Clairen desperatly needs a rework#867

I know these posts come up every other week but they do because they tell the sad truth. The character is the most anti fun char to fight in any fighting game i ever played (only counting fighting games that actually can be taken seriously and at least try to have balanced chars), she is completely busted all the way to top level play, unlike other chars her gimmick has no downside since non tipper hits are still good and finally she seems to attract toxic players like a magnet.

IMHO the main reason why she is so anti fun to play against is the complete lack of precision to pilot her, while you need to play extremely precise to counter her. The devs stated several times that she is balanced around the thought that you need to play precise with her. But this is simply not true. I would argue she is the most unprecise char in the game. Her tippers are so big, there is no need to actively go for them, they will happen naturally more often than not. Additionally her hitboxes are completely unreasonable on most of her moves. Why does dash attack hit behind her? And even though she is on the higher end for end lag in the game, it is still way to little considering how big her hitboxes are. if you account for the distance most chars need to cover after she wiffed, so they can actually bridge the distance of her huge hitboxes to land their own, she becomes the safest char in the game. This results in this extremely mashy gameplan most clairen players have in neutral: just throw out hitboxes like a wall hoping something will connect. And it works because once they get the accidential tipper they get so much time to react to start a combo. No need to think ahead at all. All this is amplified by her insane speed and how much she benefits from the system changes from rivals 1 to rivals 2. Having FH means she becomes even safer. All the moves that might connect in time after she whiffed will most likely loose to FH. Shield gives her another option to make things safe and she most likely benefits most of ledge invul in all the cast. having the option to always retreat to ledge and throw out a huge hitbox with full invul is completely busted. which is kinda ironic because the ledge invul is the only way to propperly contest her recovery since her up B has laughable huge hitboxes that reach far into the stage. finally grabs give her the perfect mixup to her attack spam heavy gameplan and lead to unreasonable strong and early kill confirms on 50/50 mixups.
All this leads to the extremely anti fun way of fighting her. 9/10 times you know exactly what a clairen player is going to do next, but leveraging on that read is so hard because it demands 10 times the precision and timing from you compared to what that clairen player is doing. Thats why people are so carried by the char. Everyone fighting clairen sees that. their opponent is doing way less then you are and yet it works. If your character thats meant to be played precise does not need precision you need to get back to the drawing board and change things. Clairen should not be an easy to play character. given her arche type she actually needs to be one of the hardest chars to play. she needs to only work if the player has insane precision. otherwise the whole concept falls apart.
all this leads the the unwanted side effect that the most toxic players seem to gravitate to her. Most people you face online are friendly and chill but the ones doing toxic things like emote spam, taunt spam after every stock or excessive t-bagging are almost always clairen players. These people exclusively play the char because it gives them easy wins. So despite clairen being the most played char, i think massively nerfing her unprecise play will not hurt the playerbase much. these people don’t care much about the char and will just move on the next most busted char that carries them in mid level.

So how do we fix her? you might have guessed it: actually force players to use precision when piloting her. Instead of applying universal nerfs that would also hurt her top level viability exclusively aim at unprecise play. make hitboxes more reasonable and tipper much smaller to avoid any lucky tippers. make non tipper hits actually bad for her unless the player explicitly aimed for it in a combo. She needs to be reworked from the easy mode char to the most challenging one. Top level players will most likely only benefit because she could get some compensationary buffs for extreme precision play and those people actually can use her in a precise way. And other players will either need to learn the game like all others, or move on to another char. having less clairens in the mid ranks is not so bad after all.

Concrete list of Clairen changes:

• Clairens sword is too long, but not by much. Especially on the Halloween skin where it’s a chainsaw, and the beach skin where it’s a floatie, you can see her sword is comically long. Not by a lot! Just a little. Reducing the sword size and reducing her range a hair would be good.
• Her tipper hitboxes all need to be smaller and require more precision, like OP said. The mashing in neutral is only annoying because theyll just eventually hit the tipper if you aren’t careful. That’s unfun. This can combine with the first bullet point of making her sword smaller. Just shrink the tip (and adjust the animations accordingly).
• Clairens side tippers are dumb and fake: https://rivals-of-aether-ii-patch-140.nolt.io/314 these should be removed. Her aerials (including Dair) should have tippers only at the extreme point of the move, no side tippers. Same with her dash attack. The tipper hitbox behind her is unfun to get hit by and feels stupid every time.
• UTilt needs like 2-3 frames more end lag.
• Clairens DStrong is too fast for what it does and how large it is. It needs more endlag/more startup or both. (I’d also like for the backwards hitbox to be lower, but I’d be happy without that.)
• No Fun Zone needs some love to make it more useful/interactive. Maybe hitting tippers charges up a meter that lets her deploy the NFZ at will (in addition to the counter). “Counter burst” by pressing b a second time while you’re at full tipper meter or whatever. If it hits you, it freezes you as tho youre tippered. It can be the futuristic version of her families “shine,” matching Zetterburns shine and Forsburns combust thematically.

