Her air melee's useful and has great range, but if it whiffs you're screwed. It also does next to nothing in terms of spirit damage, but then again guard crushes in SWR/UNL aren't that great anyway.
I would say anyone missing with melee is going to risk being punished. Patchy is no exception.
Her bullets aren't anywhere near as dense or as powerful as they should be. Aside from 6C and 236BC, most characters have bullets that at least trade with hers.
Her bullets don't need to be denser. If her bullets were denser, she'd be god tier. Seriously. She covers so much with her different bullets that it's ridiculous.
Spout can be highjumped on wakeup, and thanks to Patch's limited melee moveset you can't capitalize on that very well at all. Of course, if they block it's pretty much a guaranteed guardcrush.
That's the point, to force them to be where I want them. It wouldn't be a wake-up game if I wasn't trying to manipulate them on wake-up. Also, it's pretty much nothing to stuff someone who's high-jumping with an 8A. And if Patchy can't stuff them, she's still pretty safe. What are they going to do to her while the spout's up?
Emerald City is terrible compared to just about every other reversal. It's grazable, and there's lots of vulnerable time afterwards if you whiff (or even if it's blocked). And if your opponent's using a graze attack then it doesn't even matter since you just gave them a free counterhit.
Terrible how? It has invulnerability frames on startup. What more do you want it to do? It's not like it's a spell card; there's maybe one or two reversals in the game that aren't to begin with. And I know graze attacks are a weakness, so I'm not gonna fling it up when someone's dashing in. EC is used more to take out jump-ins and punish delays.
And even if you want to discount EC entirely, she still has the crystals to work with which are just as, if not better, than the spout is.
Silent Selene's great, but it's not like it automatically makes her better than other characters. Plus it has a tendency to drop the opponent, and with limit it's not as useful as in IaMP.
How useful it is in IaMP means nothing. And whether it drops the opponent or not, it still functions as a reversal and as a link. The threat of her invoking it makes Patchy hard to approach, which is very dangerous with her array of bullets and zoning specials.
Royal Flare's startup is massive, and everyone except Yukari and Youmu can graze the entire thing if you don't combo into it (which drops it to about 3.5k damage, so at that point you may as well be using St. Elmo's Pillar instead anyway).
Sorry, but you're wrong here. Let me explain why.
Bullet attacks cost spirit to graze in Hisou Tensoku, even when ground dashing. If they have 3 or less spirit orbs, it is a -guaranteed- Guard Crush. There is NO way the opponent can stop it. Block, dash, fly, nothing saves them. This alone doesn't sound like a big deal; except Royal Flare is designed so that the first few times it hits delivers the brunt of the damage; REGARDLESS of when those first few hits occur in the spell card.
So it basically means they're taking about 40% life easily nomatter how many hits of the spell they manage to absorb before it hits.
That means Patchy having you in the corner is very dangerous. I'm not proficient in using it this way, but I have most certainly seen its effects on the receiving side.
If you want to just compare the damage; St Elmo's Pillar combo'D off of a spout is 2800. Royal Flare is 4500.
It's a very dangerous spellcard. Yes, this or Silent Selene alone doesn't make a great character, but Patchouli is full of this stuff.
Philosopher's Stone can be fun, but opponents I usually play will just abuse graze if they see me whip it out, at which point I'll end up taking more damage than they do by the time it ends.
Then you need to open them up. You have the ability to fill the screen with BS. You have plenty of room to throw melee at them to open them up. Even in the worst case scenario of them running away from you endlessly; catch them once and you're gonna do at least 2500 damage from that one combo. And running away is easier said than done.
Let's also not forget that her lack of melee specials means that if you block during any of her combos you can simply dash forward and smash her face in after her melee ends since everything after will be grazable.
Yeah, that would be what would happen if I just auto-comboed you in the corner mindlessly. But we're playing a mind-game here; what if I expected you to try dashing and 2A'd you? Or 6A'd?
It isn't really that simple.
