I do agree that Eyedol is extremely good. He definitely came out of the cooker a little hot, IMO.
Warrior is incredibly strong, even without pip cancels. And despite this, jump HP is so dominant that I think there is little reason to do anything else from many ranges. But the devs have said on twitter that j.HP will see some tweaks in the next patch. I personally think it needs to lose like 15-20 frames of advantage (no jump normal should be +25, or +3 or so if done instantly off the ground), and the hitbox needs to be quite a bit shorter so anti-airing it without a DP is not so impossible. The reason anti-airing it is so hard is because the hitbox swings really fast, in addition to it being really big. So even if you press a beefy anti-air button, you just have to randomly hope that it coincides with when jump HP swings into your button during your anti-air’s active frames. If you’re wrong, you get hit (and comboed).
This is the hitbox for jump HP, which swings around him in just a few frames. You have no hope of hitting his hittable box, which is way in the back, so your only hope is to out-prioritize the red box, which is very hard to do if your anti-air is only active for 2 or 3 frames.
Warrior is still very strong without jump HP though. Pip cancels are really good and his normals are very difficult to contest. But I can see that being a bit more manageable if you don’t have to worry about jumping HP putting you in 30 frames of block stun and is maybe anti-airable.
I do think mage is the weaker form, despite still being good. A lot of characters struggle to contest the zoning, and you should have pips available most of the time because command grab in warrior is very good (better than Gargos devil divide, as far as range, startup, mixup potential goes). His main weakness is a slow reversal (but still a reversal!) and low damage on average, so you can take some hits from mage and not die. The scary thing is, I think smart mage play involves not entering the combo system too often and instead just building pips for warrior by finishing combos with teleport. You accept that you won’t be doing damage to your opponent and instead front-load the warrior stance.
And I think his instinct is, by several orders of magnitude, the best in the game. I even made a thread about how to deal with instinct shadow DP, which is challenging for many characters, requires meter for almost all characters, and is missable in a fight because the window is small. Even without this, you basically have to deal with 15 seconds of warrior with even more far-range button options, and the character also can’t be zoned. It’s very strong.
Basically, I think both stances are very good (warrior better, though), so the random stance switching doesn’t really impact him all that much. In fact, every time he switches stances, he has an opportunity to freeze the screen and maybe punish something you were doing… stance switching can actually be good, even if it’s to the stance you don’t want!
I don’t think warrior really struggles to get through zoning that much (maybe with worse j.HP he will struggle slightly more? but he only has to really get to half screen before he is a threat, and he has a short jump and a run), and mage kinda sucks up close but it’s more manageable than characters without a reversal (Kan-Ra, Spinal, Gargos, etc). And he has instinct pop as his ultimate reversal, which Spinal and Gargos don’t really have. And when he’s at the peak of his momentum, he is probably the best character in the game.