The Zetterburn and Clairen bias#212

Online these 2 characters are by far the most consistently disliked and complained about in this game without a doubt. The bias the devs have towards Zetterburn and Clairen is so obvious and it is quite frustrating. Consistently they will nerf other characters that make a much more significant change to their gameplan. But whenever they have given Zetter or Clairen a “nerf” it is never on the same scale as they would give to another character. I don’t even think these 2 are insanely overpowered or anything, moreso it’s that their alleged weaknesses hardly exist.

Like the hitbox “nerf” they did for Zetter’s down-air in this update is so comical for a move that has been obnoxious since this game’s existence. They barely made it any smaller so it still leaves it as a giant egregious hitbox. It is baffling looking at his down-air hitbox between Rivals 1 and Rivals 2. In 1 it doesn’t cover his entire body and it’s also much more narrow. But in 2 he has these giant circles that cover his entire body and then some. Meanwhile in the same patch they changed La Reina’s dash attack far more by making it significantly smaller. Even still I think hers shouldn’t hit as high above her that it does (Many moves across the cast have this problem of being way larger than they need to be and covering space they really shouldn’t.) but this is a pretty significant change especially compared to what they gave Zetter.

For Zetter being a character that is supposed to have a weak recovery in my opinion he really doesn’t. Yes you can edge guard him for sure, but unless you are right on him when he’s about to up-b you’re probably getting burned because of how absurdly fast it comes out. Compared to Fox and Zetter in Rivals 1 he has hardly any start up on his up-b in Rivals 2. I think it’s also a little insane that he even gets his double jump back from his down-b. Captain Falcon gets this in Melee (even though it’s a glitch), but his recovery is infinitely worse. He also doesn’t have a Fox up-b that he gets to do afterwards. On top all of this when you do get Zetter to land on stage with a recovery option he barely has any landing lag.

I don’t how Clairen got away with no nerfs this patch that weren’t global changes that every character got. She has gotten countless dedicated posts discussing her over the past many months. For the character that is supposed to be precise that seems to hardly matter for her with egregious hitboxes hitting from everywhere. Somehow her up-air and up-tilt hitboxes got left unchanged which is beyond me. It is insane the amount of times I have seen these moves tipper when the opponent was below her. Interesting that they adjusted her standing grab hitbox (like everyone else) yet you can see how far behind her body it still reaches for some reason (when none of the other adjusted grabs have this problem). This really doesn’t help her whole being precise idea.

It’s frustrating how little effort it takes to get results with Clairen. Yet at the same time it is much harder to combat her because of how little risk she has for throwing anything out. Myself and many other people have said this before, but a huge factor for this is because she is for some reason the 2nd fastest character in the game. It’s been over a year of her being faster than Ranno (the one who has the slowest air speed in the game but fast on the ground, meanwhile Clairen gets to be faster in both and have disjoints) since you nerfed his run speed. The fact this has never been properly corrected for such a long stretch of time shows the devs do not care about properly balancing her stats around the rest of the cast in a way that makes sense. There is no rational reason why she should be so fast, it just doesn’t make any sense. Especially since this wasn’t a problem in the first game, she wasn’t the slowest at all but she wasn’t out here only being outran by Maypul and slipstream Wrastor.

In an update where every character got some kind of change it’s no coincidence Zetterburn and Clairen got very unimpactful nerfs and no nerfs at all respectively. It has been months since any relevant update has occured for this game so I hardly doubt it was a lack of time to be able to get changes for them when everyone else had something changed. The fact that Ranno (who people seemed to be pretty chill with his placement overall) got more impactful nerfs than both these 2 combined really shows something the devs favortism.

Clairen just does not work in this engine. She needs a hard rework. Giving this character access to shield and FH negates all her weaknesses from Rivals 1 completely. She can swing all day and you won’t even close the distance her moves covered before she can swing again, with some chars. And if you can being in her face has no consequences with shield and FH unlike rivals 1 where she was screwed if that happened.
the devs don’t seem to understand that a character needs to be weighted against the general options the engine provides and they clearly did not do that with clairen and also not with zetter. ledge and ledge invulnerability benefit those two chars more than others on the cast. and the list goes on.

I really hope the devs read this, because after almost 1000 hours in the game, I am close to quitting entirely because of how frustrating Clairen is to play against.

Floorhugging makes this character super dumb. If you don’t play one of the fastest characters, getting grabs on her is near impossible against a decent opponent. Now that out of shield options have been nerfed, the problem is even worse than before.

