La Reina's side special downward variant on stage#887

This is one of those moves that’s completely fake, and the problem is that no matter how fake you know it is, it’s incredibly dificult to combat.

For comparison, Maypul’s up air off the top is fake. You can ASDI upward and it doesn’t kill you because it doesn’t connect. That’s incredibly easy to combat. You have about a dozen frames to react to it, not to mention the number of frames you have to react to Maypul tethering to you. It’s a move that’s fake, but you can spot that it’s fake and counter it.

La Reina’s side special down throw from the ground is completely fake, and it’s nearly impossible to combat, even when you know what to do against it. This is due to the game’s inbuilt system of clearing the tech buffer the moment you get hit, which means that the window you have to actually tech this move is strictly between the time you get hit by the stomp and the time you hit the stage. This is, roughly speaking, like 3 frames. That’s an incredibly tight window even if you know it’s coming.

The fix here is to the system, not to the move. Clearing the buffer on hit is a good idea, but not when you have moves that require you to hit an incredibly strict timing like this. I believe the way this ought to be handled is that, on throws like this, if the button is held down, it buffers a tech the moment you get hit. Players are only going to be hitting that button if they want to tech this move.

Getting hit does not clear the tech buffer
You can press shield before the hit and after the hit of SideB, there’s far more than 3 frames to do it and can be done consistently
The exception is you can’t press shield during hitpause, which will put you in a tech lockout. This is a universal rule for any kind of tech

If that’s the case, then I think a look into that arbitrary restriction is merited. I know the general idea why (making wallhug techs harder), but surely with minimal programming overhead the two could be distinguished.