About playing against Clairen and frustration: A 40+ pages evidence based essay styled rant#738

Hello. My nick is Luke Leal, and I’m a Kragg main from Brazil. For the last month and a half, I’ve been writing a massive Clairen rant. One that could show most of the issues I have regarding her design and balance direction. I’ve done all that while backed by frame data and practical example evidence, and wrote it in the following 40+ pages google doc (I personally wrote it with my keyboard, aka it’s not AI generated). It’s not just a enormous wall of text, btw. There are plenty of gifs and images serving as exemples (both theorical and practical) of what I’m talking about.

The point of this doc IS NOT to claim Clairen is an unbeatable top tier. In summary, I tried to explore why playing against Clairen feels so frustrating to play against for many players. I researched and labbed the game a lot to do so. It features an in depth exploration of her hitboxes and frame data. It’s likely useful even for high level players (well, at least i learned a lot about Clairen and her matchup while writing it).

I’ve put a lot of work on this. I even played a bunch of Clairen myself so I could understand her better. It’s a long rant, but it comes from a place of love. I really love this game and want the best for it. I thought my insight and knowledge about Clairen could be useful both for the community, and also for the devs.

The doc can be read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cz3eXzE5dWzNZ2I2BiI3XuBppS6W2SfND35OQqrqgjQ

I hope you find it informative and / or helpful. Thank you. :>

Posted the same reply on Reddit so I’ll also post it here:

I understand your general frustrations when playing against clairen and even agree with some of the points you raise, mostly about how many of the hitboxes are still too large (but this isn’t a clairen exclusive issue) and that her sour spots are still too good on hit (again isnt a clairen exclusive issue), but the moves and situations you chose to complain about confuse me.

Like, you state that clairen’s recovery is a bit too strong. Okay yeah im on board, “it’s because of up b being too big and it reversals you if you mess up edge guarding it” no dude 😭. I do agree that her edge cancels are a bit too lenient with up b but the examples you show with it are odd, most clairens arent ledge canceling on the sides of plat forms facing the edge of the stage they’re doing it on the side of the platform that faces center stage cause it’s way harder to punish (or on the ledge like you admittedly showed). But even further than that the real problem with her recovery is the side b that makes you invincible and guarantees you get to grab ledge if you are in range of it and the opponent doesnt hit the start up. At high and top level gameplay clairen is most often recovering by pressing side b to ledge, getting hit after she teleports, teching, pressing side b again and then grabbing ledge. There IS counterplay to this (ive started hitting her, expecting her to tech and then parrying the second side b because it spawns the hitbox right next to stage) but the risk reward for going for it is incredibly bad. The problem is her side b not her up b.

It also confused me as to why you mentioned up tilt but made no mention of her down tilt or jab. There are players who have top 8’d majors where almost their entire neutral are those two moves, and I have beaten those players. (Musiq I love you im sorry)

And even what you chose to talk about with her uptilt confused me. The annoying part of her up tilt isnt the tipper shield safety from max distance (she earned that safety with spacing the literal end of the sweeping tilt) it’s how good the sour spot is on hit.

Also you never once mentioned neutral b and that is absurd to me. That move enables so so much of clairen’s combo game at high/top level and has remained relatively untouched since the release of the game. It often happens out of situations where there is no correct answer because of that move’s existence or sets up said scenarios. (I.e tipper nair at mid percent, di out you die, di in you get tipper neutral b’d and die)

Lasty, and probably most importantly, you never mentioned how FAST she is. She has the second highest run speed in the entire game behind maypul (unless you count slip wrastor). That HUGE change from rivals 1 to 2 is a huge part of why she feels so frustrating as well because it assists her in neutral and advantage state massively.

TLDR; I understand your general frustrations but I believe you are complaining about the wrong things and it muddies the waters on where the direction of the character should go.

Also I think there’s other characters more worth complaining about than clairen.

I hate Clairen too, but I dislike the overall direction you went for with this rant. You focused on the hitbox sizes instead of her mobility and I feel that’s a big mistake. Complaints about tipper placements such as U-Air are definitely very valid though: it makes no sense in gameplay for it to register tippers on players below her.

Clairen works in R1 despite the gigantic hitboxes because she’s balanced around them when it comes to frame data and mobility. In R2, she’s not — she’s clearly privileged as you noted in the sections regarding her recovery and the Ult Mario player’s playstyle.

However, if you nerf the hitboxes and keep her mobility mostly the same, then Clairen stops being Clairen and becomes even closer to Marth lol.

It was a good read though and I think the complaints you did raise, in a way, are valid — they’d fix her even if not in the direction I personally prefer. I have to highlight the F-Throw section though as the one egregiously invalid complaint, however.

And then her forward throw has 9 frames of animation, before the hitbox comes out (10 - 18)
Its hitbox is active for 1 frame. Which results in 3 frames of hitstun (19 - 21).
This whole thing means that the grabbed player needs to be inputting their DI between frames 19 and 21. These are the “rainbow circle” frames in the gif above.

I read this and I was like “what are you talking about”. You have the entire startup of F-Throw to react! You can DI by holding a direction before you get hit. You kind of acknowledge that a few lines down and even throw the whole complaint away by bringing up that ‘you can just hold down and be fine’, so I was a bit confused about why that was even there.