makes the move a bit worse offensively while hitting it as a recovery tool. This should stay. The added startup makes the move feel very clunky and takes away some of the appeal to the character as this should be his main tool in his gameplay.

Now the counterpoint would be, well we still want to make the move more committal to use just like how the patch notes put it. To satisfy this, I would propose the following:

• Forsburn side special has startup frames reverted and in exchange the clone upon getting hit by the opponent will now make Forsburn take a fraction of the percent of the attack that the clone was hit with.

This maintains rewarding aggressive play with clone for the Fors player. This now also introduces more incentive to the opponent to attack the clone now that there’s a real commitment attached. If Forsburn detonates the clone as opposed to the clone suffering an attack then he does not take any damage. The clone still retains great utility in being a good bait and switch tool because if it is attacked while the real Fors is closeby then he can win the interaction in exchange for a little bit of percent. This also would discourage using clone while camping in smoke because now the player will yield a non favorable outcome. This would also help balance out the non committal nature to sending clone out to spike an opponent’s recovery because if the recovery move hits the clone you now suffer something as opposed to nothing. Through good aggressive utilization of the move, Forsburn doesn’t suffer anything and the tool remains being a core tool to his gameplan. Through poor usage, there is now punishment.