Tone down scooping effect of Absa's Strongs#307
In one of the previous patches, there was a change that prevented characters from “falling out” of Absa’s multi-hit strongs.
The way the change was implemented has effectively removed sour or weak hits from her strongs, such that they can be used with much less consideration for precision than other analogous moves.
Absa’s Up-Strong has hitboxes which extend lower and wider than what is visually indicated by the animation. If she whiffs from a character length away, you would think it would be safe to grab her since she is exposed from the sides. This would be the case with other characters with similar moves like Mewtwo, Zelda or Lucas. However, even if you are one of the shorter characters and you attempt to grab her mid-animation, there is a good chance you will end up in the sweetspot above her head.
Her F-Strong is a bit less egregious, but it’s still a very large move and it can scoop into the sweetspot both from above and below. This makes it powerful in a variety of situations that I suspect are probably not always intentional. The move is large enough that it seems to me that it would be fine if it were allowed to have sourspot hitboxes along some of its edges. In its current state if you graze the edge of the move, you are essentially teleported right into the strong hit.
It’s difficult to make an argument for changing these strictly on balance grounds as Absa is clearly not super dominant or common, but leaving them in the current state in the interest of giving her some potency feels like a clumsy way to balance the character. I would suggest toning down these moves to reward precision and displacing some of their strength to elsewhere in her kit.
they’re already slow or weak AF, is it too much to ask for her strong attacks to just work? You’re asking for more precision but she already is a realy difficult and punishing character to pilot. You have to already be familiar with djc or invest a lot of time as a main in order to space her aerials and on top of that she doesn’t have a coverage aerial like ness or mewtwo, you have to actually DJC while landing tiny, 1-frame sweetspots.
It shouldn’t be too much to ask for the Absa’s qol to just have some strong attacks to fall back on, fstrong doesn’t even kill until extremely high percents, and her upstrong is really slow… if you’re getting punished by those moves over and over again, I think you can easily learn the MU and when to punish her for it. And if it’s only once in a while and you’re still bothered by those moves connecting properly, I don’t know what to tell you. Sorry? I guess??
Down strong is better than entire characters, that’s the one that I think needs eyes on it.
@Nicodemu$ In the last paragraph of my post I tried to make a case that “Absa needs it” is not a good excuse for the way the hitboxes work. Most strongs in the game have sourspot hitboxes as a way to incentivize precision and intention. To me, it seems that the only reason her strongs work the way that they do is because the developers wanted her to have multi-hit moves for stylistic reasons, and that can be complicated to implement. Had she been designed in a way where her strongs were conceptually similar but not multi-hit moves, I can almost guarantee that they would not take the form of one giant sweetspot hitbox the size of Kirby’s Smash 64 up tilt.
I’m not begging for nerfs to Absa, or to make her harder to play. I don’t think this character is oppressive and I’m not saying people who play her aren’t skilled or deserving of a fun character. I just think these moves feel like they are stronger than they should be, and that it’s possible to make them less rough around the edges and give her something else as compensation.
I have learned to play around them within reason, over the course of hundreds of hours playing against her. But it just feels bad to get grazed by what would be a weak or sour hit from any other move in the game, and then end up losing a stock because you got teleported directly to the strong hit. I FGC nod and move on, but those kills always feel really unearned on the part of my opponent when it happens. It feels especially wrong when she whiffs and I die because I touched the third rail trying to grab her, which is something you can expect to punish any other whiffed strong in the game with.
Every other patch since she came out Absa has recieved nerfs to make her “less annoying” to play against. These changes always do very little to affect how people percieve her yet every time it makes her feel so much worse to play as. Most of the top rep for Absa has moved on to other characters because of how much more effort she requires for the same or less reward than other characters. Making her moves worse AGAIN would only further alienate her already dwindling playerbase.
I don’t know why you keep talking about sweetspots and sourpsots in relation to her strongs. Some characters do and don’t have these on certain moves. Multihit moves, especially grounded ones, are generally not designed to have these as it is difficult to control the spacing of them, due to the opponent having lots of agency with DI and SDI. You say if the moves were different they’d have sourspots etc, and maybe? But that doesnt really mean anything tbqh. Its hard for me to explain it much better than that.
These moves aren’t necessarily designed to drop, but usually have the caveat of sometimes dropping,. The devs clearly thought it was happening too often tho and didnt want to increase the reward of the strongs themselves and so instead made them more consistent.
I do get where you’re coming from tho, as they are effectively hitgrabs in many cases, very similar to Zetter’s fire strongs in function. I also wasn’t really a fan when they made this change because of this.
It largely negateing floorhug counterplay/decision-making is my issue. I think Absa’s and any other strongs that work similarly should not pull a fighter off of the ground as long as they are floorhugging.
Other than that tho, the suction effect is fine imo and if you got caught by hitbox thats on you.
Fstrong last a while but only covers in front her and is very faithful to the gfx. Upstrong’s 2 multhits only last 2 frames each with a compeletely vulnerable frame in between; her legs are also vulnerablle during the multihits. Also if you trade with the multihits at all you are almost always at the advantage, especially if you OS with floorhug.