Please Unshackle Wrastor#1197

As a big fan of the rivals of aether series since the first game, I’m well aware that Wrastor being in his presently nerfed state in RoA2 is the balancing equivalent of Tai Lung being locked away, waiting for a (perhaps literal) feather to free him. That being said, I believe that the current iteration of Wrastor is entirely unfaithful to the intent of his character, and to the expectations of the players who would want to play him.

Wrastor currently features significant reductions in his hitstun on most of his combo moves, including all of his regular aerials, ranging from 0.8 to 0.9x hitstun. This causes combos to drop in an unintuitive and off-putting way, where the opponent is simply able to act prior to when they would be expected to act if any other character were to use a similar move on them. This comparison is especially unfortunate when considering that Wrastor’s aerials aren’t even uniquely actionable, in that his endlag and landing lag for those aerials is unremarkable, perhaps even slightly higher than average. This makes the character feel unfunctional in frustrating ways, where combos which should be barely possible aren’t, combos that should be reasonable are barely possible, and combos which should be comfortable are reasonable at best.

Although I can appreciate the idea that a character with multiple jumps and the potential for high airspeed with Slipstream can find unique extensions which have the potential to be oppressive if he were allowed to use them without restriction, reducing hitstun with the expectation that Wrastor will simply find extra extensions to make up for it is flawed, as it doesn’t take into account the low to mid percent window where any character could reach a follow-up, meaning his mobility doesn’t allow him to cheat extra frame advantage, and his lowered hitstun simply prevents him from getting combos started at all, or extended them even as well as any other character could, let alone better. The current method of restricting him feels like an uninspired stop-gap solution, a blanket insurance meant to make sure he doesn’t do anything terribly interesting by simply lowering his hitstun dramatically, making his meta performance the main priority, rather than whether or not he actually feels good to play. I believe strongly that a character should first and foremost be a real, and fun, implementation of the ideas of the character, with meta balancing being the second tier of concern. That’s not to say it should be ignored, but rather to say that it feels as though Wrastor has been approached in the wrong order with this iteration, making a character that has no chance of being problematic first, rather than making a character that feels good to play first. A character should always strive to fulfill the promise of its kit first, even if that makes balancing more challenging. It’s what makes the game fun, and it’s something Rivals of Aether 1 was very good at. Watching characters pop out of hitstun early for fear that that the character would be too powerful otherwise is both unintuitive and unfun, and cheapens the promise of the character, as well as the expectations of the player, who expect a given output for a given input (i.e. I hit this move, which launches this way, they DI’d like so, so I can do this, and so on).

My initial assumption on Wrastor was that he’s simply a character which demands a character specialist, as he was in the first game, so I set about watching competitive sets featuring the character in order to witness his high level execution. I was frankly disappointed with the viewing results, not because the best Wrastor players aren’t good players, but because the character looks extremely underwhelming, bordering on boring, even at a high level. Saying this, Wrastor was easily my favorite character to watch in major tournaments for RoA1, especially the likes of Biobirb/Windows, who would play him so expertly at a top level, and made the character seem positively electric. The fast-paced gameplay of “kill or be killed” in matches with Wrastor present was addictive, watching him threaten 0 to deaths as quickly as he’d be KO’d astonishingly early himself. It felt like everything Rivals of Aether was about. By comparison, in RoA2 his high level gameplay in almost every set where the Wrastor player is competing against a peer in skill level is reduced to tech chasing to rack up damage, spiced up with the occasional pair of aerials. One of the most exciting combo characters of the first game, reduced to dash attack tech chasing into hopefully an Up B as his best solution to most situations, or praying for an Up B out of shield. If I’m to be entirely honest, I’d rather they lock out his Up B as an OOS option if it meant getting to witness the character play the game, instead of being locked away like this for the rest of the (hopefully lengthy) life cycle of the game.

