(Edit: fixed some errors in the text. Also important disclaimer. This original post is talking about cowboy during the 3.0 update. But this all also applies to cowboy in every version until his nerfs in 3.4. Though, mainly pre 3.0 obviously lol.)
Alright, I feel this topic is well worth escalating into a thread.
I will disclaim, no shade is intended to be thrown here.
First and foremost, I shall set the record straight and identify myself. I am a ninja main, I mainly play with my friend, a cowboy main. But I do play games with randos every once in a while when I'm not busy with school. I've to this day not played against another ninja, and beaten all but one of the cowboys I've fought. Wizards are about 50/50.
I must say, the state cowboy is in, is honestly depressingly poor. And has totally killed my friend's will to play this game, that he once was very exited for. He was the one to introduce me to the game, if you couldn't discern that.
My friend is a loyal cowboy main, and I'm here to make the case that the current state of cowboy is the main cause of his hiatus from the game.
I'll be pulling a lot of points from a comment I made on a patch notes thread, those will be italicized so you'll know which is from that and which I wrote up now for this specifically. This'll just make my life easier lmao.
First and foremost, I win about 5 or 6 to 1 against my friend. And I've lost to one random cowboy in total before the 3.0 update, and haven't come close to losing to one since the update. The matchup was way closer before 3.0, because ninja did not have the teleport he does now. And frankly, he kinda needed it. Ninja didn't have any special actionable movement option unlike the other two characters. So it could get rough at times for Ninja.
Why do I feel this is the why it is the way it is?
Ninja isn't particularly untamed, nothing he has or can do seems outright goofy compared to the other characters. So not Ninja.
I think it's because Cowboy, while easy and forgiving, is not as effective as the others, when played the way most people play him.
Let me tell you what separates every other cowboy from the single random one that beat me. Your average cowboy is basically trying to start and/or end every interaction in range of lighting strikes, his most oppressive, boring, and spammable move. He can chain it into itself up to like 10 times before needing to teleport even after the increased knockback on repeated moves change. And can also teleport obviously to chain it again, and obviously if the cowboy is smart he'll keep himself out of range of Burst's hitbox. Your only choice is to DI up and eat the damage. This is easy to do when playing as cowboy, and pretty effective damage wise, you don't have to spend meter on it at any point, and obviously it has good range.
It's easily the most miserable thing to witness in the entire game. You can predict it and bait it and whatnot but inevitably when you are hit, there is no counterplay, you are making no choices, you just have to hit the funny button a dozen and a half times, and maybe adjust your DI.
Lightning strikes in tandem with other spammable moves, which, in a universe without lightning strikes would otherwise be perfectly fine, make Cowboy's combos a shell of what they should be and leave half of his kit in the dust. Untouched by god or man. It's really quite sad.
What did that good cowboy player do that the others did not? Well, he didn't use lightning strike at all, if I remember correctly. He'd do air chains with teleport and the various sword swipes, into the lasso command grab. Which does amazing damage. But, it takes more effort than lightning strike spam. That's the only cowboy I've seen up to this point who used that move and other's well besides the half a dozen most people just do mindlessly with noticeable levels of tact and skill. Now of course not everyone is gonna know better to use Cowboy's extra ground combo tools, launchers, and air game shenanigans right off the bat. But the big funny looking attack that's relatively safe to throw out? No duh, at first glance, why wouldn't you use it? It stands out against the rest, as Cowboy's most versatile move.
This move confounds me in the current state it is in. What role is it intended to play? Whatever that may be, it's also working double time to fill multiple other roles! Who's raised the damn thing's rent! It's clearly struggling to pay!
Jokes aside, It's really fast, but it has really good range, that outclasses many of his otherwise good long range moves automatically. Because they aren't quite as fast. Yes it requires spacing but Cowboy is the character with the most versatile movement tool in the game, teleport. So, that's not as big a deal as it otherwise would be. It also chains into itself, way more than any punch or kick or even cowboy's other basic sword swipes do in the game... In what world does that make sense? It chains into itself for about half health if not more every single time. It's kind of absurd. And not fun to watch live, or in the replay, the animation doesn't inspire much either. Especially compared to what cowboy can do, I think his combos have the potential to be the coolest looking in the game. And that's saying something because Ninja is pretty goofy with it in that regard. Based off the animation of lightning strikes, you'd think that it'd be some sort of high knockback combo ender or something. But no. And if in 3.0 Cowboy's super chainable upwards slash was nerfed into being much less chainable, why wasn't this? It's the same thing functionally, just horizontally instead of vertically! It's only weakness is calling it out with a dodge or something to avoid the hit. it's not very safe on whiff if you breach it's wall so to speak. But that won't come up all too often in my experience.