I feel like Kragg should NOT be losing this matchup as hard as he does, yet here we are. Right now, either I’m switching mains to pick up Zetterburn and laugh my way to master, or I’m quitting ranked play altogether.

Patch after patch, the problematic characters everyone complains about don’t get touched, while the ones who were already struggling get shafted by the general changes…

i also don’t get how they think chars like orcane or fleet need nerfs? just because we have a crazy character specialist for each of the char does not make the char good. Its those specialists doing miracle work, nothing else.

@GrandChienFou I have a feeling that if you are a casual you either play clairen or quit because of clairen lol. Happened to all my friends

I think something that doesn’t get pointed out enough is that when people talk about how overpowered Clairen is, all the voices in the room will often come to different conclusions on what the lynchpin “root problem” is. Some talk about her movement, some talk about her recovery, some talk about specific moves or the way she’s rewarded by certain system mechanics.

The problems with Clairen’s kit are nested and layered, and no amount of “this one move now has a 5% smaller hitbox and/or is 2f worse on shield” is going to fix her kit. She needs a MAJOR rework, regardless of tournament results, because of how horrendous she feels to play against and how skewed the effort needed to play her against the effort needed to fight her is.

There was a stream shortly after the patch where Dan Fornace addresses people being upset about Clairen going untouched and says the following:

This was funny because people were like, why were there not more Clairen nerfs, she’s really strong? Honestly, the universal ones hit her, pretty good.

I find this pretty insulting when every other character has to deal with the same nerfs. To give my perspective I already struggle to punish Clairen mindlessly spamming pokes, and the shield buffer reduction as well as the grab range reduction just makes Clairen even more capable of flailing her sword like she’s controlled via Wiimote. It’s possible those nerfs have a higher effect at pro levels of play where punishes are a lot more refined, but Gold-Diamond players don’t have that. And while Clairen is on paper more affected by the ledge parry change than most, the fact that she can recover low to avoid the parry and STILL have a mixup via [short Up+B/long Up+B onto stage/long Up+B drift back off-stage] makes ledge parry not as much of a factor as I think Dan thinks it is. It’s just not much, and half the roster has to deal with both that AND character-specific nerfs this patch.

I already stopped playing for the rest of the ranked season due to the pain of trying to fight Clairen, a matchup I already hated, with my now-nerfed character. She really, really needs something meaningful done to her in the September patch.

@DestroyTheAirArmada Literally exactly what they did to her in May for the last time she got any balance updates. They gave her jab 2 frames of recovery, made tipper down-tilt do 2% less and changed the final nair sourspot angle.
Yes those are all nerfs, but in the long run are not going to be that relevant to how a Clairen will play. But people will cite patches like this and say “DUDE SHE’S BEEN NERFED SO MANY TIMES!!!” but they are just little tickles one after another meanwhile any other character they don’t have a problem stabbing them in the back multiple times.
I’ll give em that they actually made her down-tilt hitbox make sense in that same patch. But still didn’t fix her other hitboxes so what’s with that?

Somehow Dan has gotten to the point of being so deeply biased that he has said outright “At the very tippy top, Clairen and Zetterburn fall off a little bit”. (Shoutouts to Nurse for having that quote as a channel point reward.)
This is such a weird statement. Yeah characters are gonna “fall off” at the very top of competitive play if the best of the best don’t play said characters and are consisitenly winning events they enter. It is very sad that they have consistently continued to ignore critisism for these characters that negatively affect a large majority of the player base. Just so they can in theory have a “balanced” game for the top 1% most skilled players. Even moreso once you get to the best of the best players, individual player skill matters so much more than the character pick.

Saying the overall system changes effected her pretty good doesn’t mean much when it affects everyone in the cast. Even if in theory they effect her more than any other character, that’s not going to suddenly fix all the issues players have with her.

I have not touched ranked this season or played online at all because the idea of dealing with Clairen makes me rather just play another game instead. It’s not like she’s impossible to beat, but damn it is so unfun to play against her. Watching her run around the screen awkwardly fast, spamming her everything moves that lead to imagination, easy kill confirms, a very hard to exploit recovery. The list goes on.
Similarily for the Spring 2026 season I played at most 15-20 ranked sets and did not bother playing the game beyond that. Once again the idea of constantly playing against Clairen deterred me from playing the game (and floorhug another unfun aspect of this game).

I have many gripes with this game still. From this most recent update their clear favoritism and unequal treatment of characters is what’s deterring me from even wanting to play this game right now honestly.

Zetter’s down air can still tech chase you on a platform from below the platform, by the way.