And like… That’s it. I feel like strong Clairen players would either not notice or feel buffed from the NFZ changes, and mid players who were carried would all be instantly worse. She doesn’t really need that many changes to make her unfun parts go away.

Anti vote; I think Clairen is really fun to play against. One of the few characters that has clear counterplay up and down her kit. She is definitely always and will always be top 3 with her design, but I’d rather have her be top 3 than some unfun mess like Zetteburn or La Reina.

I agree with the OP. Though I’ve gotten much better at fighting Clairen, her tipper hitboxes are way too easy to hit. The amount of times I have been tippered from a point blank bair is ridiculous…point blank, the exactly opposite of a tipper. I’m actually caught off guard when bair doesn’t tipper. Why does side special hit from the front? Why does up air have a tipper hitbox on the side of the swing?

I have little to add except that I consistently find Clairen to be the most frustrating character to fight in the game and beileve that there’s an imbalance between how easy she is to play and how difficult she can be to play against. I’ve expressed my thoughts about Clairen before, here.

The only other thing I’ll add is that I’ve been playing only Clairen on a second account as a self-imposed challenge (a friend didn’t want a copy I’d bought as a gift), and I’ve noticed two things:

1. I easily surpassed my main’s ranked MMR in a fraction of the time invested learning the character.
2. Opponents rage quit much, much more often when I’m playing Clairen. (This was after my initial ranked climb.)

why slow motion when play against clairen? also uptilt covers whole platforms OMEGALUL

@D
as someone who played alot of fighting games i always try to learn a char that gives me trouble fighting against with my main. And usually i start to see the weaknesses by playing them and also learn the counter play because other players are using it against me.
Not with clairen. when i tried to learn her i realized how easy she actually is to pilot and also how everyone i fought struggles against her in the same way i did. This is the biggest tell of an unbalanced char i ever saw.

Oh boy another post from ZooLz8l where he wants something changed because it hampers his progress…
No brody. She doesn’t need a rework. Especially desperately. Most people think she’s fine and there are far bigger problems out there now.
What needs a rework is your approach to this game, the dev team and the characters.

Ever thought that maybe the problem lies in you? I had to look for your rank manually because you keep it a secret. You’re hard-stuck gold bordering on platinum and used to be hard-stuck silver in the past all in the span of over a year. There is no way you can be hard-stuck gold and below for that long just based on character balance alone. Normally you’d naturally develop - I know because I have an acquaintance that despises Clairen comparably to you, he finds the game’s mechanics to be infuriating and hates dealing with floaties and yet the guy progressed from Gold to MASTERS. That’s a monumental milestone for him and to me too honestly. Kudos to him. And no he’s not tryharding - he’s grinding as much as you do this season. What I’m trying to say is that the guy pulled himself up. It was a long arduous journey but every season, this guy made monumental breakthroughs. Because he wanted to. Because he trained. Because he gathered what he was working with and used it for progress instead of throwing it away because it’s not what he likes. He worked on his gameplay flaws and his MU hurdles. So why can’t you? He is also a guy with life - he works and plays other games too. He isn’t some sweat overlord with unlimited time on top of that, so I’m gonna relatively compare you both. The fact you can’t advance is because you neither want to accept this game for what it is, but also you don’t want to work on your gameplay flaws. People ask for your gameplay recording and you chicken out. You go to socials and this nolt and try to force your wacky agenda and try to come up with yet another excuse for why you suck or that you actually don’t suck and you’re pretty average - in fact very very good for that average level by throwing this completely unfounded and impossible to prove “x-rank is actually elite smash level in ult”. It was gold in the past, then in silver and now in bronze. You can’t keep one consistent version even.

Let me tell you this straight. Being bad needs zero excuses and there’s nothing wrong about it. It’s natural. What’s wrong is that despite your claims that you want this game to succeed, you manage to:

• Demonize the devs because the game isn’t engineered to your tastes and doesn’t carry you, while frantically talking like you’re some collective’s representative even though it’s just you and said possible representative finds you insufferable and tells you to quit it.

