Easy route for full chip, practically guaranteed on an opponents wakeup when paired with cross-stroke, with anywhere between 1-4 damage based on how effective your opponent’s blocking is.
Relatively fast for a special move, and safe on block.
Frame traps into Magenta.
Full chip if delayed for a second Cyan followed by Magenta, which is arguably more difficult to challenge than the standard CMY route.
One of the best whiff punishes in the game.
CMY on block in most situations will deal 1 damage, regardless of Y being blocked or not, discouraging taking the risk to crossup.
Retreat after CM is an incredibly common option, because there’s a good chance that you’re going to take that last point of chip with your next approach anyway.
I propose that chip be removed from Cyan for the following reasons:
It disincentivizes Valerie from repeated Cyans to score chip, and instead has her commit/mixup a bit more to get her damage.
In most cases cross-stroke oki no longer leads to guaranteed chip, encouraging Valerie to either commit to the full CMY mixup if she wants to chip, or attempt frame traps after the initial cross-stroke.
Rainbow Disc becomes less effective for simply grinding down with chip.
Another alternative, since Cyan is cancellable, would be to make it unsafe on block when its done on its own, but I’m unsure of the advantages/disadvantages of that option.
Adding more recovery frames to it (maybe to backdash too?) would weaken Cyan → Cyan, which would probably be enough. Removing chip damage could be right balance-wise, but CMY sequence doing 1 block damage is kind of Valerie’s thing and taking that away would make her less interesting.
Speaking of which, what if Yellow had weaker push force (maybe compensated with very slightly faster recovery) on block? This would make the already possible throw punish with Lum, Dragon and Rook easier to do, since as of now the only reason people don’t use this punish is… difficulty of its execution, since you have to walk for precisely 1-2 frames then throw and input buffer doesn’t help here, as you simply cannot buffer two actions at once and have them be made 1 frame after another.
I would argue that CMY not doing block damage on its own would make it more interesting. One of the issues with it is that Y has a mixup option itself, but when you have 2 mostly safe options (when including Ranbow Stroke), and one unsafe one, is the unsafe one really worth the +1 frame advantage when you’ll get your damage on block anyway? Part of what makes it interesting is taking a risk that would pay off, but the risk outweighs the reward.
Yellow itself could do with some tweaking regarding the achievable but difficult punishes, but I think that warrants its own discussion.
Mechanics wise sure, Cyan not dealing block damage would be interesting. But from a dynamics stand-point, not so much.
If the issue here is front Yellow being too safe, making it a bit easier to punish on block would fix that. Also, Rainbow “being safe” is usually not the case, as many characters can reversal or otherwise hit Valerie out of it on reaction.
Speaking of which, what if Yellow had weaker push force (maybe compensated with very slightly faster recovery) on block? This would make the already possible throw punish with Lum, Dragon and Rook easier to do, since as of now the only reason people don’t use this punish is… difficulty of its execution, since you have to walk for precisely 1-2 frames then throw and input buffer doesn’t help here, as you simply cannot buffer two actions at once and have them be made 1 frame after another.
The problem with this is that if you reduced to push back so that those three characters are in throw range, it might leave another character who is now in micro walk throw range. So Lum, Dragon and Rook can all punish easily, but now Grave has to micro walk and throw.
That may not be the case, of course, there might be a huge gap between the throw ranges of those three characters and the next longest. But unless you have tested with every character in frame step mode, I don’t think you can say for sure.
That most likely wouldn’t happen if Yellow’s recovery was compensated slightly. The idea is that it would recover fast enough to not let anyone take advantage of microwalks, but its push would be weak enough to allow at least some characters to reasonably punish it.
I think making it -5 on block (instead of -6) and weakening its pushback would work out overall, because - assuming that the new pushback lets Lum just barely punish it without microwalk - the next longest throw, namely Onimaru’s back throw, even if possible with 1 frame microwalk then instantly inputting back+throw on the next frame, wouldn’t be very relevant in this use case because Valerie already vastly prefers Rainbow over neutral Yellow against him (assuming Onimaru’s upcoming buffs don’t change this dynamic of the match-up, but that’s unlikely I think). Obviously it may turn out that it’s not possible to do this without introducing microwalk throw punishes vs. Yellow for a different portion of the cast, we can’t do much but speculate here. But if it’s possible to do then it should be considered.
Many multihit specials don’t do chip on the each hit.
(Example: Geiger’s flash gear is two hits, but only deals 1 chip.)
So, if you choose to think of Valerie’s CMY as a three hit move, it is perfectly reasonable to make the first hit (Cyan) not deal chip.
When a special doesn’t deal chip on each hit it’s because one input results in mutiple hits, as opposed to CMY where one button press leads to one hit each.
