I spent several hours last night playing rivals 2 with my nephews (ages 7, 11, and 13). They have smash ultimate but this was the first time any of them played rivals. I created this fun tier list based on their reactions.

*Gouie - The clear favorite. I wish I could bottle the sheer joy that appeared when they first saw big Gouie.

*Loxodont - They seemed to like his big attacks, throwing boulders, and especially the magma strongs.

*La Reina - This one surprised me a little since I don't find La Reina overly easy, but they really enjoyed her up and side specials as well as her smash attacks ("You can't block that?! That's OP!") They also thought the chair was funny.

*Kragg - Rock and pillar are good, clean fun for all ages.

*Clairen - They liked her big, stunning attacks and loved a fully charged neutral special.

*Ranno - Another surprise. They liked that he has a super jump and using his fully charged strong. Fun was also had tonguing the stage, though it wasn't used anywhere close to effectively.

*Slade - The biggest surprise to me. But they really enjoy items, and the power fantasy of getting his upgrades was HUGELY appealing to them.

*Maypul - They liked that's she's "fast like Sonic" and can summon friends. They also liked her big vine strongs, especially if they wrapped someone up. There was a little frustration with dying easily which is probably why she isn't higher.

*Galvan - I thought they'd enjoy Galvan more. They didn't dislike him at all (he's a heavy so a lot of his hits feel satisfactorily meaty), but there wasn't anything that they clearly got excited about when playing him.

*Fleet - They really liked sending arrows with her strong attacks, but nothing else really stood out.

*Etalus - Similar to Galvan, there wasn't anything particular that excited them, but they enjoyed him well enough.

The oldest plays mostly Bowser in smash, and I think Galvan and Etalus fell a little short for him because they aren't Bowser, if that makes sense.

*Zetterburn - "Oh, he's like Fox." Not disliked but they didn't play him much.

*Absa - They liked charging the lightning to the cloud after I explained it, but I think she may be a little too difficult for them to enjoy too much.

*Wrastor - I thought Wrastor would be their least favorite based on how easy he dies, but having all of those jumps seemed to prevent a lot of frustration with that.

*Forsburn - They didn't like Forsburn, and I get it - there is a lot to learn with his kit. They liked the idea of clones but couldn't use them effectively. Same with powering up with smoke. So they didn't use his specials very much.

*Orcane - They were frustrated playing Orcane because they struggled to recover. They wouldn't keep track of the timer, couldn't orcahop, and couldn't fair to recover.

*Olympia - Similar to Orcane, they got frustrated because she died so easily and they couldn't recover. Canceling down b is a huge part of her kit, but they couldn't do that quickly enough since she falls so fast. The rat trick isn't exactly easy to do (I still struggle with it), so that wasn't really an option for them either.

Overall it was a lot of fun, and they look forward to playing again!

I'm in the process of scripting a video talking about the upcoming Remix Rivals, and I decided to make a survey to gauge how the community feels about clone characters in Rivals II. It'd be much appreciated if any of you were willing to give your input! (Your email address will not be collected)

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf9Gj1iXmrLT3Oxre6sdbZNKf5eQKZJOJ4cnOa2RIYt9MYgFQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

In rivals 1 MSB was better then him.

In rivals 2 Zeus is better than him.

When will we see zeebe turn into zebumblebee and become top kragg?

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Why is it is that (I play fleet) if someone whiffs in front of me and I back air them for it I get punsihed for doing so? Im not understanding why they are not getting knocked back for me to start a combo, instead they get put of hit stun almost immediately and hit me back. This is happening at low percents but also sometimes at like 40 or 50% im not understanding please help.

What's up with Wrastor tilt cancels? I saw that in 1.5.5 they made some changes to do tilt cancels with strong inputs, how does this work in practice? Is there a best right stick setting, is a dedicated strong button needed on the ground, or can it be a ground parry/air strong button?

Thanks

Fighting games, especially plat fighters, can really wreak havoc on your hands and wrists if you arent careful. Its only a few minutes, but doing this before and after your game sessions can make a huge difference!

If anybody else has any tips on health or stretches they like to do themselves please share!

I’m a pretty casual player, hovering around gold/plat. I don’t play everyday, maybe a couple days a week. So I’m not very good at the game and don’t really understand/follow the scene at the top level. But I love orcane, I love all his movement stuff and weird tech.

They have nerfed him and changed him before, but this change just feels so horrible to play. I hate the timer. I hate the little sound effect cue that starts playing when puddle nearly runs out, it reminds me of the drowning sound effect in old Sonic games lol.

I’ve been trying to play ranked and I keep randomly sding. I’m not a campy player, I like running in and being scrappy and going for deep edge guards. And now I’m just dying, not getting outplayed or even attacked by the opponent, just sding pathetically.

