Ness' gimpability -- still as big an issue as in Brawl?

[Conda]

We've seen how easy it is to gimp Ness' recovery in Smash 4 so far.

Enemies can no longer easily just land on your PKT bolt to dissipate it - it has half a second of pass-through properties (similar to the custom PKT that makes it like lucas's). However, the PKT bolt can still be attacked with a projectile, or ness can be blown out of the recovery with a 'wind' effect, which is very common now amongst the cast.

Also, Ness can be edgeguarded with a normal old aerial, since PKT2-ing still takes some time, and often my opponents aren't too afraid to just drop down and toss a Nair to keep me from completing PKT2.

At the higher skill levels, what is going to stop players from doing these measures against good Ness players?

Also, the custom Lucas variant of PKT2 doesn't prevent any of this from happening, really. It just prevents body-blocking the bolt. But Ness can be gimped many ways out of it this time around with all the wind effects, as well as everyone's better edgeguarding game.

So is this still a fundamental end-of-the-day weakness for Ness that good players will be sure to exploit?

Also for fun -- what other characters have weaknesses like this? (there are a few )

 

[Mysteltainn]

It's still a real thing, but Ness is equipped with a new tech called the Double PSI Thunder, where if activated again quickly after bouncing off of a stage wall, he can perform it again. This isn't going to get rid of Ness' recovery problems completely, but mastering this new tech will be a must in this instalment, and will only mean good things for Ness in the end.

See it here -

 

[Eagleye893]

This has always been a problem when playing Ness. Opponents can gimp you easily if you give them opportunities to do so (Mario's cape says hello). One key point when learning Ness is to attempt to reduce the numbers of opportunities your opponent has to gimp you by playing away from un-safe offstage positions and mastering the options you have when you recover.

--You can direct your PKT in a wider circle if the opponent is waiting on the edge or preparing an attack so that your PKT2 is delayed.
--You can use a reverse-PKT2 (in which you circle the pkt forward around yourself to avoid putting the thunder head above and behind you) if an opponent is moving behind you to try and catch the PKT Head.
--You can direct yourself at different angles to avoid moving toward your opponent in a way that puts you in danger. An example of this is going straight up when someone is charging an FSmash that would hit you if you went forward.
--You can hold Down while in PKT2 to avoid snapping ledges. This can be useful with the new bouncing glitch/mechanic to bounce off and give yourself another arc, though it might not be useful if you're already capable of recovering.
--Ness' second jump has a relatively high peak, so sometimes if you DI (or vector) properly on hit, you won't need to use PKT2 and can move accordingly.
--You can interrupt Ness' second jump to initiate PKT->2 earlier if you want to give yourself space to actually hit Ness with the PKT Head.

There are some situations in which you fly so far offstage that your second jump needs to be used at its full height to even just reach the edge, and those situations we can't really do anything to avoid gimp-ability. The point is that we need to play to create situations where it's pretty dang hard to gimp us unless we screw up. We seem to be less gimp-able because of the fact that PKT goes through people on startup now and that we can bounce off stage to refresh our upB, but the core of our recovery hasn't really changed much over any game.

 

[Conda]

I posted a thread to discuss Character Weaknesses in the competitive forum. I wrote a bit about Ness's gimpability in the OP, so I'll share it here: http://smashboards.com/threads/char...g-capitalizing-on-designed-weaknesses.374295/

@ Eagleye893 - I wrote a bit about Ness using DJ to recover being way less safe then in Brawl to to airdodge nerfs when landing, and how that changes things drastically. Check it out, see if I'm forgetting something.