It’s a choice between health and just having that bar. We’ve established already that the juggle opportunity is useless for anything else unless Jago has the corner to convert it into HKD/flipout oki. The amount of life gained if Jago chooses to hold onto his meter is tiny and could be removed without anyone caring.
Whilst I really don’t mean to aggravate, how else did you expect this thread to turn out? It seems like you’ve dug up an obscure Spinal change from the start of the season, to identify a vague principle and cross-apply it in a way that justifies getting rid of Jago’s de facto lifegain ender, which you clearly don’t like dealing with. You’re asking for a nerf, and I don’t think suggesting buffs could be applied to compensate for that nerf is all that substantial considering that
- With Jago’s standing in peoples’ mental tier lists currently, a lot of people would howl at any buffs, even if they came alongside nerfs; and
- You’re talking about rolling the dice on a buff that you might not end up caring about to compensate for a nerf to something you obviously care about. Even if you do end up caring about the compensatory buff, who’s to say you won’t be asking for that to go later down the road, too?
You’re yet to take my hypothetical seriously, too. And again, this isn’t meant to aggravate, or intended as an attack of any kind. But if you’re asking for a nerf, just come out with it. We should be able to do that without turning this into the ■■■■■■■■■ that the competitive community had over counter breakers, even if we are emotionally invested in the specifics of the situation.
Anyway, whilst I certainly wouldn’t verbally abuse Keits or join a lynch mob or get particularly toxic over this the way that a lot of competitive players have over various season 3 changes, it’s probably worth me noting that I didn’t agree with substantial parts of the season 3 rebalance in the first place, including finding the Spinal rework a tad dubious. My impression was that IG was bringing offensive potency down a notch or two and taking damage out of the game in a number of places for reasons of “fairness” that I don’t think KI is really about, and I had the sense even then that those changes would lower the waterline and expose Jago’s strengths in a way that’d later have people baying for nerfs to Jago’s precious, beautiful frame data, hitboxes, and overall gameplan. I’m on record questioning changes to things like Wulf’s overhead prior to the start of the season. I miss strong Kan-Ra and Spinal, among others. I hate the notion that balance should deliberately ensure that certain archetypes don’t become top tier because they’d be “unfun”, I think that leaves people feeling like labbing up a character isn’t worth it because the deck is already stacked against the “unfun” ones.
I guess at this point I’m going to put any changes to Jago under a magnifying glass, and I’m looking for nerfs to Jago that “save the furniture,” that don’t hurt medium wind kick or his frame traps mainly. If we’re going to see more Jago nerfs, I’m hopeful that it’ll come out of things like passive meter gain and a proper ender damage rework, because I think Jago can be made more interesting if he can’t just do launcher ender all the time – that is, outside of instinct.
A lot of these discussions seem to happen under the assumption that Jago always has instinct. I think that kind of discussion misses the forest from the trees. Jago gets two instincts a match typically, and one of them is nearly worthless if he can’t pop it and convert it into something before he loses his first lifebar. That’s not to say it isn’t one of the better instincts in the game, but I think people are obsessed with it (and in particular obsessed with lifegain – I think if you’ve taken competitive gaming in general seriously you’d notice that people generally think lifegain in any game is better than it typically turns out to be).
I don’t know how much I care about this particular proposed change, but at some point maybe I’d prefer if Jago just lost the lifegain entirely and picked up an instinct perk of a kind that isn’t typically less potent than it looks to an uncritical observer.