• You’re one of the biggest doomers of this community and you’re an amplifier of doompostong. You keep whining how the game is gonna die and hell you even go as far to say the devs “look like ghosts because their game is collapsing” (childish and petty as shit btw). And if anyone voices anything against that? You throw mud at them.

• If a genuine bug occurs or even a fix to a move that stopped functioning due to physics/engine changes on a character you hate - you start tweaking and claim that it’s some form of “privilege” or agenda. Remember when you said the devs messed up controlls with their update ON PURPOSE because they are so incompetent or worse? Where is the apology for that? And you have the gall to make more demands to them on top of that.

• Any time you are offered genuine advice you lash out on people. You keep throwing insults or completely random fallacy claims that you don’t bother to prove in any way. And boy do you keep flexing that skill envy by either calling people better and more skilled than you “sweaty lunatics” or dropping that stupid metric/statistic out of your 3 letters where “ackshyualy 95% of the Smash Ultimate’s playerbase wouldn’t beat a silver from RoA2☝️🤓” which is extremely insulting to both parties tbh. but you don’t seem to bother.

You’re gonna say I’m lying? Trust me, everything is in your reddit account. I can’t link it or drop more hints because the mods/devs might interpret this post as brigading and delete it.

What is in a desperate need of change is you. Just you. If you cannot - just quit. Seriously. And boy please educate yourself on subjects you want to talk about. You’re so confidently wrong it’s not even hilarious and some of the changes you propose are what would give either the game or competitive scene a stroke like these AI game enhancements or whatever.

@IntelligentNitrogen904 hear, hear.

@TemptingActor769
you tried to stalk me through different accounts and yet you failed. I use a different name on steam than i use on reddit just like i do here. Because of stalkers like you. So i don’t know who you tried to look up in the game but its definitly not me.

Me? Alting?! Are you for real? 😭 Very funny bro. Why would I create alt accounts just to see whatever bad takes you got dawg. I wish I wouldn’t see them.
Unfortunately Clairen posts work like a honeytrap - and while I have the excuse of maining her, you got none of that. So look in the mirror one time before throwing obsession accusations.
And stalker? Bro you send so many messages on nolts and on reddit that I don’t need to stalk anything. The chances you’ll pop-up are drastically huge. Seriously. And don’t even try playing the card that the account insulting devs and players wasn’t yours. It’s got the same personality and writing style to it. And the views can be replicated down to a T. Also please, how many people get an idea for a name like “ZooLz8l” (that you used in previous nolts) with exact same letter variations, spacing and numbers? Not even counting the MATCHING PFPs in those nolts. Lastly if I’m so wrong, then why don’t you just prove it? Because word vs word can only get you so far.

As for the arguments disagreeing with my “most people finding her fine”… Firstly the “multitude of negative Clairen feedback” is amplified by you - with your whooping 3-4 posts ranting on her (counting this one). Secondly, obviously there will be a split of opinions but disregarding the other side just shows peak tunnel vision. Of course you and few others only look on nolt and reddit where the opinion is skewed. I check on Grindcords, general cords, character cords where the opinion is less skewed (mainly because the Clairen top players will laugh you off if you claim she’s ass). And while the character can be “fine”, they can still be good. Current perception there is that Clairen has a low priority for changes because she got a ton of them and we got characters like Zetter and Loxodont that are bigger problems. But I never attempted to claim the other side doesn’t exist. That’s not on me.

As for your posts - it’s so sad to see a guy claim that the character players are “toxic” because they just try to play the game. You know what’s toxic gameplay? Tbagging, taunting, stalling, toxic in-game messages, avoiding direct confrontation completely. That can be toxic. You should know that better, especially since I’ve heard of at least two instances of people mentioning that you play such way which in neither of the cases you stated that they got the wrong person - all in discords.

The only reason why I decided to confront you is because of your hypocrisy and constant ill-wishing about this game and the devs. Whining on Clairen? Please I know you’re unreformable. Because of all the “multitude of the posts claiming Clairen is a problem” posts, you are the most frequent contributor. (At least 3 or 4 posts were done exclusively by you). But when you keep nagging about how the game is a sunking ship, for example by making crackhead theories, basing it on a surge of negative reviews that turn out to be either botted or nonsensical while heroically claiming that you are trying to save the community, then I personally feel like putting a stop to this farce.

https://rivals-of-aether-ii-patch-160.nolt.io/573

Lo and behold. And you call me sad.

@VersuS

and while I have the excuse of maining her

Ah. 😏

I check on Grindcords, general cords, character cords where the opinion is less skewed (mainly because the Clairen top players will laugh you off if you claim she’s ass)

So do I. I don’t have the same experience you’re claiming. People complain about Clairen often.

