The only thing that's remotely a problem for me is how much stun is on magnet when you hit something. It almost feels like there are times where I can cancel it earlier than others, but most of the time the timing is really late. I'm not sure if there's a difference between his inner and outer hitboxes and hitlag, but either way I'm a little confused/unsure as to what the fastest we can do it is. Also, it seems to be much faster when I wavedash out of it as opposed to jumping and doing another magnet. Is there a reason for this?
I know this much: Multimagnets while hitting nothing are much faster because he falls much faster with it, so spamming tech in between stocks actually feels nicer, lol. I guess I just have to get used to it, and get used to not having magnet do so much work. That is, I'll have to strategically read what my opponent is going to do in reaction to my pressure, instead of spamming moves to force them to do something or their shield gets broken with ease.
Also, we're going to have to use our aerials a lot more skillfully for pressure, and use grab as a follow up.
I mean, it kind of sucks if you had fun using his amazing pressure in 3.02 like I did, but overall this is more balanced and less gimmicky. Though, if I can admit, I'd sacrifice more power on his smashes for better pressure with magnet. I'd take 0 or -1 on shield over -2 for pretty much anything. Hell, I'd even vote for a worse recovery if I could keep my old style.
Alas, though, the PMDT wants less gimmicky stuff, and I honestly feel like some of his old moves were absolutely braindead easy. Dair linked into every hit no matter where you came from, and bair was super easy to spam offstage. As they are now, you have to actually set up and earn the final hit on dair because you have to come straight down pretty much or stay on top of them for every hit to connect. This way, dair > OU upsmash isn't a free 47% combo if someone fails to react to such a fast, non-committal approach like 3.02 sh dair was. Also, we have to be precise with bair and can't just throw it around everywhere for a free gimp, so that's nice. I feel like the nerfs to fair went a little bit too far, but I'll work with it. It by no means makes him a bad character; I just have to put more effort into him to make him as good as he was before.
tl;dr, Lucas is still pretty good despite all the nerfs. He isn't super easy anymore and you have to actually know how his hitboxes work to succeed instead of throwing them out anywhere you like and getting free combos with lots of damage. I think the nerfs to magnet and fair were slightly a little overdone (from a design standpoint, not a balance one), but he's still a good character.
