playing defensively doesn't work with lucas if your opponent is at a lower percent. Its way too easy to shield his projectile so lucas will never force your opponent to approach if he doesn't want to.
the problem with using his aerials to approach safely is that the range doesn't go anywhere so its basically pointless to do because it never pressures your opponent to do anything and its way to easy to own with a move that has better range.
Well there's a spot on his Bair which has very good range. It's diagonally down from his back and the third hitbox that comes out and below him. The good thing about this is that it attacks from a point where a lot of characters have a blind spot unless they angle their tilts or smashes.
And he can always pull back to prevent the opponent from countering, since the attack auto cancels. The only issue is that it's not good spacing to do it from a short hop.
And also to just satisfy my own curiosity, I just checked his Fair and it has about the same range as Zelda's Fair, which is alright I guess. It still has the advantage of being slightly more disjointed.
Likewise, his tilts aren't bad at all. His Ftilt's range isn't as poor as you made it out to be, and Utilt has surprising range and speed too.
I can see where you're coming from, but we generally don't have these issues while playing. You've got to remember that a lot of lucas's attacks are relatively lagless save for his more obvious smashes.
I don't main Lucas as ferociously as I used to, since I picked up Lucario, so I'm probably a little behind on his game. But I haven't seen a Lucas player who suffers from getting camped as badly as you say.
PK fire isn't that terrible. You can punish people who roll past it by doing a jab and stuff. *shrugs*
But besides all that, Lucas's frame data is quite good. He's quick and for the most part safe.
