Frankly, I’ve always been a just above middle-of-the-road level Spinal player. I’ll never claim to be excellent - just a Killer tier Spinal player with 45-60% Win Ratio. In Season 3 I feel my ratio is on the decline.
That said, how do other Spinal players feel he is fairing amidst the current Season 3 landscape? For non-Spinal players, how much of a threat do you consider him?
I hate to not have the hyper-specific logic behind my thoughts, or mathematical data to support it. It’s more of an overall “feel” than a series of specific insights and matchup data. If I were to list specifics, I’d say I’m getting punished on wakeup more than ever before. Sure, it’s nothing new for Spinal, but in S1/S2 I felt more capable of escaping once knocked down - perhaps players are simply used to Spinal’s behaviors?
Again, pardon the lack of concrete data. This has merely been on my mind as of late, and I’d like to consider the possibility that I’m not simply losing my edge.
Spinal is currently complete trash, primarily due to the cross up bug (you may question including bugs in balance discussions but it hasn’t been hotfixed and will be a major factor in this weekend’s Kombo Klash). The bug nullifies his oki mixups without giving him much in the way of compensation as whereas some characters can set up nasty obvious cross ups which hit meaty and so are still blocked the original direction, or slightly delayed and hit as a normal cross up instead, Spinal has difficulties setting things like this up due to the high recovery on skeleport and the high advantage on his back throw (which is normally obviously really helpful but for the cross up bug they actually get up too slowly and start getting up once you’ve crossed them up facing the normal direction and the bug doesn’t activate - delaying the cross up means you don’t recover on time to land a meaty normal).
I was hoping for more in patch 3.4, I think his divekick could have uses once it’s explored more, but thanks to the cross up bug this patch is not a good time to be exploring with Spinal.
Yeah i heard about this bug it is pretty bad for the bone man
Right now i think Spinal is very strong as a character but that is without the bugs (so how he should be) as he has a insane pressure game and his skulls can be scary for any player…Spinal was better in season 2 (possibly top 3 IMO) but he is still a great character
It mainly applies to blocking and back dashing, from my tests on the bug it doesn’t affect normals or specials. It means meaty ambiguous cross up mixups don’t work as you just block the original direction.
I am extremely frustrated with MS that they haven’t hot-fixed this frankly game-breaking issue.
This is NOT something that can wait until the next patch, but they haven’t even acknowledged the problem exists.
They need to fully revert whatever input change they made in a hotfix while they work on the issues internally, then release an update to the fix at a later time. Letting their game rot with this issue is irresponsible of them.
