Maypul's punishment for getting grabbed is unfair#778

At present, Maypul loses both mark, Lily, and often Terry or Poppy when she gets grabbed (the latter due to the time taken during the grab itself and the throw hitstun). I understand the initial impetus for adding this. In the early days of the game, Maypul was dominant because of her speed, near-permanent resources, and the ability to simply turtle under Lily, who would punish successful grabs with her attack. However, as the game has progressed, this has become incongruent with the methods of removing gimmicks, and has become an overtuned nerf for a character who already suffers from a myriad of other overtuned balancing factors, including her low weight, high hitstun gravity, poor options against shield and floorhug, severe marthritis past a certain setup percent, and stubby recovery.

It seems that the way that gimmicks have been decided to be removed, aside from non-comparable things like Zetterburn’s fire or Galvan’s drills, is to land a successful pummel on the defending character. This makes sense. While attacks and grabs are omnipresent in the game, pummels aren’t. The same could be said about parries, but those remove things in a more defensive manner. Landing a grab is easy, but landing a pummel is hard.

I want to focus on the former: landing a grab is easy. In fact, it’s one of the only ways to get in on someone, especially at early percent. I believe that the idea that Maypul losing her resources when getting grabbed was decided at a point when the emergent meta (floorhugging and grabs) hadn’t been decided yet. In fact, if I remember correctly, the Maypul nerf happened before floorhugging was made automatic for all attacks, and it was certainly made before shield grabbing became bufferable. What this means is that the decision was made in a game state where the idea was that Maypul would be good at avoiding grabs because she’s fast, so she’d have an easy time maintining her resources until she gets an in. I have my gripes about that–personally I don’t find it very fun to dance around and run away for 6/8 minutes of the game just to preserve my recovery–but it was a sound idea at the time.

Now, however, it’s out of place. Unlike other characters with far better recoveries, Maypul loses everything when she gets grabbed and thrown (which, keep in mind, usually leads to huge juggles at low percents, so she loses hard to grabs even when she doesn’t get tossed offstage). This doesn’t track with other characters who also have resources that are used for recovery. Imagine for a moment what it would be like if Forsburn lost all his smoke clouds the moment a grab connected (and maybe even lost the ability to place down more until he touched stage again). Imagine if La Reina’s chair got destroyed the moment she got grabbed. How about Etalus losing armor if he gets grabbed? Orcane losing puddle? Do those sound crazy? If so, good eye, you’re right.

Now I want to be clear. I don’t think that Maypul should be reverted to her original state. The change that made shielded strongs and Lily bites remove mark, and even the one that made whiffed versions of Lily bites remove it, make sense. Maypul shouldn’t be chucking out strongs on shielding opponents anyway, and if the opponent has the spatial awareness to shield Lily’s bite, then losing mark is a fine reward, especially since in that instance Maypul has the option of replacing it with a seed (since she’s presumably on stage). I also think losing Lily when she gets grabbed is fine, considering the turtling problem that arises otherwise. However, the way she’s currently set up isn’t fair compared to other characters. She has great strengths, but a character with great strengths who gets completely invalidated by one of the game’s most common options, something she already struggles with given her poor offensive neutral options, just isn’t fair.

Continued here due to character limit…

I want to propose two potential routes for changing this.

1. When Maypul gets grabbed, she doesn’t lose mark. Instead, she has to get pummeled to lose it. This puts the mechanic on par with other characters’ gimmicks, requiring a successful pummel to get rid of her ability to tether recover in a circumstance when she’s usually getting chucked offstage, as opposed to being punished for unwise offense. In this case, no other mechanics need adjustment, since she retains her recovery resource if she’s managed to set it up.
2. When Maypul gets grabbed, she loses mark. However, from the time she’s grabbed to the time she’s actionable again (after throw hitstun or escape), Terry’s timer freezes, and potentially even gets reset to max. In this scenario, Maypuls who have the awareness to keep Terry primed and active are rewarded for that effort. This is instead of its current state, where Maypul has to obsessively waste neutral resources to chuck seeds at Terry for the chance that he’ll be useful in a future recovery.

I believe option 1 is the most fair of the two, and the most reflective of the game’s current balancing philosophy. However, option 2 isn’t horrible either. In either case, though, I don’t want to view this as a strict buff. Instead, I’d like to revisit the tinkering done with Maypul’s up air a while back that sought to make it a less-ish viable recovery option. This was a panned change at the time because she wasn’t given a corresponding recovery buff to compensate the change, but if we’re buffing her recovery by perserving tether, then I think it’s fair to lessen the impact of her up air. This would also make her recovery less reliant on this one move, which reduces moments where you try to do it, miss the jump out of stun, and fall to your death (though that’s a minor concern), and it also makes it less of a learning curve for less experienced players.

Whatever the case, I believe the current state of Maypul’s punishment for getting grabbed is unfair and incongruous with the rest of the cast, and I strongly recommend revisiting this early design decision now that we have a better picture of how the game is actually played.