thehard
Smash Lord
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Most people don't understand Miis enough to rate them accurately, or they're not sure what moveset they're supposed to be rating them under.
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Official Viability Ratings v2 | Competitive Impressions
- Thread starter Shaya
- Start date
- Status
TDK
Smash Master
I define viable as a character who you can effectively solo main a tournament with and consistently place well with.
Project Quarantine
Smash Apprentice
Oh no. Do I need to pull out the dictionary on y'all like a few months ago in the old thread?
No
Viable is generally defined in the smash scene as "able to win high level tournaments." The word(s) preceding viable, such as: not, kinda, very, solo-main or barely, define how "viable" a character is.
edit: ninja'd by TDK sorta
edit2: I feel like everyone should agree on something to the effect of this
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DunnoBro
The Free-est
He's a worse little mac imo
His "answer for everything" is trying to not die and killing with rage.
Speaking of mac, I'm bad at testing in-depth interactions but little mac vs luigi seems hilarious.
Rapid jab beats fireball and dash grab. Only losing to well spaced aerials, roll behinds, grounded cyclone, and dash attack. None of which provide a very appealing risk/reward for luigi with mac's escape/punish options while grounded.
Also, mac's dash attack is actually safe on luigi's shield.
If there's a way to have fun fighting luigis, mac is probably the answer lol
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Browny
Smash Hater
warionumbah2
Smash Master
The only top player who picked up mk then switched to ryu is Mr R(still has him as a pocket tho). The new mks don't matter as much as its the same old mks doing well, abadango is the best thing mk got in the era of hype as he's discovering utilts utility. Only leo actually uses utilt as a kill confirm and im glad abadango is doing so as well. Right now mk is being consistent, he's placing well but it looks really average because most of his results were huge upsets or super hype inducing (salena vs nietono and leo vs mr r).
Tyrant plays the sheik MU more than any other and he's come up with legit tactics(insightful advice) to not make it as bull**** as usual. He finally ended the win streak void had other him its now 3-2 in voids favor. Not sure on tier placements this thread is super flip flop on their opinions with mk, but that seems to be the theme for sword users.
Yoshi is not solo-viable because the Diddy Kong Match-up is really terrible right now.
Guest Mii-Brawler, free moves is High Tier. But not a real threat, because he lacks casual kill moves. I'd call him viable because he doesn't outright lose most match-ups. He's pretty balanced in that regard.
Guest Mii-Brawler, free moves is High Tier. But not a real threat, because he lacks casual kill moves. I'd call him viable because he doesn't outright lose most match-ups. He's pretty balanced in that regard.
Wintropy
Peace and love and all that jazzmatazz~! <3
- Joined
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So since we're on the subject of tier systems, I want to throw out an idea I've been pondering on for some time.
I'm 99% certain this has been said before, but oh well, we thrive and create~
Recently, somebody in this thread defined the "big" Ikes in the current metagame based on the scale of their ability: in other words, whether they are able to challenge a local, a regional or a national. I think that's an interesting way of examining it. I'm wondering if it'd be beneficial to try something similar with characters rather than players?
In other words, rather than debating how "good" a character is in itself and then stack that up with every other character in the roster (which inevitably comes down to "which meta-irrelevant mid-tier is this meta-irrelevant mid-tier better than?"), we make a simple, abstract table of where characters can be placed based on their "scale of threat" quota.
So to offer a very haphazad educational example:
National threat:
etc
Regional threat:
etc
Local threat:
etc
If necessary for the sake of competitive relativity, add a "not a threat" category.
N.B. THIS IS JUST FOR DEMONSTRATIVE PURPOSES, PLEASE DON'T READ TOO MUCH INTO IT, 'KAY~?
Now I don't propose that this is a "better" way of doing it, or even that it's a good idea in the first place. There's every chance it doesn't offer any new data or is just a very slapshod way of restating what we already know (i.e. Sheik is better than Meta Knight, Meta Knight is better than Bowser Jr, etc), plus it may take results solely into account without considering theoretical viability or be prone to massive change depending on which region you're examining (that said, maybe a different table for different "nation"-bodies is a good idea, i.e. one for the US, one for Japan, one for EU, one for Oceania, etc), but I wanted to throw the idea at the clever people and see what sticks.
