Here's how I'm looking at this. Jade has:
- Fantastic range that involves weapons so she has safety in extending her reach
- Glow which is a middle finger to so many moves (and even some characters entirely)
- Potentially good zoning power if your variation focuses on it
- An S+ tier D2
- An S tier D4
- Great stagger potential due to her range
Basically, Jade should be everyone's least favorite opponent in the neutral as she has options for potentially every scenario to stay in an advantageous position. For these strengths, Jade's power budget gets pulled from the following areas:
- General damage
- Combo potential
- Block safety
- Whiff safety
- Speed
I think out of all of these weakened areas, her general damage is the area that makes no sense to me. As I said in the Jade General Discussion thread a while ago, most characters' opponents need to make 4-6 notable mistakes on average before they're done for. Jade's opponents need to make upwards of 9-13+ on average. Her combo potential being intentionally hindered makes sense because it'd be super frustrating if the staff lady got a read on you at a distance you can't do anything about and proceeded to burn meter to get 280+ damage on you (ignoring F21 which can do this because it's stupid slow and impractical). Jade's overall damage being as piss poor as it is is what makes her feel so weak. One successful wiggle stick + butterfly whiff or poke read results in such a small amount of damage that the opponent doesn't really need to care much save for the loss in positioning. They will continue as they were to get in and proceed to take advantage of Jade's low safety and speed (as they should). If all of Jade's moves just did a little more damage, those one-off punishes and pokes would start to get scary as Jade begins taking off chunks of life that can't be ignored. Throw in some sudden bursts of KB damage and viola! Jade's still playing the same as before but now she's actually a threat.
Sound reasoning, it's perfectly valid.
Though her problems point past her damage and the reason we have come to acknowledge it being risk reward is that some of her specials such as Glow are unreasonably unsafe (-44 is not just unsafe, it's literally unviable*. I've spent a good deal punishing it in various situations in the lab and trust me, a lot of the current cast can create situations where it would even be pure death at -20.
Very few moves are so horribly unsafe.
The second problem is that many of the cast has better overall spacing game. F4's in the game are typically tools that come out fast and often lead to full combos - again the damage - but they do more than that. They circumvent her own spacing game by being simply more efficient tools. Jax, Baraka, Kabal and Liu are some characters who have no business being so much better at spacing with what else they are capable of.
These three factors:
- Her damage
- Her horrible frame data / safety
- Her inferior toolkit in many cases
create the problem of the Risk/Reward.
The reason I say I don't know what she needs is that some of these tools such as Liu's i9 F4 are decidedly overperforming and could be the moves needing the change instead of her own, and that while her horrible frame data is also a problem, Glow and Butterfly are both an essential tool that could make or break the character if they were too good or if they remained like this with other changes.
Simply put, all three of these factors - her risk reward in general - are a difficult thing to balance even for the devs who see the numbers, let alone from our player-side backseat driving.
*unviable in this context doesn't mean you can never use it, it means it's heavily punishable in many situations where she would need it, and that it can only be used in very specific situations. It's often punishable from full screen in the case of teleporters or long distance in the case of some others.
I think you mean 6.5 or so, not 4...
