Clairen's run speed is THE problem with the character, please consider reducing it#1021

tl;dr: The aspects of Clairen that people believe to be the most imbalanced are directly related to her run speed, and reducing it would probably have a positive impact.

I’ve been playing a lot of Clairen post-patch and the most toxic aspect of the character is how safe her neutral is. It isn’t specifically because of her hitboxes or frame data, allthough moves like jab, dtilt, utilt, and her pre-nerf grab hitbox have been critiqued. It’s because she can safely disengage whenever she whiffs in neutral. This isn’t just true against slow, stubby characters like La Reina or Olympia (who was previously one of the only characters with a favorable MU against Clairen); even fast characters like Ranno and Zetterburn struggle to punish her when she whiffs. Furthermore, Clairen’s jab and tilts are so safe that not only is it impossible to punish her when she chooses to run away after a whiff, it’s difficult to punish her when she chooses to jab or dtilt instead. This results in an incredibly frustrating guessing game where the Clairen player is disproportionately rewarded when you guess wrong, especially when jab or dtilt tipper.

The ease with which Clairen can simply out-run her mistakes in neutral is a much more significant problem at average and above-average skill levels where neutral is less refined, but it isn’t uncommon to see this interaction happen even in high level play. For example, look at this timestamped interaction in Rongunshu and Ant’s Port Priority 9 set:

Rongunshu whiffs dtilt at the ledge, immediately dashes back, and effortlessly outruns Absa’s ledgedash ftilt. The dtilt wasn’t optimally spaced and Absa has the best wavedash in the game (this was pre-nerf). To me, this interaction is everything wrong with Clairen’s run speed.
Rongunshu is so good that he doesn’t do this often, but it’s a scenario that repeats itself over and over against average Clairen players: whiff, guessing game between another button or dash back, rinse and repeat. Furthermore, the options that do circumvent this guessing game (wavedash out-of-shield or out-of-floorhug) are disproportionately demanding relative to what’s necessary to punish other characters when they whiff, and the exceptions (Maypul, Ranno) have better balanced strengths and weaknesses which mitigate the difficulty of playing neutral against them: Maypul’s weight and susceptability to being combo’d and edgeguarded, and Ranno’s slower run speed, significantly slower air speed, and less disjointed hitboxes. In contrast, it is more difficult and riskier for the majority of characters to approach Clairen if she’s committed to playing passively, and it’s her run speed that’s the cause.

It should also be noted that Clairen is an extreme statistical outlier relative to the rest of the cast in terms of her run speed, as she’s the only character whose run speed has increased substantially from RoA1. Every other character’s run speed is more or less untouched from RoA1 with three exceptions: Zetterburn, who is slightly slower (~3%); Ranno, who is significantly slower post-nerf (~8%); and Wrastor. Outside of these three and Clairen, every other character’s run speed is directly proportional to their RoA1 run speed. Clairen’s, on the other hand, increased by a whopping ~10%. Why? Why is she so fast?
I do not know how or why this character has dodged the base attribute nerfs that other characters rightly received. Ranno, Kragg, Orcane, Maypul, and Olympia all received substantial, deserved nerfs to their base attributes, but Clairen’s haven’t been touched since the slight nerf to her air acceleration in the first few months of the game.

Nice writeup, totally agree her mobility needs to be toned down, especially given how many other characters have received mobility nerfs.

The mobility + tipstun is what puts her over the edge I think. Marth gets away with being so fast on the ground because he can’t stick you in stun forever by hitting a tipper.

I do think that it also interacts with her offense / tipper hit stun as well, but it’s a bigger problem on defense in my opinion. Playing this character really reminds me of playing 1.0 Ranno, where neutral and advantage feel effortless.

This is the primary reason why all of the nerfs she’s been given haven’t moved the needle very much. Movement speed is easily the single most important attribute in a platform fighter. Clairen doesn’t just have a strong run, shes among the best in almost all of the most important movement stats and it allows her to get away with things that no other character can in very subtle ways, which is why I think a lot of the community overlooks this as her core issue.

Not only does she have such an incredible run but she also has some of the best options in the game for countering dash back, which means she gets to run away while her opponent doesn’t, letting her control the match even more than her disjoints already inherently allow for

who would have thought that giving a character strong move speed, long reach with little end lag, insane grab game and then adding a stun mechanic, that lets you convert almost any stray hit into a combo, on top could make the char broken.

Melee marth is fast so clairen has to be fast.

@Anonymous truth nuke

Sarcasm aside, Marth actually has to commit to jumping

clairen has a good run speed because she’s the only character in this game without a projectile. she needs to be able to close distance and keep in her range. that’s why she struggles so hard against over shoot and whiff punish. the example u provided isn’t really a good one imo. down tilt is a relatively safe move across the entire cast, not just clairen. not to mention the absa was late on the wavedash f tilt. if they acted sooner or even wavedash jabbed or even down tilted they would’ve been able to punish. if clairen had more consistent ways to close distance in this game where literally every character has a projectile or some solid way to control stage or zone in some sense, then yes her run speed would be a problem. not the case unfortunately tho

She has parry and NFZ, that’s the entire point of the latter. Clairens barely have to use NFZ anymore because she’s so fast.

^its really not that simple. nfz only covers a portion of the stage and frequently has to be used to recover in certain match ups. for example, etalus would just kill clairen every single time off stage if she didn’t have the option to use it for recovery. then the nfz is off stage and poses no threat. not to mention when it’s used on stage it really only leads to situations where the opponent just does everything in their power to avoid the nfz, forcing u to approach or wait for it to finish and then they proceed to play their zoning game. parry is the same thing. unless the parry puts the opponent in stun like when u parry absa cloud, neutral will just reset. the whole cast has good enough movement to reset neutral against someone with invincibility. they can literally just retreat to ledge and get invincibility themselves. the reason why u might not see clairen use nfz for the purpose of blocking projectiles is because a lot of the times its simply not worth it. it’s not because she doesn’t need to because of her run speed. it’s way more favorable to the clairen to save it for a counter attack, edge guard or for recovery.

this put so much of my frustrations with this charcter into such an eloquent post. Her speed and low ending lag on her moves makes neutral feel so much easier for her than the skill required to punish her. I know I am not incredible, but the number of times I have predicted a clairen to utilt, and then i try to weave in and punish the utilt but get hit by a second utilt or a jab or something because I wasnt PERFECTLY spacing her first utilt is just absurd. And if I wait for the second utilt to try to get perfect spacing, sometimes she just dashes away or dashes in and its so hard to deal with. I get that I’m bad, but its ungodly frustrating to have a character that has such a skill disparity in neutral execution for her vs skill required to circumvent it by her opponenet. And it wouldn’t be so frustrating if she was a hit and run charcter who had to win neutral several times to get much, but to have such an overwhelming neutral on a character with one of the best punish games and advantage states in the game with her tipper mechanic is just too much imo. I think a movespeed nerf with maybe 1 or two frames of ending lag to her utilt would make this character a million times more fun to play against