If nothing else, it might be a fun project to get discussion going. It isn't a big clever new idea, just something I've been wondering and wanted to share.
Peace~ <3
I'm 99% certain this has been said before, but oh well, we thrive and create~
Recently, somebody in this thread defined the "big" Ikes in the current metagame based on the scale of their ability: in other words, whether they are able to challenge a local, a regional or a national. I think that's an interesting way of examining it. I'm wondering if it'd be beneficial to try something similar with characters rather than players?
In other words, rather than debating how "good" a character is in itself and then stack that up with every other character in the roster (which inevitably comes down to "which meta-irrelevant mid-tier is this meta-irrelevant mid-tier better than?"), we make a simple, abstract table of where characters can be placed based on their "scale of threat" quota.
So to offer a very haphazad educational example:
National threat:
etcRegional threat:
etcLocal threat:
etcIf necessary for the sake of competitive relativity, add a "not a threat" category.
N.B. THIS IS JUST FOR DEMONSTRATIVE PURPOSES, PLEASE DON'T READ TOO MUCH INTO IT, 'KAY~?
Now I don't propose that this is a "better" way of doing it, or even that it's a good idea in the first place. There's every chance it doesn't offer any new data or is just a very slapshod way of restating what we already know (i.e. Sheik is better than Meta Knight, Meta Knight is better than Bowser Jr, etc), plus it may take results solely into account without considering theoretical viability or be prone to massive change depending on which region you're examining (that said, maybe a different table for different "nation"-bodies is a good idea, i.e. one for the US, one for Japan, one for EU, one for Oceania, etc), but I wanted to throw the idea at the clever people and see what sticks.
If nothing else, it might be a fun project to get discussion going. It isn't a big clever new idea, just something I've been wondering and wanted to share.
Peace~ <3
By MK mains logic, MK is clearly sheik's worse matchup, since earlier in this thread they were using tyrant losing as evidence MK gets destroyed by sheik.
Realistically Tyrant just adapted from their last set and outplayed Void, I don't think it's anything wrong with Void's playstyle (you can talk about the things Void could do better but it's not like Tyrant plays perfectly either).
The matchup is essentially even at top level.
Baby_Sneak
Smash Champion
Huh
Little Mac is nothing like us when he's so much of an extreme character. We're FAR more well-rounded with a better recovery and versatility than him. If anything, a better comparison would be Mario because, they're both Mario (duh) and are very similar in moveset. Only differences are physics and key moves, which makes mario better than us.
DunnoBro
The Free-est
I know, which is what makes Doc worse.
Both very susceptible to gimps, like bottom barrel recoveries but mac has lots and lots of cheese kills and the shutdown/rushdown frame data. Doc is balanced but tries to play too fair when no one else is with him. No one's fair to mac and he isn't fair to them either.
He's not solo viable because of a lot of reasons:
1: He loses to ALL top tiers but luigi. (He does not beat mario like ZeRo claims) Some of them pretty badly.
2: He isn't great vs most high tiers. Olimar, wario, and peach maybe.
3: His recovery isn't directly bad but it does inherently have an unavoidable stock losing factor over the tiniest of mistakes. This makes it unwiedly to use only him throughout the course of a long tournament.
Like just watch top players vs yoshi. At least 1 stock is always taken via edgeguard and even if not, LOTS of damage or bad situations are created from yoshi trying to come back.
This character is not viable. He has a lot of tools and is very fun to play/annoying to fight, but a sheer lack of consistency killing and living bars him from being viable.
He's essentially ness without a good grab and killing backthrow.
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Explain this one to me, it seems to me like Mario vs Yoshi is awful for Mario, because he relies on early combos, most of which don't work on yoshi (d-air can even be nair'd out of before the final hit >.>)
Like imo doc does better vs yoshi than mario does, but I'm not at a high level with any of those characters so I can't really judge.