Although anecdotal, a recent reference I would choose for comparing modern Wrastor’s gameplay to other characters would be Lucius vs Ravenking at Combo Breaker 2026, Losers Top 8. I specifically chose this set because, among other reasons, Wrastor wins the set. That’s because to me, this plea for change isn’t about how good Wrastor may or may not be now, or whether he could see stronger results as time goes on even without change, or not. I am not making this post on the premise that Wrastor is a “bad” character in terms of competitive performance, or that he “needs” buffs to be competitive. I am making it purely on the belief that his implementation and the playstyle which is emergent from that does not live up to the promise of the character’s design, and I believe that should be the most important factor in how a character is tuned, not whether or not they’re capable of being competitive in the meta. Now, regarding the set, we can see that these are both high level players, that they’re well matched in skill, and that in terms of competitive performance, the Wrastor player, Ravenking, did win. That being said, when watching the actual gameplay of the set, there’s a stark contrast present. Lucius, playing Ranno, has plenty of exciting sequences like the one we see starting at 5:27 in the set’s youtube vod, a tech chase reverse fair on the plat leading to a pair of rising uair 1 hitfalls into a rising nair hitfall, followed by a chase into tipper down tilt into rising reverse bair hitfall into reverse fair. This is exactly the sort of sequence that makes a character fun to both watch and play, and for most characters, when playing against something like that, it’s taken with the appreciation that it can be returned in kind, which creates an exciting back and forth. On the other hand, despite Ravenking being an excellent player as well, what we see from Wrastor is mostly fishing for fake follow-ups that by all accounts look like they should have worked, like the dair dsmash at 5:47. Notably, if Lucius had predicted getting clipped by the dair and held towards Wrastor, he would’ve been sent too far out for a follow-up, but instead we see him get sent quite close. The expectation here, for every character, is an extension, possibly even a kill confirm, based on the opponent’s DI. After all, that’s the very principle that allowed some of Lucius’s most hype extensions: read the opponent’s DI, follow-up accordingly, punish bad DI with further extension or kill confirms, and so on. This is fundamentally how platform fighters work, and it’s how most characters in Rivals work. It’s how they should work, and seeing it go both ways is a major part of the excitement of the game. Instead we see it fail, purely because the hitstun was insufficient, despite it appearing like the follow-up was reasonable relative to the way Ranno was launched. As it would happen, Wrastor’s down air has a brutally low 0.8x hitstun multiplier, contributing to many situations just like this. For reference, most characters have no hitstun multipliers on their aerials at all. Some have them only on earlier hits of a multihit move to prevent hitfall shenanigans, although if that makes you curious about the Ranno string I mentioned earlier, Ranno’s uair 1 actually has no reduction in hitstun or hitfall at all, allowing him to do those sick extensions. The real question is, why the inconsistency? And it’s not even just with Wrastor, the entire cast feels as though it’s divided between characters which are intended to have fun first and be balanced second, and those intended to be balanced first and have fun second.

It would be fair to assume that Ravenking is perfectly familiar with the limitations of these strings. We see plenty of times where the follow-ups he’s fishing for seem predicated on reading an airdodge or other button press, such as his tornado at 6:18. Likewise, even with such tragic multipliers stunting creative combos at most percents, when the percents finally climb extremely high, we do see a handful of moments where Wrastor can finally start playing the game, such as Ravenking’s dair fsmash at 15:08, which barely worked at 140 to secure a kill most characters could kill confirm into at 100 with a much more generous window. So, I don’t mean to insinuate that these limitations are somehow so unintuitive that even high level players are confused, as I don’t believe confusion was a factor at all in how he was playing. He played around them, he did so well, and he ultimately won the set. Competitively, Wrastor can do it. What I want for the character is not competitive viability, but for him to be tuned in such a way that it satisfies his design as an air combo fiend. To make him fun to watch and play, rather than both looking and feeling like half a character, forced to play the most bland playstyle that could possibly be forced upon what was previously such an electrifying character. I’d rather see Wrastor die at 50 to Ranno usmash but actually function as a character, than I would see him be forced to play a game of repeated reads off of every stray hit for lack of a proper combo game.

I originally drafted this in the post screen as one terribly long post, and had to cut it into segments to meet character limits per post, so I’m sorry if anything got jumbled up in the process. I think I’ve managed to clean it up. Thanks for reading!

You put this on 1.6, you need to repost it on 1.7

Can you link it?

@WonderfulBackyard310 https://rivals-of-aether-ii-patch-17.nolt.io