Good throws + ease to land grabs = not fun#966

This is not a Clairen issue, but for the sake of the example, let’s strat with this: Clairen’s grab game is in a great spot right now. It allows her to contest shields, that would otherwise be a very strong counter to her character as a whole. But the fact that she has so many ways of using grabs to extend combos feels very lame. Most of her aerials can be hitfalled(fell?) to get a garanteed grabs, and then there’s side special?? The tipperstun lockout is a good way to make Clairen players resort to more crative routes and DI mixups, but then she can just grab you out of a poke. It makes her relly so much in her grab game that it weakens her identity as a midrange fighter.

As I said, this isn’t really a Clairen issue. Why do Zetterburn and Olympia, who have the easiest and most efective shieldpressure in the game, get soo much off of grab?

Fast characters in general have such an easy time chaining grabs out of techchasses and mvement is not the only factor to. Having fast normals just allows many players to have slow reaction times and still keep pushing advantage. They managed to spotdodge? Keep the pressure with jab before they have time to grab themselfs. Tryed to jablock a rolling opponent? Chasse and grab them anyway. Missed a jablock because they teched? Just grab, you have enough time.

As a bonus, I just want to say that this isn’t just a mechanics/gamefeel issue, it’s also an espectator experience issue. Let’s face it, grab combos are not as exciting as the other types of combos.

The way to make it less frustrating would be to either target these character’s throw game, to make their stats worse, and/or to tweek the frame data for stuff like spotdodges and jabs specifically. For Clairen it would be much healthier if her tippers provided grab protection during a small time span, like her tipperstun lockout.

Seconding this. It would require a massive rework for the whole cast, but the fact “justgrablol” is a legitimate strategy to instantly improve is a worrisome state for the game to be in.

I think the amount of stun and lack of knockback growth on a lot of throws is at the heart of this. For the first roughly 150% of the game, most characters get an insane amount of reward off of a throw, sometimes even a kill confirm. On the contrary, there are almost no throws that scale hard enough to take stocks. I don’t understand the concept of nearly every throw in the game being Fox up throw or Marth fthrow for all relevant percent bands. If at a certain point a bunch of throws stopped working as combo tools and started working as kill moves, I think the game would have a healthier RPS.

Or, y’know, like… allow hits to actually work so attacking is a decent way to approach instead of just grabbing… just a thought.

Floorhugging also contributes to this, since it makes a majority of your non-grab moves useless at low percent.

@Anonymous that’s not really true. Most moves will have limited use in low%, but just a few are actually useless at low%. If anything, grabs beating FH makes grabs cooler, since it forces people to stop holding down after one or two neutral wins(most characters will get knockedown by most stuff at around 50%). My issue is how top tiers get to toss you arround from 0-100% and then kill you without having to really strugle for the grabs.

@Nendez
if grab is always better, they are useless at low percent. its actually worse this way because these moves are a trap that give the illusion of reward and hinder people to actually learn the real punish game which is grab.
FH is removing so many options and simplifying big parts of the game by having grab the clear best option. Anyone saying it adds depth has no clue. Also, the argument that people like the scrappy neutral exchanges it adds to the game is just silly. Because why would you ever even attempt to do that when you can grab?

@Zoolz8l I’m NOT arguing with you, lol. This is not a post about FH and you are stating lies as always.

@Nendez
“you are stating lies as always” says that without any proof, which actually means he is the one lying. gotta love people in here…

@Zoolz8l Phoenix Wright over here thinks I owe him proof of anything

I think, to give a levelheaded analysis of why grabs are so overcentralized and why floorhug plays a large part in that, you need to think it through.

In order to grab, you have to be on the ground. The ground is also the same place you utilize floorhug, making which you’re choosing to do ambiguous. Thankfully, grabbing is one of the few actions you can’t passively floorhug during, so there is a 50-50 to it, but that ultimately doesn’t matter that much for one reason.