But I never attempted to claim the other side doesn’t exist. That’s not on me.

Even in this same post you’re saying the Reddit and Nolt board are biased and so the opinion that others feel this way isn’t true. I’m not saying you said the other side literally doesn’t exist. I’m saying it doesn’t seem like you will actually engage in any discussion about Clairen because, for whatever reason, you feel like you shouldn’t have to because the opinion is simply wrong.

All these words and you STILL aren’t talking about Clairen. Do you have opinions on why Clairens design doesn’t have the flaws mentioned in this thread, or are you just here to fight Zoolz8l?

@SophisticatedDiagram426
The design flaws provided by Zoolz ignore the core problems. Sourspots of anyone in this game are great. Lox can effortlessly combo from them, Zetter has autocombo and Absa can sour fair into sweet fair as some examples. Pinning everything on Clairen is shaping a rhetoric as only she has the flaws by proxy.

Accidental sweetspots is a funny claim because from what the guy said, it implies the events were in a heated moment in a battle so the margin of error is far greater. And I said that in the past - people who play her want to hit the tippers, so they naturally will try to get it after failing. If it implies anything else then it can get nonsensical because “accidentally sweetspotting” implies they wanted to hit with a sourspot. If it implies that they get those hits while they naturally wouldn’t then sorry but her hitboxes follow her trails rigorously. There are also more characters with even more finicky ranges across the cast too. They get addressed all the time and again putting everything on her is a unfair. Especially that the only reason she gets addressed all the time is likely because her sweetspots are graphically distinct and easy to tell apart from other sweetspots. Dash attack hitting behind? Side effect of the developer’s effort to make sure it wouldn’t whiff in point-blank range, given its massive startup.

Moves are too safe? Yeah everyone has some safe moves to incentivise people to engage. Especially a character like Clairen that has no projectile. If all of her moves were completely unsafe then she’d over-rely on grabbing, combined with reduced interaction with the enemy which would in turn create another problem. And it goes for everyone of course. The safe moves create a sense of balanced experience of choices affectong gameplay and your chances of winning, instead of getting the most rigid RPS game ever.

I could drag this post on and on while the core of what I’m trying to convey can be summed up in this.
The flaws provided are either personal gripes, opinions that can stem from misunderstanding of how the game works or flaws that are in no way character-exclusive. Demanding changes solely for her gives a sense of targeting.

Forgive me if I’m overstepping, but I think the reason people bring up sourspots being too good specifically for Clairen is because of how they conflict with the principles of her design. She’s 1. a swordfighter, meaning that her archetype demands great midrange, but weak close and long range, and 2. a tipper character, meaning that her midrange is even better, but at the cost of her close range being worse.

Clairen is acceptably middling at long range, though those weaknesses are perhaps too strongly mitigated by her disturbingly high run and air speeds and NFZ, but her close range is as good, and sometimes often better depending on circumstance, than her midrange. Yes, for moves like fstrong, you want to be spacing for the tipper, but it’s undeniable that due to her generally low landing lag, hitbox jank for unconventional tippers, and a load of other factors like her strong grab, Clairen can get away with fighting close quarters more than her archetype should be able to–while also being able to fight at the midrange better than anyone other than the other weapon-wielders. If you count tipstun, she’s even better than they are at midrange as well.

This has little to do with her being a good character. Nobody is making the claim that she’s unbeatable, although being as good as she is does exacerbate the discussion. Even if she was bottom 1, it would be worth reconsidering her design because of how much it breaks the apparent intent behind it. My personal proposal would be to implement some kind of whifflag on her specifically, but also apply it on her sourspots. If a Clairen player is good enough to play to her strengths and hit tipstun, then they would be rewarded with her good frame data. If not, then they’d have to endure a fraction more end or landing lag. I don’t agree with the idea of making her core mechanic less accessible, but I do think that giving it extra reward (or giving her standard hitboxes less reward, depending on how you want to see it) would bring her closer in line with the apparent intent.

@VersuS
your main issue is that you read a persons post and then interprete it in a completely different way of your own. I never accused you of using different accounts. You tried to link an ingame account and its rank to me and you got the wrong one. Thats what i said and ment. And you do this all the time. you have such an unhealthy obsession with me that you read every sub-sub-sub-sub-comment i write looking for that one sentence that you can give your own new meaning that in your mind then is the opening to attack me while in reality you just put words in my mouth i never said.

@TemptingActor769 Out of curiosity, were you in debate club in high school?

Can we at least tone down her up B drift? With such a fucking huge hitbox, it doesn’t need that much aerial control after the fact.