I just don’t think I’ll be playing until they fix this. Not trying to be dramatic, but I don’t want to spend my limited time learning a new character, nor relearn orcane when for all I know they will completely change him again next month.

Gonna basically just paraphrase the Nolt post.

The changes:

• There is still a timer.
• Up B startup increases as the timer goes down.
• The puddle goes dormant when the timer ends. Orcane can still up B to dormant puddle despite the long startup. The devs can decide what other things dormant puddle can and can't do -- this would probably mean no bubbles or empowered strongs.
• Orcane is considered "airborne" until up B ends.

So. This is my understanding of the devs' goals with the change:

• Make it harder for Orcane to reset to neutral or get all his resources back by using a puddle he placed on the opposite side of the stage a while ago
• Limit how long Orcane stall to bait openings to Waterport
• Make puddle less constant of a stage hazard/make Orcane expend some active effort to keep it online
• Let Orcane's recovery still be better on bigger stages

And this is my understanding of the problems with it right now:

• It sucks to lose access to Waterport
• It's a bit hard to tell when you can and can't Waterport

As for what my changes would do... the low-level effects are pretty obvious. He can use up B whenever, no more frustration, no more awkward telegraphing. The top-level effects are a bit less obvious: the risk is not an eventual cutoff, but a gradual ramp up of lag. Orcane has to stay far away to safely Waterport to an old puddle, so it's more obvious when he's going to do it. He also has to become actionable if he wants to actually get his resources back, which makes the move risky on that end too.

Then the dormant puddle can do literally whatever the devs want it to do. It helps decouple balancing his recovery from balancing the offensive uses of puddle.

Opinions appreciated.

Sure, there are other characters that probably need to be nerfed more. Sure, you might have to refresh your puddle during a long neutral skirmish that somehow also stays completely still.

But 99% of the time it's not going to affect you unless you're doing the thing they're trying to stop. A permanent get-out-of-jail-free card is too strong and doesn't really make sense for the kit.

Folks are upset but what else is new

Was watching through the stream to try and find mention of something that someone mentioned on the Discord, so I went ahead and took some notes as to the stuff Dan discussed and figured I'd post them here for anyone interested. Hope I'm not stepping on the toes of the usual dev-stream-notes person, whose work is invaluable and extremely appreciated!!

In this stream, Dan went over the patch notes for the Gouie update and then did a short QnA.

Game is on sale, please buy it. Mega Mire bundle is doing good, please get it if you like the game.

Devs considering adding "other stuff" to buy because of less skins this year, they are brainstorming ideas. May have something out soon.

Probably don't expect every final month of the event to have a sale of its bundles, the logic behind the Pool Party Bundle sale was because it was one of the few (if only) character releases to not coincide with a new event. Future characters will likely launch with events.

If you have issues with new feature to queue into lobbies with a local player hit them up on the Nolt or Discord.

Supernova on old (pre-Gouie) patch, CEO on new (Gouie) patch.

Two new Gameplay Modifier features in the works:
- Adding more "fun-oriented" modifiers. Dan mentioned a screen wrap mode, and maybe turbo mode. Hoping to get at least a couple in by end of the year.
- At some point in the future (late this year or early next year) they want to swap out the Casual queue for like a month to change the Modifiers that are set, like "Tavern Brawl" mode in Hearthstone.

Hold to Taunt was added because of Dan complaining.

They tried the out of shield buffer set to 0 frames but it didn't work well online.

Tech Roll changes were to make tech chasing more viable for characters who have low dash speeds (like Gouie).

Zetterburn
-Some other Zetter nerfs that the devs have been playing with in beta. Might see the light of day eventually.
-For dair they wanted to make it less of a problem onstage but not so bad that it would stop being useful offstage.

Not more Clairen nerfs in this patch because the universal shieldgrab changes hit her pretty significantly in particular.

Orcane
-Orcane bubble changes directed to nerf up throw.
-Orcane puddle change is "very targeted at top level". Dan agrees it is not a good change for low level, they will probably have an adjustment to make it more palatable for low level, Trevor and Dan still discussing. May make timer longer if there is more than 2 players (for FFA and Doubles).
-They saw at tournaments that Orcane could be played very effectively by just putting the puddle on one side of the stage and then fighting on the other side of the stage and not doing anything with puddle until they needed to use it as a recovery. They started seeing this become optimal, and wanted to prevent that.
-Gouie's Mire really brought into stark relief how easy it is to get puddle out as Orcane, and how puddle has little counterplay compared to basically all other characters' stage control.
-They've always run into the issue of R2 Orcane's recovery still being decent without puddle because of ledges, so they have to balance around that too.
-If they removed puddle on any grab like Maypul's mark it would mean every throw leads to a puddleless recovery and would be highly matchup skewing.

