Make Fors's clone cooldown matter more when recovering#213

Tl;dr Fors’s ability to stall offstage to wait out his clone cooldown lets him recover from incredible distances, even when being actively edge guarded. His recovery resources should be limited more than this.

Although Forsburn’s recovery is not easy to use, it is incredibly rewarding, especially for a character with few notable weaknesses. A clone cooldown was introduced and later increased, in part to make his clone more of a limited resource offstage. However, the timer still allows Fors to use the clone again if it’s hit, so Fors can use clone any number of times as long as he doesn’t fall to the bottom blast zone. Thanks to his fall stall neutral B and fall-stopping horizontal side B, getting back to stage this way isn’t too big an ask. This even tends to leave some stray smoke for Fors to use if he gets rinse-repeated, making successive edge guards harder in some respects.

We saw this situation come into play during Supernova grands. I think the best example is game 4 of the reset (22:50), where Cake uses two side Bs per airtime three separate times over the course of one stock.

At the start of the game, Bbatts hits Cake out of side B while he’s offscreen offstage, and Cake uses double jump, air dodge, neutral B, and up B into smoke to stall long enough to use side B to wall, then wall jump and up B onto stage to force a rinse-repeat. Bbatts then manages to once again hit Cake out of side B when he’s offscreen, but the moves he’s forced to use to even hit Cake here (which serve double-duty to cover up B into smoke mixups) stall out the clone timer enough for Cake to use side B again. This, perhaps the best edge-guard I’ve ever seen, continues with multiple further callouts, onstage landings, and rinse-repeats, yet Cake is still able to hold out long enough to find a chance to escape on DI out when Bbatts chooses to up air him, and he only dies to a critical-hit nair after using two side Bs per airtime for the third time that stock.

I have a couple suggestions that could help:

• Increase Fors’s clone cooldown. (Risk: could affect clone use in neutral)
• Make Fors’s clone only usable once per airtime in addition to the cooldown, or lengthen the cooldown just when interrupting side B. (Risk: could be unintuitive/hard to track)
• Make Fors’s clone cooldown increase each time it’s destroyed before he touches the ground. (Risk: might be too gradual to fix the problem)
• Make Fors’s side special lose its airstall with successive uses per airtime. (Risk: might play weird and might not fix the problem)