I haven't been up on all the Brawl stuff really, so I'm looking for innnnput
Lucas is my favorite character at the moment, how does he stack up to the other characters? Tier-wise, gameplay-wise. How is his weight and killing potential. How do his projectiles stand up to characters like pit, rob, snake etc? How are his throws?
Basically, can he compete?
Ok, I'll answer in order.
First off: I see him getting between high on mid tier or mid on high tier. He has a couple of counters, but has a robust enough game to compete with them.
Second: He has a good offensive, defensive, and pressure game. He's versatile as all hell. Wavebouncing PK Fires enable that. Basically, you approach with PK Fires, and the PK Fires shoot you backwards and give you a massive waveland. Hish SH PK Fires resemble falco's lasers from melee.
As far as weight, he's medium-light. With good DI, you can live to ~200 on some matchups easily, on other matchups, it's a stretch to get to 160. His recovery is good enough that if you don't die directly off a death zone, you'll almost always make it back.
Lucas has 4 good killing moves, and can kill with other moves as well. If you catch a jiggs in an upsmash, she'll die at like 30% (charged ala rest punishment) or 50% uncharged. most characters die from it at 70%. His Fsmash has solid KO power by 100%. His Dsmash KOs at about the same time, and punishes spotdodges quite nicely. Finally, Psi Magnet has good horizontal knockback, and has the same trajectory as sheik's fair from melee. It freaking outright kills Ike at 150% through the death boundry!
PK fire is my ideal projectile. He can outcamp characters with reflectors because of the wavebounce: it hits their reflector, but you fly out of range of the reflected fire. Not so if you didn't wavebounce. He outcamps Pit because of Psi Magnet (for real). Shield the first one, psi magnet the rest of the arrows, then watch him approach. When that happens, start to camp with pk fire and don't let him near. repeat.
PK Thunder is a great edgeguard, and it can do crazy stagespikes and KO off death boundries. The trick is to hit with the bolt only and not the tail, so if you hit them, turn the bolt immediately.
ROB's easy enough to camp, just pretty tough to KO. It's not a bad matchup. Nobody mains snake in the Ann Arbor area just yet, so it's too early for me to make a judgement on that.
His grabs are interesting. They're risky due to wind-down lag, but fast, so Lucas isn't like yoshi in that regard. His Dthrow sets up for aerials at low percents, but they'll only kill if the opponent DI's really poorly.
I'm of the opinion that lucas can do well in the competitive scene. However, there are enough tough matchups that you really do need every trick available to you. The most important one being wavebouncing. It's an awkward control scheme at first, but I got fully used to it in 2 days, and yes, I did play melee. His tilts are good, he's got a Nair that is really nice, and chaining nairs to tilts to nairs is hard to for the opponent to break if they don't have a shine or other fast move.
Nice to see you here, Brookman.
