Lemme cite Leffen really quick:
I don’t approve of Scrumpy’s balancing style for multiple reasons. First is, no balance patch exists in a vacuum. If you nerf the top tiers, then you turn away people who previously enjoyed those top tiers. Nerfs are occasionally necessary, and I agree that Fox could use a nerf, but I do not think these are the correct nerfs, especially because they change what fox is capable of and his options, making the character less deep.
I think the Project M fox nerfs were much more appropriately considered, especially the changes to shine and laser. Laser shouldn’t be limited to a single laser, players enjoy using double laser. It should be nerfed in damage instead. Sure this will keep its ability to reset scaling the same (though theoretically that could be jury rigged to count less often in the staling buffer, or be excluded from it completely) Project M went the extra mile and had its damage decrease over distance, while nerfing its base damage to like half a percent.
I think Shine should be changed to be transcendent priority (unclankable), which in addition to losing its invincibility, means that it will trade or lose with attacks that deal 13% or less, where right now it will clank, keeping fox safe. (though given the hitbox is disjointed, this might backfire and effectively make shine beat a bunch of attacks where previously it would clank) Project M also made an extremely subtle and well considered change of having the shine scale in knockback versus aerial opponents exclusively, meaning that exclusively shine spikes are percentage dependent, and all of his ground combos with shines are intact.
Beyond that, I think the big thing to fix fox’s design while keeping his playstyle intact is simply decreasing his damage output all around, but leaving his knockback the same. Fox isn’t Marth or Sheik, he doesn’t have tools that outright invalidate loads of characters in the neutral game. He’s a jack of all trades, good at combos, gimps, recovery, and killing. Nerfing damage can allow him to continue to be good at all of those things, but need to work a bit harder for it than other characters.
Also I just think Scrumpy’s solution to shine was terrible. Making it a 3 frame move, making it cancellable on frame 6, removing its higher hitlag. He might as well make the move useless. Shines are a huge part of fox’s character, and if you remove these aspects then he completely loses options he had before, he becomes a less deep character.
Similarly, on his buff videos, I feel like he didn’t make extensive enough changes to fix some of the inherent problems of the lower tier characters, or make them into fun/deep characters like Project M did. PM didn’t just buff them to make them viable, it expanded what they were capable of.
I’d point to SD Remix as a better balance mod than whatever his final result will be. SD Remix versions of characters are also in the latest 20XX hackpack.
Balancing to the top didn’t completely work in PM, as I’ve explained previously, but it’s still preferable to this.
Celia Alexis Wagar's CritPoints 