Grabs beat shields, parries, and the passive floorhug, and they at the very least don’t outright lose to dodges. In that way, the only preemptive defenses against grabs are to attack or to be out of range. (Yes, you can also grab back, but the grab break time window isn’t nearly what it needs to be for that to be more than an accident.) Presume you aren’t out of range or don’t have range to get away into, but you do have enough time to react with an attack, a jab for example.

This works, but only if your opponent is actually going for a grab, and specifically a grab. If they choose any other option, you get punished for doing it because they floorhug the knockback and then choose another option (probably a grab, since they can get a throw combo). This heavily discourages using offense as defense, leaving players even more disadvantaged when the opponent actually does go for grab, since they don’t want to do the one option that might work but will blow them up if they gamble wrong.

The downstream impacts of this affect the entire game’s neutral and centralize grabs as the close range tool to an unhealthy degree. Grabs as part of the RPS triangle are meant to be a call-out tool against overly defensive opponents. If a player is turtling too much, getting grabbed and blown up for 30+% or a stock encourages them to drop the defense more often, and that then opens up other offense avenues for the attacker that would have gotten blocked and punished beforehand.

However, when the defensive mechanic is passive, such that it can be done in the middle of movement or even offense, it spoils the role of that mechanic. Now you can’t attack an opponent who isn’t committing to defense, because they don’t have to commit to defense. Your only reliable attack route is to grab, and that’s already advantageous for you because your opponent is rightfully aftaid to use the options that would stop you.

Compounding things, the reward given for grabbing an opponent isn’t decreased to compensate for its new central role in offense. You still get the 30+% reward for it (sometimes more, if your character is designed that way). That means that players are even less incentivized to approach each other, since getting grabbed is usually way more of a disaster than getting hit by other attacks (you can’t SDI or floorhug it, so your only hope to escape is a DI read–there’s a related but opposite problem with juggles, but that’s a separate topic).

What this often leads to is a neutral defined by both players dancing around on opposite ends of the stage, jumping around, and chucking projectiles at each other to tack on enough damage that eventually their moves will at least send into knockdown where they don’t get actively punished for landing them. Or, if they’re Clairen, babydashing in and spamming down tilt.

This is just my personal opinion, we’ve reached the end of the analysis section, but I don’t think that’s fun. I don’t really enjoy running away, spamming my projectiles, and fishing for an opening to grab, but I know I’ll get blown up if I do anything else, so I don’t have a choice. This is in contrast to how I feel playing Melee (which I don’t even enjoy playing on account of the controls), where I can at least put up a wall of hitboxes in neutral that allows me to close distance. I don’t find Melee fun because its controls aren’t made for humans, but I enjoy its neutral so much more than Rivals’, which kind of baffles me, since I can actually control my character consistently in Rivals.

@Miscellaneous Shaun holly shit, a good contribution!! I mostly agree, actually. I’ve proposed on another noltboard that they tweeked the spotdodge frame data so it actively encourage counterhits and actually hard beat grabs, on top of a proper grab teching mechanic(grab clancking if conecting at any point of the grab startup animation). However, I do firmly believe that poking people for a bit and forcing mistakes is still a good alroach to neutral, tho, not just dancing around(even if that’s very strong too).

What’s so complex about “oh if I don’t hit them with the approved moves I can get punished”? Why would I ever open myself up to that possibility when I can just grab? If FH makes for such amazing “complex” interactions then why is grab exempt from that complexity? If I’m getting hit by jab combos that could frame trap why wouldn’t I just FH into shield instead of trying to swing?

If “FH is great as it makes for super complex and cool interactions”, in which case, why does grab bypass the whole mechanic? You can’t have this conversation about grabs without talking about FH because FH being the way it is is part of why grabs are so prevalant in every interaction.

There’s also no real reward for frametraps in this game because there’s no counterhit mechanic wherein you take more damage/stun etc in the startup or recovery of a move, so the idea of frametrapping them “out of floorhug” as opposed to just continuing your jab combo is kind of moot.

