please nerf zetterburn in a way that actually matters#1012

Zetter is lame, safe, and somehow still ignorant and with a top 5 recovery (don’t chime in clairen mains). Please make this character play the same game as me instead of his own nepobaby world, thanks.

After the salt comedown, seriously cmon. Why does he have a better punish game and neutral than characters that die more easily than him. Give him a single tax or weakness, PLEASE.

I think a post like this could also be made about Clairen. The frustration people have with those two characters specifically is that they’re both very good, perhaps better than a large chunk of the cast, and have been very good throughout the duration of the game without any meaningful adjustments. Meanwhile a large portion of the rest of the cast have seen their good qualities toned down, even while being worse than these two.

That isn’t to say that there haven’t been attempted adjustments or nerfs to them. For Zetterburn, early on in the game’s lifespan he got a nerf to his up special and down special, the latter of which provided diminishing returns. He also got a nerf to his shine on shield (including one by proxy with bufferable shield grabs), and recently a nerf to his fire pools and fire ticks to allow the opponent to more easily counter it. For Clairen, she’s gotten a number of hitbox adjustments ranging from negligible to fairly significant (down strong), and some attempted adjustments to make her up special less obnoxious.

However, all of those changes, for both of them, fall into the category of “not meaningful,” or at least not meaningful enough to offset the frustrations people have. The core game plan of the characters has not changed since the game’s launch. Zetter still does full hop dair into mixups on shield, weak hit-strong hit fair confirms, and dthrow and bair into strong attacks. Clairen still does throw DI mixups, recovers in ways that are incredibly difficult to contest, and kills with stray hit tippers that don’t seem like they should be tippers. On one hand, not having to change their playstyle is kind of admirable from a design perspective. On the other hand, it seems unfair considering what’s happened with other characters and the level of dominance they’ve displayed. Doing something would help the perception of “Clairen and Zetterburn are never going to be nerfed.”

I think clairen has good counterplay, it’s just not intuitive, (CC/FH, wd OoS) where zetterburn just sorta has more clear options to win in all scenarios than other characters do. Clairne is weak on shield and can be exploited at ledge; both of which are hard to wrap your head around doing. His weakness is supposed to be survivability and and exploitable (but good recovery) which is normal for spacie-coded characters. He doesn’t get combo’d nearly as hard as Oly, Kragg, Clairen, Fors, Lox, etc, but still gets to have a better punish game overall than every one of those characters. Corny, mickey mouse character until he gets actual weaknesses.

i’ve probably seen this stupid lion more than every other character in the roster combined this ranked season mf is worse than min min sonic steve game and watch and snake combined

the real problem is that they want to make zetter this ground truth for balance so he is kinda like a shoto in trad fighters: he can do everything and has no real weakness, he just hasn’t something completely world shattering busted like other chars. But in this game this results in a char that is extremely safe and can deal with any situations which makes him extremely strong for most levels of play. i think in tournament level play people are good enough to overcome this but for everyone else he feels extremely furstrating to fight because everything seems super safe, uncontestable and in the end, super easy to do when you are the zetter. I think they should massively reduce the range on his up B. its comical from how low he can recover and how he can almost always mixing up landing on stage or at ledge despite already havbin a second recovery tool with down special. Then add a bit of landing lag to the up special and he has a real weakness that can be exploited. Another thing i want changed is how for works. Having the ability to virtually block parts of the stage or whole platforms with down special is too strong, especially when on fire you die at hillariously low percent. maybe make it so that when the opponent stands in the fire, every attack of him ignites them, even jabs. Additionally nerf fire balls. they are way to easy to spam, they need a short cooldown like fleets side special and a bit more startup. And finally, make parrying the fireballs be worth more. if you are slighty of with the parry timing (which can be extremely hard given how fast the move comes out etc) and take the fireball hit it can lead to some absurd early kills. On the other hand, if you parry, zetter will take a bit of damage and be long gone before you can actually reach him. So i would propose that if zetter is on fire himself, his opponent can do the same as he does: smash attacks will consume the fire on him and increase knockback. Just like people can apply fleets time bomb to fleet etc.

It would be more productive to point out specific things that you think should be nerfed, OP. He’s “lame”, “safe”, and “ignorant” (easy?) So, what do you think should change? And why?

The devs have been explicit that they nerf things where the counterplay is extremely unfun (like Orcane bubbles or sideb). So, you have to make a case that playing against Zetterburn is so ridiculously unfun that it’s annoying every time and most players hate it. Personally, I don’t think this is the state Zetterburn is in. Your worst criticisms are that he is too safe, is too simple, and has a good recovery. I don’t necessarily see an issue with this, these are strengths of the character.

What about unfun things other characters can do? Most characters have the potential to be extremely annoying and safe. Loxadont or Clairen can spam spaced aerials on shield unless you do mixups or overshoot. Maypul can spam safe aerials on shield and camp the whole game because of her speed, very hard to counter unless you’re used to it. Absa can spam cloud and ftilt and camp the whole game (you can parry, but she can do timing and positioning mixups). And any character can camp the whole game and exclusively go for whiff punishes without engaging. These all have counterplay, but it’s not fun at all. Should these characters be nerfed too? Actually, all of these have been nerfed in response to player feedback iirc. So, if you think Zetterburn is as bad as these, make a case for it and the devs might listen. I personally disagree, but everyone is allowed to have an opinion

Honestly I think all Zetter needs is 3-6 more frames of startup to Fire Lion. Zetterburn getting hit out of the startup of Fire Lion should be one of his primary weaknesses. Zetter moves on frame 17. Ultimate Fox moves on frame 20. P+ Wolf is Frame 23 (someone check this one I’m not familiar with Rukai website). If you want him to have a super low landing lag upB, high startup is the appropriate tradeoff.

Now the counterplay is hit the Lion while he upBs and he has a hard time. Straightforward and I think probably sufficient.

Extras:

• QoL but not necessary: dthrow -> upstrong on no DI is braindead and that should only connect on DI in.
• Shine should jump cancel on hit only. But everyone hates this one so I won’t stand by it.

I think if you wanted to nerf Zetter outside of making his offense worse, you could do four things:

1. Increase his hitstun gravity so he gets hit more by the fastfaller curse (it’s not as strong as it seems it should be).
2. Make it so jump canceling his down special doesn’t go from immediate hitbox to jumping. This is niche, but this allows him to fairly safely use this move on shield and move in a very unpredictable way with it in a circumstance where he should arguably have to work harder. A buffer period between hitting jump and jumping where he lacks the hitbox would help.
3. Don’t allow his down special cancel to edge cancel. This is a big change, but I think it’s warranted given how strong of a mixup option this already is and the speed of the “roll” when he lands. He can already mix up your timing pretty significantly with that without totally canceling the lag.
4. Give his up special significantly more landing lag. For reference, while he has more lag than melee Fox, he has much less than similar moves on other characters in other games. This matters because he already has more strengths to it than those other characters, including a faster startup, better drift, lots of hitboxes on startup instead of just one, quite a long travel range, more varied angles, and, while it barely comes into play, the ability to fake it out with an air dodge. With all those strengths on his side, the move having basically no landing lag means that if you can’t hit him during the startup or travel with ledge invulnerability, there isn’t a lot you can do to beat it. I think giving the move landing lag comparable to other up specials (like Maypul, Ranno, Clairen) would be helpful, and if that comes with a tradeoff of faster startup like those moves, then so be it.

Unfortunately they’ll never remove the training wheels off the dumbed-down melee wannabees. They need this game to appeal to the melee audience who’ll only ever play melee you see.