I am astounded that you do not have Luigi on there. It's blatantly obvious that he ***** the face off Diddy. I agree with Peach and Wario being very bad matchups for Diddy. For Wario, you have to read his movement in the air perfectly to win. It also helps to get a grab release spike in or two. Lucario is an enfuriating matchup if he camps and rolls. It's surprisingly hard to punish. After playing Jash last week, I hate TL even more. The character is able to run away and spam projectiles into combos at all times and it's always effective.
Whether or not you feel like Luigi is Diddy's worst match-up, which I understand many of you do, is pure opinion. I recognize that my outlook doesn't always echo popular consensus, but that is kind of why we're having this mini-discussion on the matter in the first place.
As far as Luigi goes, I personally feel that the match-up is even. I won't do a full-blown analysis, but here are the big things:
- Aside from his somewhat mediocre fireball, Luigi has absolutely no way to reliably zone you from mid-range.
- Although Luigi has insane priority on virtually all of his attacks, he has p*ss-poor horizontal aerial movement. Everything that he does in the air is telegraphed, and you can almost always expect him to cover the almost nonexistent cool-down on his F-air or D-air immediately with N-air's instant start-up, or some sort of lame air-dodge mind game. Most people who face Luigi always feel the urge to try to drop their shield and attack him in-between aerials, which, of course, never works. Your solution? - Shield everything and punish his landing lag.
- Contrary to popular belief, most characters (including Diddy) have frame advantage while Luigi attempts to jab-cancel after the first jab. Jab him back to space him away, or jump or roll away to avoid his Super Jump Punch, D-tilt, or whatever else he decides to throw at you.
- His main approach (from the air) is not very reliable if it is baited. You are not dealing with Peach's dual zoning, or even Marth's F-air. What you will see most of the time if you drop the ball and allow him to get that close to you is D-air > N-air, which is not safe against your shield at all.
- It is incredibly obvious when Luigi's go-to kill move, F-smash, will be attempted. If you are around 75-80%, you can pretty much expect him to be setting up for this move in some way. Most of the time, it will be angled upward in order to slightly reduce start-up and cool-down (from how it's been explained to me, at least). There is absolutely no reason for you to approach him, much less be within three character lengths of him, while you are hovering around critical KO percents. Just. Run. Away. You will be shocked at how effective and annoying this tactic is.
- By contrast, you have many moves that are surprisingly safe against Luigi's shield, including charged smashes. Luigi's unusual low traction physics will slide him safely outside of his grab or attacking range. This is important in exploiting Luigi's lack of mid-range options, and keeping him outside.
Diddy Kong has more resources at his disposal that allow him to out-space, out-zone, outrun and out-gay Luigi in almost every way imaginable. Hit-and-run is especially effective against him due to his generally slow movements, as it also takes advantage of his lack of tools to fall back on in order to compete with our ability to zone. If you manage to force Luigi to approach the majority of the time, there ought to be nothing surprising about the rest of the match.
All of the tactics that I've recently been trying to develop against Peach work wonders in the Marth match-up, and are laughably even more effective against Luigi, who I believe to have worse tactical resources than Marth in almost every way (namely range and ability to close distance). The only thing he has on Marth is his propensity for wildly early KOs, but these are generally not difficult to avoid if you just retreat during kill percentages.
Your typical Diddy game has to be drastically readjusted against Luigi, admittedly. I take to the air a great deal more in this match-up and focus on tacking on damage via bait and punishment as opposed to virtually nonexistent banana combos. Banana peels are still crucial in the match-up to me in order to set up specific traps and encroach on Luigi's spacing.
Incidentally, the way I play against Luigi works even better on Kirby, Jigglypuff and Mario. Mario in particular gets ***** even harder once you permanently trap him at mid-range. The entire mid-range concept grew out of the idea of, "Why even deal with trying to punish another character's slew of lagless, high-priority attacks
if I just simply avoid being in that situation in the first place?" I'm still working out the kinks to my execution in the Peach match-up, but virtually all the characters I've mentioned here lack Peach's sheer attack speed and Float ability, so the tactic works exceptionally well against the rest of those guys.
When NinjaLink was giving me advice on the Peach match-up, the one thing that hit home with me more than anything else was, "Don't get D-aired." It simple and stupidly obvious and obnoxiously difficult against Peach in particular, but what if you applied that idea against other characters?
Seriously, guys.
Just.
Run.
Away.
I've never had so much fun faking helplessness in my life.
EDIT: Okay, so this ended up being a full-blown match-up analysis anyway. I hate you all.