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DunnoBro
The Free-est
I understand why people think it's bad, it's awkward and annoying but mario wins simply because he outneutrals and outkills yoshi.
For super early percents, mario fthrows > rar bair for damage and positioning. When that just stops working, dthrow > spaced uairs/rar bairs also work. Reading the nair for pivot fsmash is also an option.
Yoshi still gets comboed and juggled fairly hard, and has lots of trouble landing so mario is content to hit once, then land to bait out nair. If he just jumps away fireball/fludd/usmash cover yoshi's options well so if mario stays patient and consistent in his option coverage
It's even at best for yoshi overall. Yoshi possibly beats mario on FD and Smashville where he has better escape/landing options, and mario's juggle/combo/kill potential is hindered, but everywhere else it's an uphill battle. (these are also the most played stages so likely why some people might think yoshi wins but stage striking is a thing)
It's similar to yoshi vs fox. People thought yoshi destroyed fox, lots of escape, combo, and edgeguarding tools but when it gets right down to it, he isn't winning the neutral enough or killing as well.
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Hippieslayer
Smash Ace
That doesn't really matter in the least since Judge isn't something GnW relies on and should really only use on rare occasions (when trying to make a comeback), I mean it's not a good attack looking at the risk reward ratio. The move has ****y range and is not fast and while hitting with it can yield a KO chances are it wont yield much at all or lead to you eating a fat punish because you pulled a 1. And if you're trying to hit with it and your opponent knows this its easily avoided. I mean it really just isn't that big a deal of a move so its absence really can't really hurt GnW as a character. Add to that the fact that chain judge, if it is worse, really isn't worse by a wide margin anyway, and I don't see how GIMRs making any sense.
I know GIMR is like the one good GnW in the US but this really makes no sense. It's the fast food custom that provides GnW with a great ranged attack and his two killer up-b customs which are the great ones.
A 'top level player' is by default on higher level of skill than any Yoshi player out there so this wouldn't be indicative of anything.
DunnoBro
The Free-est
There aren't many top players of yoshi's to begin with, but half of raptor's stocks were lost to gimps vs Dabuz. (Well, one was him just being baired out of neutral without a double jump at like 40% but that's the kind of crap I'm talking about when he just loses stocks)A 'top level player' is by default on higher level of skill than any Yoshi player out there so this wouldn't be indicative of anything.
I mean his recovery is just bad. Lots of SDs, gimps, and advantage gained from pressuring happens due to it at all levels of play (as high as yoshi gets anyway). Are we really going to contest that he has a pretty low tier recovery for this game?
Also, unlike other bad recovery chars like ness and luigi, you don't lose much to anything for failing to edgeguard him since he's not grabbing the ledge quickly or is able to convert big damage/stocks off your ledge get-up like real characters can.
We're talking about GIMR here =p
But like I said, it was that AND the fact that even if customs stayed around it wasn't worth practicing with inferior sets to them was the reasoning I heard.
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Xeze
Smash Ace
Agreed. In a tournament I entered, I was dumb enough to not strike FD against a Yoshi on game 1 and I lost. This stage allows Yoshi to pressure a lot with his eggs, plus everything you've listed. Game 2 I picked Town & City and won. Game 3 we went to BF and I also won. Platforms help Mario a lot against Yoshi, as they cover you from eggs and aerial approaches.
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Baby_Sneak
Smash Champion
little Mac also has worse MUs to deal with than us, and our MUs aren't very good, but they're consistently 40:60s, which isn't that bad in the grand scheme of things. Yea, LM can have a 70:30 and such, but he also can have 30:70s and 20:80s just because of the type of character he is.
Both of their recoveries might be bad, but we have more options to use compared to LM who only have 3 options max. We have more ways to mix up our recoveries which gives us more flexibility. LM can have his incredible Ground Game all he wants, it fails against a lot of the top tier characters where they can throw projectiles to pull you towards them for you to just get grabbed (sheik and pika). I rather have Both a ground game and aerial game than just a dumb ground game and no aerial game. LM's cheese only works against people who have no knowledge of him.
