After playing a fair bit I have more notes:
The lack of horizontal height gained from Ninja's DP as of now, I feel, is honestly a bit cruel. It barely goes off the ground at all! I honestly don't mind the height being nerfed, traditional anti airs aren't quite a thing in this game. And the lower the height gained, technically the more safe the move becomes. But this very much limits situations where you could bounce someone into the air, and then go into DP and hit with the latter half. Which was a good non jump way to get into the air and start my beloved double jump air combos. It's especially good in that regard after cancels, where you cannot always jump right after. Something in between pre patch and post patch would be nice. Or, perhaps, DP could get a stance-esque shenanigan. Where after the first hitbox comes out on the ground, where you'd normally just be able to cancel, you could also chose how high the DP goes. Like how you'd select the light, medium, or hard version of a DP in street fighter by your choice of buttons. This'd be cool! Maybe it'd give the move a bit too much versatility, but we've already lost the invincibility. Really, if you could chose between the height of pre patch, and the height of post patch, it'd just be for the sake of comboing with one, where you couldn't with the other, or going higher into the air or staying closer to the ground for combos. If anything, the option for a higher DP would more often be a liability.
Cowboy can still kinda just spam stuff like lighting strike for free high damage combos. Even with DI it's honestly kinda dumb, he can still rep like 8+ before he has to do something else, usually teleport, at which point he can often just, do another set. Cowboy is supposed to be the easy to pick up character, but honestly where other characters like Ninja are forced to really use all their options, or be ready to adapt to situations where some of their options won't hit, and their disadvantage stake is so much more exploitable (though this was made much better by the new teleport, praise Jesus for that one, finally made my cowboy friend have a taste of his own medicine lmao) cowboy just gets to hit the funny button(s) and has a million ways to escape tricky situations for free. The latter was a much bigger issue last patch because Ninja had no burst option equivalent to missile mode or teleport so I wouldn't get caught up with that. But when it comes to the former even with the new knockback bonus to moves that are repped, it doesn't change Cowboy's honestly kinda lame combos.
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. Either that, or cowboy can be made relatively more forgiving, while nerfing his nonsense in a way that doesn't kill his cool moves that are good atm, but instead encourages and even forces when necessary more thoughtful and diverse play. So that way he's at least fair and comparable to the other two characters, in terms of how the brain power to damage/funny combo number go up scale. Honestly stuff like his swipes can stay spamable, those are equivalent to the punches and kicks of the other characters and you can chain those a fair bit. And they are quite forgiving, but honestly they aren't as offensive as some of his other "why is this the way it is?!" spammable moves. Like lighting strike. And the swipes do look quite cool in the replay. Those, honestly, could maybe just stay the way they are. But his long range super disjointed special moves and whatnot can just be chained, and for way longer than other character's actual moves that are supposed to he chained. Or even his moves, which are supposed to be chained. Lighting strike needs a bit more recovery time, and a lot more knockback. I'd personally make it the mid/long range combo ender. But unless stuff like this is changed, the grand canyon sized divide between cowboy's mindless chaining and the other two character's fun strategical decision making will continue to grow.
And it's already bad enough as is. To have a chance of getting a half health combo with Ninja, you gotta spend resources, have great spacing in the ground and air usually using double jumps very strategically and skillfully, and chose your attacks in your string wisely. 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.
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. My friend's a loyalist, I don't know how long I'll be able to convince him to play the game when the one character he's interested in on a conceptual and aesthetic level (and to a massive degree in both regards) is in the state cowboy currently is. And it's quite sad, because he was the one to introduce me to the game in the first place!