I picked up cowboy once against my friend to prove a point for fun, the results are as follows:
I played him once and totally swamped my friend, cowboy can be played really cool and do really cool combos, but you don't have to do that at all. Which isn't very fair compared to the other two where you need planning, you need to do setup, you need to use most if not all of the stuff in your kit, and etc. Cowboy has potential to be incredibly cool but his current role as the easy baby mode character is honestly kind of sabotaging that. Because the only time I've seen people use anything outside of the same single digit set of moves that chain into themselves over and over again is when I picked up the character for the first time to obliterate my friend, while going for style over substance. After which my friend actually started incorporating more of cowboy's kit occasionally. But after punishing him for going for that sorta stuff because it's not as good as spamming his spammable moves, he quit doing that. That's totally limited my friend's ability to get creative with combos, and is progressively making him worse at the game and not better. That's not my or his fault. The character is just in a totally malfunctional state right now. If you ask me, as an aspiring game designer, I'd rather see this character's potential realized then keep them stuck in a role it doesn't fit in well.
If you watched post launch interviews and whatnot, you'd know that cowboy is the least finished character in the game currently, even by the admission of our beloved developer. And this was very clear to me, especially before 3.0, obviously a crazy outlier move like lightning strikes being the way it is, among a couple other accomplice moves, and then everything else being super undertuned should make that clear. But that's a cripplingly bad problem for what's supposed to be our token "beginner friendly" character. This is super problematic, as laid out by me from the past:
To get a half health combo or more with cowboy? Hit an attack on the ground, teleport wherever you need to be, hit the buttons you wanna hit over and over until you need to teleport again or whatever, until your opponent inevitably bursts or DI's into the air. If the former, so long as you weren't hit which is likely if the enemy isn't wise, (which is likely given the average range of cowboy's sword attacks) your disjoints and instant burst movement should get you in perfect position to punish. If the latter you gotta use and eventually run out of air actions, at which point your combo might be over. But even so by the end of the air combo you'll still have netted a fair bit of damage, even outside of the previous half of the combo on the ground. That's a huge discrepancy. [Relative to the effort required for a similar reward when playing either of the two other characters.]
And because of just how much easier it is to do lame combos, nobody really combos with cowboy the way he's clearly intended to do combos. My friend says his kit feels bloated, I theorize this is because he feels half of it doesn't need to be there for cowboy to play the way most people play him now. I can even tell that he's starting to have less fun. Especially now that Ninja actually has a teleport and a new evasion move. Despite all the damage buffs, and Ninja's substantial nerfs, my friend is losing worse than ever, and when he does get a hit? He's not encouraged to be methodical or thoughtful like I'm forced to be, he's just hitting the buttons, and going through the motions. The character's just not in a healthy state. He needs a slight rework, because in many aspects he needs some minor buffs, but he also needs the chain combo spam crippled.
Basically, if it wasn't clear, I believe the character is teaching players bad habits, this is bad because the average player will do what they think is necessary to win. And if in practice they feel they get more results at first from spamming something like lightning strikes than implementing other combo tools and using things tactically and with foresight, which is clearly the intended way to play the game in general, the more time passes, the less likely they will be able to cope, when inevitably this must all be fixed.
The state cowboy is in now is honestly kind of sabotaging the game in a way. It's a great disservice to the average cowboy player that such a character with such design pitfalls that clearly isn't finished made it into the game. This needs solving, and relatively soon. Or we risk bleeding the more casual chunk of the cowboy playerbase when he is finally changed in a big way. And obviously, given the nature of the character as our beginner friendly character, we cannot afford to take such a hit. But, I wouldn't rush it, lest we risk creating something even worse. This needs to be handled with care as all game design conundrums should.
I'm sure this will be received negatively by many, but it's something I think needs to be said in the unfortunate event that the community or the developer aren't particularly aware of it. Though, I have faith that the latter is aware, as stated earlier I've complained about it before. But in the wake of no response from other players or the developer, I felt it necessary to speak out. Better sooner rather than later.
