La Reina Recovery nerfs suggestions#642
La Reina currently has one of the strongest recoveries in the game for various reasons, the two main ones being chair and side special.
Chair allows her to regain all her resources mid-recovery at any spot offstage, and is fairly hard to interrupt her doing so if she’s moderately offstage, since you’re going deep and risking getting hit by her grabbing her own chair with upair, which could kill you or reverse the situation.
Of course doing it deeper offstage means that she has to spend some of the resources to recover again. However, this doesn’t carry as much risk as it should, since her side special allows her to attempt recoveries almost risk free, while allowing for many reversal opportunities using her timing mixups. Not only that, but since she has ample time to recover, and as described in my other post, she can recover in a way which is countered only by hitting her during side special, which doesn’t waste any resources, and lets her try again, wasting time and letting her chair cooldown count down, so after like 1 or 2 recovery attempts, even if the edgeguarder successfully counters them correctly, she gets to drift offstage and use her chair to risklessly gain all her resources back and keep on trying.
One big thing I want to emphasize about side special is that the best way to edgeguard it is to hit her mid-travel, but that lets side-special effectively bring her closer for her next recovery attempt, buying her more time. If an edgeguarder wants to halt this progress, they’d have to go deep and try to hit the side-special startup, which has massive pullback so it’s hard to hit it, plus if they whiff they risk death due to La Reina’s side special spike option.
All of this combines into making edgeguarding La Reina a huge rinse repeat slog, which at any point due to a mix up or mess up, the edgeguarder could get reversaled and die to side-special spike, or chair upair grab. There are no good medium risk medium reward options for edgeguarding her.
My suggestions for tuning her recovery would be some of the following:
Don’t let her get chair back without touching stage. This would limit her chair tech to get resources back to once per edgeguard, and then she would rely on normal recovery after that. Very similar to Kragg’s recovery philosophy.
Decrease side-special pullback, or at least leave some hitbox to be hit out there while she does her animation so it still looks like a cool wrestling move. This lets attackers take a good calculated risk to hit her during startup without risking a reversal TOO much. Similar to the previous Clairen side special startup nerf, which let a lot of edgeguarders hit her out of startup more effectively.
Decrease side-special length or angling for repeated offstage side specials. This lets the rinse repeats be more effective, and discourages repeated use of side special to try to recover without spending any resources. Very similar to Galvan’s recent recovery nerf which I believe was very effective.
(Maybe) Now that I saw the way Orcane’s new side special works, I thought of maybe making La Reina’s side special have a similar activation hitbox that doesn’t immediately grab and beat a lot of moves out, but activates a command grab hitbox a few frames after it connects with an opponent. This makes it easier to hit La Reina during side special travel without risking a reversal if some hitboxes barely overlap or anything. I don’t know if this would be good though since Orcane seems to be having some issues with the new side special activating vs airdodging opponents, so maybe this design is not too good.
Anyway I hope this gets looked at. Watch Corncycle vods if you’re not convinced that La Reina recovery is good!
Just let me see the magnetic aura I’m contesting with, nothing feels worse than contesting and losing to an invisible disjoint. Please display the disjoint & the intangibility with more clarity.
I kinda like the idea of side b being like etalus up b and getting less and less distance each time, but also make her lean back take longer and longer . I think the other nerfs are too much
i agree with all points. well written.
I think worsening the swayback is a bad idea. Its pretty key to the move functioning in other contexts, also currently has the choice to forgo it for the b reverse and get some extra distance. Other suggestions seems like solid options to consider though.
ty all for the input, i want to clarify that i wouldn’t want all the suggested nerfs to happen at the same time, just 1-2 of them would tone it down enough, i just threw out enough ideas so that hopefully some of them would be good