Galvan drills are underwhelming#852

Galvans drills feel underwhelming and almost useless as a user for 3 main reasons at a higher level:
Difficulty to place/Output
ease of destorying
The Reward

Firstly Difficulty to place/Output:
(Down air drill is exempted from this section although taking similar time as strongs attcks the ability to move and freedom to place the drill anywhere is very strong)
Finding the time to place down a drill is extremely difficult.Often requires galvan to lose advantage/edgeguarding to place down a drill due to how long strongs require to come out.
According to dragdown wiki:
Forward strong takes 61 frames until actional
Up Strong 56
Down strong 43
These due to their killpower obviously take longer but you are giving up the strongest element of galvan being his punish game and edge guarding ability all for 1 drill. I belive the idea is to try and string strong attacks into your combo game but its very difficult often requiring suboptimal DI from your opponent (Up throw into Up strong, Down air into Up strong, Forward throw into Forward strong, as well as returning magnets into foward strong which can often be parried) Which makes it hard to be able to use these drills during combat as you end your combos short as well as drills are often in subpar placements. Along with losing your advantage you lose access to some of your best tools, Powered up Forward air and galvanized side special both of these can often lead to kills and main source of taking stocks. A galvanized magnet often is also a good tool creating a strong mental stack on the opponent and return hit often set up into kills or even strongs. Its very difficult to ever choose the option to spend this time for 1 drill compared to all the other options

Ease of destroying:
For how much of an effort and sacrifice it requires to set up what the opponent has to do to break drills is almost laughable In my mind its supposed to be a push and pull every drill you create your opponent destroys however this is so much one sided in the opponents favour due to their output and ease of breaking them. Any move that comes into contact breaks the drill characters such as loxodont often break drills by accident just by their hitbox size same with most other characters or they have the movement and frame data to easily get in and destroy it like a maypul nair, its often even done during combos, even offstage drills can be broken by large up special hitboxes. The game can progress without the drills really putting any threat towards the opponent often breaking without any thought towards them or without intention. Drills are also often placed close by each other to create “setups” this leads to the opponent getting even more reward by destroying multiple drills with 1 attack (of course this is a risk the galvan player needs to make however with the time setup to place 2 drills next to each other i feel like it shouldn’t be able to vanish in a second its left alone)

The Reward:
The reward from the drills is noticeable but underwhelming. Often drills are facing offstage as you place them during advantage and its pretty much impossible to combo off a Forward strong drill on ledge, the knockback is also nowhere near enough to kill making it unthreatening. You can remedy this by placing drills facing towards centre stage this can be comboed often if i can set it up down throw into forward drill into turnaround forward smash is one of the coolest things to hit, its just unlikely as your opponent can pretty easily hit the drill while coming on stage often by a jab which you just cant punish them for doing as a galvan (or any character).

Up strong reward is pretty good if your upclose often leading into an up air/sweet nair and into your strong combo game however if your not close and doing something like a back throw or just hit your opponent into it with a forward air while across the stage its a bit useless can be used to move along setups stuff like up strong drill into down air drill DI can also be a bit of an issue with these setups with people ding out of them. The killpower could really be increased using it on platforms and making it scary for floaties and being a source of killing would be really useful.

Down strong feels the most added on drill its nice for cheese down strong on shield pressure but i often find myself never using it on purpose it could be added to build on setups feels just lacking even down throw into drill feels like i accomplished nothing when i could of just done a forward throw for more reward without the drill it just feels worse then forward or up.

Down air
Often a finisher is often not straight up killing but putting the opponent in a bad position offstage. Pretty risky to place often requiring you to use most of your resources (side b double jump wall jump) its the only drill in my experience often targeted and broke on purpose due to this (Which is good!) has strong ability to setup into other drills, If done onstage its often requires a read into where they will tech and down stronging (i really like this drill i just wanted to write about it)

Drills can be cool Its the main reason why i picked this character up at first and cool drill stuff does happen, drills due just have some major problems making them lacking in higher levels of player I think people would like to place and fight galvan more if they used drills to create frankenstein combos.

I think mainly looking at the reward and increasing it would be how id firstly think about improving but i do think drills are lacking compared to what they could be

(Although skill is irrelevent to this discussion just so people dont go “ur just bad” i hit 1800 last season and currently 1810* this current season solo galvan)

I wish galvan had weaker grab / juggle game in exchange for more focus on drills

In my opinion the only thing they need is to be more reasonable to place. His strongs are so slow that spending his charge to place them means giving up his advantage entirely, meaning dair is a far more attractive option. If you didnt lose galvanization upon connecting a strong while already galvanized, it would make finishing combos with strongs a much more viable option.
Fully charged strongs will literally never happen aside from between stocks, even placing them when the opponent is offstage is a bad idea because edgeguarding is the primary way he takes stocks.
The reward on hit is really good, and the mere threat of a drill can force people to di in predictable ways which is an invisible benefit of the drills. Galvan is also exceptional at protecting the drills he already has thanks to his aerials.

When this character got introduced, I figured more attacks would place down drills to turn him into a mentally complex setup/trapper character, to the extent that I was worried about netcode keeping up with the number of drills he was doing to be placing. I was disappointed to find out that the optimal way to play him was to just up throw, like so many other characters.

I don’t think Galvan needs to be made uniformly better. Due to how good his throw game is, any exclusive buff to the rest of his moveset would make him even more frustrating to deal with. I agree with @weaselsnore #MinaForRivals2 that if his drills get buffed or reworked to be more present, then the other aspects of his moveset need corresponding reworks to leave him at the same power level.