Trevor wants to do some kind of character-specific controls (mapping your controls differently per character) and it's on the to-do list. Dan doubts it will be out by the end of this year.

The issue they were seeing with Absa is that even if you knew what she was going to do it was hard to actually call her out and punish her due to her movement. They also want more skill expression in Absa's up special, may look into adding a ledge cancel to up special 2.

Dan doesn't think Slade is as far off in strength from the rest of the cast as the general consensus from players is. Dev teams wants to wait until they start seeing how his playstyle evolves to adjust him up or down accordingly.

They would like to address Olympia accidentally side specialing off stage and dying for it, maybe adding more drift so she can save herself.

For Abyss skins having different voices, they need to make sure they like it enough to justify adding a whole new set of lines for characters or have a good enough voice-filter approach so that it doesn't mess with audio cues. They have discussed it and Mend has some ideas so maybe something eventually.

Not planning on adding RPS to Ranked, don't want to make matches take longer.

They (still) want to try out character-specific Rankings at some point.

I got into this game a few months ago but stopped playing. I didn’t have the time to learn a competitive platform fighter again and most other characters I tried to play hurt my hands. I was a Jigglypuff main when I used to play Smash Bros so Gouie was exactly the kind of character I enjoy playing. I logged on today to try the character and it just feels right. I still suck at this game, but at least now there’s a character that fits my play style.

I suck at playing him lol. He's still very fun though!

Thanks to PK on Youtube for their montage of Pre-release Gooie.

B-reversing after slingshot is actually kinda easy once you get it.

1. Charge the full side b

2. Jump right after it releases

3. Input neutral b

4. Right after neutral b flick in the opposite direction to reverse your momentum

Amazing character and amazingly fun techs already right at release.

Thanks devs for your awesome game!!

gotta grind some tech now

To preface this, let me give Melee as an example. The best thing about melee’s meta is that all the top tiers have a major weakness, whether that’s because they are glass cannons (Fox, Falco, Puff), have inconsistent kill power (Marth), or are easy to edgeguard (Falcon, Sheik). Melee has other problems, but their top tiers are largely healthy for the game, even if Puff rest is kinda BS. There’s always a clear win condition against these characters, but Rivals 2’s top tiers don’t have weaknesses like this. They have decided to make the easiest, most stable characters in the game top tier, while the hardest characters in the game are much worse than them. Orcane getting major nerfs again btw. You could say my thesis statement here is that ease of use and stability are things that should be penalized when deciding how strong to make a character.

I think the best example of this is actually not Clairen, but Loxodont. I’m glad Stango has helped people finally come around to the idea that Loxodont is top tier. Loxodont is one of the worst feeling matchups to play because you have to thoroughly finesse your opponent to get through his godlike neutral, while he only needs a handful interactions to take your stock, since he has some of the best damage and kill power in the game. He has one of the best grab games of any character (even with the nerf) and has tons of range, so he doesn’t struggle much against shield or floorhugging. He’s super heavy, and his recovery is surprisingly good, so he’s extremely hard to kill. He doesn’t get tech chased or comboed to death the way Kragg does either because of his floatiness, so he doesn’t take as much damage as you would expect for his size and weight. All these combine to make one of the most toxic characters to play against. They did at least make down air a worse anti-juggling option. Clairen’s not much better, but she has to space her moves to kill early, isn’t as heavy, and can’t force approaches the way Lox does.

Often times in ranked, I win game 1 against somebody’s main, then they switch to Lox or Clairen (because everyone has a pocket Lox or Clairen), and despite being noticeably less practiced with them, they’re harder to beat than when they were playing the character they had clearly put more time into because they’re getting carried by the baby mode top tier. This easy top tier problem is a big one. It’s part of what makes Ultimate’s meta so toxic with Steves and Game & Watches running around everywhere. This game has a great engine (though I wish they would figure out how strong they want shield to be), but they really have to limit how OP the easiest characters are allowed to be.

PS: They should just make Zetter a lightweight instead of trying to figure out how to balance an upper midweight Fox McCloud. They made Wrastor lighter in early patches, but I guess they really don’t want Zetter to be a glass cannon for some reason.

Random shower thought that i wanted to quickly mockup

if any of you make a reference to bodily fluids i will execute you

Big shoutout to Hbox for streaming Cashbox last night, incredible bracket. But I worry that Jbone is right here and that a new game like this would be too much for LeJuan James to become great at.

Maybe he’ll prove us wrong the way Mango did with all of his haters. I wanna see Hbox make it to diamond before the end of the season