Nerf Zetterburn in a meaningful way.#700

I can’t lie, I’m very sick of this character. I wouldn’t really have a problem with the moveset if the recovery was worse (or if there was another stage other than harbor where his recovery can be exploited, because on any other stage it’s tech central. Air amada was a good pick but then you guys got rid of it. You probably don’t want to take Zetterburn to harbor either considering that his up smash kills EARLIER assuming the Zetterburn just doesn’t straight up ban the stage to begin with), and I wouldn’t have a problem with his recovery if the moveset was way worse.

There’s just SO much about this character that I could go over, but I’m only going to talk about a few things here to keep it short.

Zetterburns fair combos into itself, is a good approaching tool, can kill, has a good hitbox, with little to end lag on it, and from my experience (No I didn’t look at the frame data before I wrote this post but feel free to correct me if you want) is safe on shield. Why? Why does this move get to do SO much?

Zetterburns shine/down air: Yes, I do hold down shine to CC the move. It doesn’t help when he can follow up with the spike of down air on stage and he can just keep doing this to rack up easy percent or even a kill.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that all of Zetterburns aerials are all ridiculous and hit like trucks (minus back air that can just combo into itself, apply fire, and potentially give Zetter a kill).

RECOVERY: Like I said before, on most stages Zetter’s recovery is just tech central with him. What I really want to do is catch Zetter when he’s doing the starting bit of his Up-B but it’s ill advised because most of the time I try to do that I just get hit by all the fire surrounding him. I know it’s supposed to be based off Fox/Falco’s recovery, but the main difference is that you can actually hit Fox/Falco during the startup frames consistently if you know what you’re doing (At least in Brawl, Smash 4, and Ult anyway). With Zetterburn I’ve not found a reliable way to do this so the best way to hit Zetter is to abuse I frames and hit him which leads to tech central most of the time.

I could go on and on here. I can’t think of a single move that doesn’t irritate me in some way. Has Zetter been nerfed in the past? Yes, and they’re good steps, but they feel like bandaid fixes. Most of the time with Zetter I have to play the waiting game because I don’t want to approach and potentially go from 0-60% or potentially just die.

Of course I don’t want all these nerfs to apply to Zetter just…something that’s meaningful and puts the character in check.

In my opinon it’s very appaling that Slade exists in a game where Zetter exists. Like Zetter just gets away with a LOT of stuff.

the main problem i see is that zetters up special has too much range. for fox/falco you always know where they have to do it, so they can just make it to ledge. this makes it easy to intercept. but zetter can recover from so many angles that its nearly impossible to be in place when he charges.

?

Zetter’s fair is the laggiest in the game (25f endlag, 10f landing lag which I’ll go over later in this post) and despite having a crazy sweetspot, it’s not as potent as you seem to think it is as an approaching tool. It’s unsafe on hit in a lot of situations if you hit the sourspot (fair enough though), shield grabbable by most characters even on a sweetspot and can leave him in a pretty bad state/position if whiffed. It’s best (most viable) use as a combo starter is combined to a platform drop (due to the 10f landing lag), otherwise it’s too slow when compared to other option for the range it has. If used well it still is an insane combo extender. It also doesn’t combo into itself more than once anymore if the opponent DIs well. It did become hard to use offstage due to it’s endlag too.

His bair otherwise, despite getting an additional 2 frames of endlag is a more disjointed option which acts as a crazy combo starter which fits your criticism better. The only real difference is that it doesn’t have a hard hitting sweetspot.

Considering his recovery, it IS too strong for what the character is mean to be, but I would rather have his down b nerfed rather than up b.

Despite being unable to accurately predict where zetter is going with up b, if he has to recover low (which happens fairly often considering the ejection angles in this game, especially in his tough matchups), simply holding ledge allows you to punish on reaction if you have the smallest disjoint (at worst you’ll trade unless you time your hit poorly).

The tricky bit with his recovery is when he can recover high, being able to cancel his down b or not, jump cancel it after some time, use up b to reach a platform or simply use double jump, there’s too many options for someone to be covering all of them, and if the zetterburn mixes them well, you’re gonna have a hard time catching him, especially with his low endlag.

Reducing his ability to recover high would be a pretty significant buff already, I don’t feel like it is necessary to nerf his low options too yet as despite being able to tech, you can easily have your % increased by 70 for being offstage once which I think is a sufficient punish already. A few more endlag frames on up b could be considered as it sometimes feels unfair to opponents with how little it is (25f endlag and 15f landing lag), that or improved catching tools for other chars idk.

I would argue none of his aerials are shieldgrabbable when using shine

He’s recovery is bs. People pretend like is just a matter of spiking him like a firefox in mellee , but they can keep wallfucking for ever. On top of that, upb has minimal landing lag onstage and the actual distiance that upb covers is wayy too long. Players like sophy abuse this vere clearly by going very low and upbing straing up. At the right distance they can land if the oponent ledge hogs and grab ledge if they missjudge the travel distance. And can always tech to avoid meaningful punishment.

This could be mitigated by making upb lagier on landing, reducing the travel distance altogether, or even creating a depleation mechanic like Etalus’, where every consecutive up travels shorter than the previous intil he lands.

Also, he does NOT need to have the best aerials in the game AND lagless strongs. Why tf does he’s upstrong combo like that at low percents? Why is the window for aerial>shine on shield so generous? they often don’t even need to be precise and try to land as close as possible to the groud.

Not Zetter specific, but I’ve always felt that wall teching in this game is far too easy for how advantageous it is. Which I feel like this definitely amplifies how frustrating dealing with recoveries can be at times.

For Zetter though I think it’s crazy how he has next to no start up before he starts travelling on Up-B. Especially when this was not the case for him in Rivals 1. Comparing to Fox and Falco as well, they also have much longer start up compared to Zetter in this game.

I personally think he’s fine; at the very least, the strength of his advantage and neutral feel meaningfully balanced by the relative mediocrity of his disadvantage. Ultimately, there has to be a reason to actuallly play the character over others, and I’m worried that nerfing him too heavily would create another Maypul or Olympia - characters who didn’t receive some sort of compensatory change when their strengths were nerfed, and who are hobbled by weaknesses designed to counterbalance strengths that are no longer as strong.

He seems like a character who needs small, incremental changes, if any. I think his bigger issue is that he’s a bit boring.

@D he just needs to be an actual glass cannon. He has excelent tools that are suposedly “balanced” by one or two mediocre things, but if he gets to have great buttons he should either have more mediocre aspects or one or two terrible ones. Right now he just feels like Olympia if she had no weeknesses. The fact that he’s recovery isn’t even bottom 5 is specially frustrating givven the whole spacie thing. Right now, if you talk about what characters are the glass cannons of the game I would say Absa, Etalus, Olympia and La Reina and wouldn’t even consider Zetterburn.