If Falcon has all of those combos into Knee, why do you also feel that he needs it to be a reset to neutral on shield? If you play as Marth (and you did last I remember) would you want his dair to be safe on shield? It's a great attack but it's a situational combo finisher when used at its best. The move is his laggiest and easiest to punish aerial, but also the most useful. I don't think you understand something about my custom build. You compared it to normal minus standards after all. If I agreed with those, I wouldn't have a custom build to begin with. Minus is being held back by "staples" and other things that just make the game too limited for my tastes. I'm much more open to feedback, but I'm not going to let something blatantly stupid sit in the game. The way I see it, Falcon doesn't struggle with building damage and he doesn't struggle with landing knees or other KO moves. Falcon has more setups into kills than anyone I can think of outside of maybe Luigi.
As for the whole Falco thing. Falco is supposed to be a menace offstage, though I might remove one of his jumps for safe measure. I don't think him chaining his aerial is as big of a deal since it doesn't kill around 80. If it does though then yes, I'll tone up the landing lag a bit and revert the endlag to normal Minus.
He only has good combos into knee if you suck.
If you don't suck, he has highly percent specific uair combos, and otherwise combos from a high commitment attack [Falcon kick], a combo that's meaty but will NEVER kill [Raptor boost at 0%] and his only aerial with even worse startup and priority, dair. That's really not a lot.
Uair is and will always be more generally useful than knee. Juggles better, safer on shield [knee is terrible since there's so much hitlag], combo starter, still KOs fine, sets up into anything. Much, much faster, and less endlag. There's a reason in Melee whenever people asked Hax for advice, he said "uair more" - the move is his best, whether or not knee is safe on shield. Knees may be satisfying to land, but uair is best in a huge number of situations.
Also uair is SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to induce "Survival DI killed you, combo DI killed you" because combo DIing uair can KO you at like 90% on the ledge, but survival DIing it up to at least 130% can lead to knees or uairs depending on position [maybe later], at least as Falco. Knee does that a lot less, just so you're aware for your mod.
Fox and Ganondorf set up into KOs more easily. Fox can waveshine half the cast into shine gimps [lol] which is set up from literally anything -> shine or somehow knock them offstage -> shine. Ganondorf's everything KOs. I'm pretty sure Wolf and Pikachu do as well [bair is dumb on both of them, as is uair and up+B] but I'm poorly practiced with them. [Also Fox shine is dumb.]
Lemme fetch you a gfycat of when Falco's fair KOs:
http://gfycat.com/OfficialBouncyAiredaleterrier
Yes, it really is that dumb. And yes, I've done this sort of thing multiple times. Falco's fair is broken at the ledge and really bad onstage - if you gave him Melee nair as a new nair and gave him current nair as fair, he'd have a much, much better neutral game, but he couldn't do what I did in the gfycat. I'm not sure which is more broken to be honest.
We aren't talking about Fox, or Falco, or Peach, or Dorf, or Samus, or Olimar, or Little Mac, or Ronald McDonald, or Master Chief. We are talking about Falcon. His kit should not be compared to a character that plays completely differently than he does. Fox's shine is retarded. End of story. Low risk with enormous reward in many situations. If Falcon needs something changed, it will likely be addressed, but this pressuring for something that has been explained won't really get anywhere.
Good Falcons basically only nair and grab in neutral [in Minus we can add Raptor Boost as a projectile punish and Falcon Kick as a generic long range punish, but Falcon Kick is easily baited] because those are his tools with not-crappy startup and range (I'm messing around with bair and so are various Melee Falcons, the move is underrated). You won't see a good Falcon throwing out random knees even when it's safe on shield, because it's just too hard to land. If someone takes that risk and sweetspots it, I think they should be allowed to not be instantly shieldgrabbed, unless they got perfect shielded [then get rekt - more on that below]. Clearly this mod (and Minus as a whole) think that's too broken (and too broken in Minus is a laughable concept to me, but I guess others have different concepts of what broken truly is).
I'll reiterate just to make sure nothing is misunderstood. Risk vs reward is how attacks are designed and balanced around.
"This attack is strong and quick and can be used pretty much anywhere? Put some punishment downside to it where possible so it can't be super abused."
"This attack is quick, deals low damage and doesn't have a ton of utility except in certain situations? No need to make it super easy to punish. Maybe even make it a combo starter or something."
Reliability is solely on the player's shoulders, because that is a judgment issue.
"Should I use this attack now and risk the punishment? Or wait til they're in a stunned or otherwise vulnerable state?"
"Gee, they're offstage below me. Do I use Falco's dair? Is it something likely to land?" It stays out forever and meteor smashes them. It's the most reliable gimping tool in Minus outside of Fox shine [which is dumb]. The reward is not only high, it's extremely easy to land considering it's a meteor smash. Compared to Ganondorf's dair, it's clear that Falco's dair is SIGNIFICANTLY more reliable than Ganon's dair.
Sure, you can say "a player can make it just as reliable" but if you give them Falco's dair it will only ever be even more reliable than it is, and vice versa [since double dair out of a meteor cancel is easy, they can only go up or in their recovery animation - having one or two options is really, really bad vs that dair]. Reliability is a question of utility that is separate from risk [if Luigi's dtaunt was fully invincible, it'd be very low risk, but still almost fully unreliable, and no, you can't "make" it more reliable as a player, it just wont' work against someone who knows what they're doing.]. This is why reliability matters - some things are so extreme, they must have a separate consideration aside from risk-reward to be accurately understood. I think knee is the same, because while it seems low or medium-risk high-reward on paper, this ONLY applies in the punish game - it is high-risk low or medium reward in neutral, and I'd like to see that solidified to "medium reward" in general. Others feel otherwise, and I'm going to have to take a step back and just tell myself "That's ok.".
Reliability shouldn't be taken highly into consideration when designing attacks, especially if trying to mesh with risk vs reward. The results wouldn't work, because then nothing would ever be "unreliable." Some attacks need a downside to them as a deterrent to using them too much for their reward. Falcon would neither be fun to fight as or against it you could do nothing but throw knees all match and never be punished for them, even when shielded.
Jabs are "reliable" depending how you look at them, and there's low risk with low reward. However, if you did nothing but throw jabs all the time, and your opponent decided not to get hit by them anymore, they are no longer "reliable" because you can't hit your opponent. A good example for this is the new jabs in smash 4. They're good, but highly punishable when shielded. Why? Cause the risk vs reward was changed.
TL;DR
Reliability is on the player, not the attack.
You can make attacks intentionally unreliable [Falcon Punch, other stuff] to balance out risk-reward (which is already done to some moves). Falcon's knee's downside is its poor range and high startup.
Jabs are a reliable way to check OoS options, but not one to KO. That's the point - nothing should be reliable to do everything [again, shoutouts to Fox shine].
I guess the real problem is that I think knee should be safe to use on an opponent not looking to directly counter the knee, via a powershield, a faster attack, or a dodge often for the slow startup knee [spotdodge often fails vs stomp]. This is NOT how you and Kien view it, hence our differences.
I'll drop this topic as "agree to disagree" since it's going almost nowhere, unless you'd both rather keep discussing the knee [it is one of the moves I like quite a lot, alongside Link's nair, Link's dair, Falcon's dair, Falco's dair, Falco's bair, Falcon Punch, Kien's Gandouken change, Pikachu's bair, Pikachu's thunder, LUigi taunt, Luigi up+B, and Wario up+b, to name just a few.]