Point proved, can’t argue with you people, lol

@Nendez
you cannot argue with us because you don’t have a real argument. Everything falls apart when we reply.
Lets take a look at this for example:
“And for the record, my issue with the FH debate is that you guys make everything about FH and also ignore any option that isn’t hardcoded to explode someone who’s FHing. Most pokes are hardly punishable on FH, most jab combos can frametrap you for trying to mash out of FH and a lot of uptilts and jab3s will knock down very early. You straight up deny the complexity of the interactions it can create.”
I think this is a prime example of why i think people defending FH are one step behind in the “mind game” and are actually the ones who need to “git gud” in order to understand what the people critizing FH actually mean.
Sure, all the things you said can be done when someone does FH, but it can also be done if someone does not FH. the only difference is a very small damage increase, in reality 2-3 extra damage, so for pokes FH is kinda free, because the extra damage does never weight out that one time you would not FH and eat a full combo. The jab combos can still be FHed and usually will get you eat a counter hit at some point and the utilts and jab3s usually create a 50/50 because depending if they FH or not they will either knock down or not. so nothing here is really guaranteed and the reward usually stays within the 30damage range. So why would i ever try any of that when i can just grab and get the 30 damage guaranteed without any risk?
you people claim there is all this complexity but its fake. its a trap. All these “deep” interactions are suboptimal. they add risk for no extra reward. I made someone whiff, now i can try to guess if they will FH or not and if i guess right get the same damage i would have gotten for grab and if i guess wrong potentially get blown up myself.
This is not counter play to FH. If breaking FH with a move would result in them going into a tumble state where they take twice the damage for a few seconds so i can actually get 60 damage on my 50/50 guess, instead of the guaranteed 30, then we had real counter play. And grab is also no counter play to FH either. its “negation” play. I get the grab and same damage no matter if you FH or not, ignoring the mechanic all together. Its ridiculous bad design, nothing else.

FH defenders consistently missing the point and crumbling beneath the weight of logic, reason and fact will never cease to be hilarious to me lmao. Even the devs are using the classic “It’S sO nUaNcEd, YoU jUsT dOn’T uNdErStAnD”. Even they literally cannot substantiate why this garbage is still in the game.

90% of the reason that grab is such an overwhelming option right now is FH. That’s just a fact. It is the sole reliable option that beats it, and even then most follow-ups that aren’t after you use up-throw kinda just lose to it anyway. I’d seen a video where CakeAssault was just doing up-throw into nothing over and over again, simply because there was a platform above his Forsburn. If you go for follow-ups from that position, you can guarantee you get FH-grabbed, and that’s after using the counterplay designed to beat it. It’s insane. You currently cannot discuss the strength of grab without FH being part of the discussion. If they remove it? Sure. There’s a much broader discussion to be had there since it can be weighed up against what it’s supposed to typically beat and what it’s meant to be weak to. But right now, like I say, FH is the main reason grab is so strong. Icing on the cake there is that some characters (mainly Clairen, as mentioned) get RIDICULOUS reward out of grab, which only exacerbates the issue further.

So at the moment, our viable option in neutral is dash-dance grab, up throw. That’s it. There’s your “depth” and your “nuance”.

i think the root issue is that the devs and most people defending FH have zero clue about how risk vs reward is supposed to work in a fighting game or actually any game for that matter.
as someone who deals with game theory on a professional level this is just so obvious. for the devs any option is fine as long as there is something you can do against it. they don’t take into account how hard/risky the thing one person does is, what the reward is and same for the person countering it. so you end up with moves that people just constantly spam in neutral because they have so little risk but so much reward and the thing you need to do to counter them is several magnitudes harder and your reward is not even 1/10 of what the other person would get if you screw up your counter play.
grab+FH is just the most extreme outcome of that way of thinking.