KhanYe
Smash Journeyman
Just several minutes ago, the Project M Dev Team released a blog post outlying the changes to Lucas' recovery to follow up on their previous blog post on the ever-so controversial Tether recoveries as a whole. They presented specific examples of what will be different about Lucas' recovery, essentially making his recovery less safe.
Lucas is a character that is lauded/criticized for having a strong neutral game, heavy punishes, and a myriad of kill moves along with a incredibly difficult recovery to edgeguard. The PMDT seems to want to make recoveries less safe as a whole, and described in detail the changes they're currently testing on the Earthbound kid Lucas. According to the PMDT's blog post:
Read the previous blog post on tethers here.
It seems to me that the PMDT is following through on their promise to make edgeguarding characters with tethers a safer endeavor. The metagame does seem to be shifting more towards Melee. What do you guys think of the changes to Lucas? Is this a good nerf or is it too harsh of a penalty?
KhanYe is having an eventful first day as a Writer at Smashboards. If you want to welcome me to Smashboards and talk about how scared you are of your main getting nerfed, talk to me on Twitter at @ayyou9.
Read the whole post here.As stated in the previous recovery blogpost, a major goal for us is to have characters creatively using all of their options while offstage. The new tether restrictions in place helped to tone down the Z-air recovery slightly, but it still didn't necessitate enough variation. We elected to match the Z-tether range closer to the physical range suggested by his turn grab (50 units -> 35 units). In addition to being more visually intuitive, it creates more scenarios where Lucas needs to utilize Up-Special to have enough range to recover. Z-tether is still an exceptionally powerful tool for both recovering and edgeguarding, but the combination of global tether adjustments and the shorter range of his tether means that it is no longer his best choice as consistently.
We've also adjusted Magnet's stalling capabilities. Most other stalls in the game, such as Marth Side-Special or Mario's Side-Special, lose the majority of their stalling efficacy immediately after the first aerial use. Conversely, Lucas could fire off quick blip after blip of Magnet with little reduction in stalling power. In this way he could wait out more edgeguarding attempts than many other characters, bypassing an inherent disadvantage of fast falling characters. We've now adjusted Magnet such that it no longer appreciably stalls Lucas’s fall speed after the first usage.
Finally, we've made some minor edits to PK Thunder 2 itself. We noticed that the hitboxes weren't working in game quite as predicted by our (admittedly, relatively rudimentary) development software, resulting in less protective disjoint than intended. We've now beefed these up slightly to give him a reasonable but not impenetrable disjoint while traveling. Additionally, we've adjusted the starting momentum and friction values to give it a much smoother, more natural feel overall. Lastly, we've slightly reduced the horizontal air drift control Lucas has after PK Thunder 2 ends -- many other moves which grant drift control so quickly after movement has ended also feature minor restrictions to special fall drift control.
Read the previous blog post on tethers here.
It seems to me that the PMDT is following through on their promise to make edgeguarding characters with tethers a safer endeavor. The metagame does seem to be shifting more towards Melee. What do you guys think of the changes to Lucas? Is this a good nerf or is it too harsh of a penalty?
KhanYe is having an eventful first day as a Writer at Smashboards. If you want to welcome me to Smashboards and talk about how scared you are of your main getting nerfed, talk to me on Twitter at @ayyou9.
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