I mean, doc mario has all of Mario's frame data and moveset (fludd and physics not included) with a better Fsmash and Upsmash (don't know about Bair, only heard it was better an I haven't tested it yet, don't fee like it either). That's at easy guaranteed low-mid tier at least.
DunnoBro
The Free-est
I think I may have mislead you somewhere, I didn't outright state LM is more viable than Doc. Just that he's better overall since, neither are anywhere near viable but mac is much much scarier to some high tiers than doc.
Both are in the "Not viable" tier, but little mac has quirks that make him much more worth learning to use.
Hard to be a top player of a bad character.Now I agree.
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It could be done, but what does it really accomplish? For someone who wants a reliable table, a character being "local high tier" isn't very helpful when they move outside that local environment into one with more exposure, and suddenly the issues become obvious.So since we're on the subject of tier systems, I want to throw out an idea I've been pondering on for some time.
I'm 99% certain this has been said before, but oh well, we thrive and create~
Recently, somebody in this thread defined the "big" Ikes in the current metagame based on the scale of their ability: in other words, whether they are able to challenge a local, a regional or a national. I think that's an interesting way of examining it. I'm wondering if it'd be beneficial to try something similar with characters rather than players?
In other words, rather than debating how "good" a character is in itself and then stack that up with every other character in the roster (which inevitably comes down to "which meta-irrelevant mid-tier is this meta-irrelevant mid-tier better than?"), we make a simple, abstract table of where characters can be placed based on their "scale of threat" quota.
So to offer a very haphazad educational example:
National threat:
Regional threat:
Local threat:
If necessary for the sake of competitive relativity, add a "not a threat" category.
N.B. THIS IS JUST FOR DEMONSTRATIVE PURPOSES, PLEASE DON'T READ TOO MUCH INTO IT, 'KAY~?
Now I don't propose that this is a "better" way of doing it, or even that it's a good idea in the first place. There's every chance it doesn't offer any new data or is just a very slapshod way of restating what we already know (i.e. Sheik is better than Meta Knight, Meta Knight is better than Bowser Jr, etc), plus it may take results solely into account without considering theoretical viability or be prone to massive change depending on which region you're examining (that said, maybe a different table for different "nation"-bodies is a good idea, i.e. one for the US, one for Japan, one for EU, one for Oceania, etc), but I wanted to throw the idea at the clever people and see what sticks.
If nothing else, it might be a fun project to get discussion going. It isn't a big clever new idea, just something I've been wondering and wanted to share.
Peace~ <3
Any regular ol' tier list will already demonstrate this properly. In most good fighting games, you can usually condense the entire roster into 3 easy tiers -- Top tier, Mid Tier, and then low tier.
Top Tier (S or A+)-- Results + major tournament wins
Mid Tier (A)-- Results + Consistent higher placement
Low tier (not A) -- Consistently lower than mid.
When it comes to competitive play, anything beyond this is a bit redundant, all you need past this is specific matchup discussion. Smash is pretty much already like this, it has been for a while. It really just depends on how lenient people are with placing the grey area between Top and Mid (characters like Meta, Yoshi, Ike, ect), but if you just lump all the "Good but not proven" characters into mid, you have an easily workable and pretty reliable tier list for all intents and purposes.
My personal opinion is, if you have to resort to theorycrafting to place a character in Top Tier (and they DONT have any results yet)...they are Mid Tier. Nobody will ever have to explain why ZSS, Sheik or Mario is top tier.
And since this game has a sizable roster, you can honestly just make a tier list that only lists Top and Low, and just use common sense from there.
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Conda
aka COBBS - Content Creator (Toronto region)
The point is it's better communication. All that meaning is implied and hidden under the layers once you understand the tournament scene fully, which leads to uninformed posters a lot of the time. The point is to make it more clear so people understand tierlists better. I think it's smart, the cyclical tierlist discussions ars as grating to me as it is to most people here I imagine. More people who 'get' what tiers are = better discussion.
It's also inherently less arguable, which is great on its own. You can't really argue your way into saying Jigglypuff is a national threat, or that Diddy is only a regional threat, or that charizard has the 'potential' to be a national threat.
Tierlists shouldn't ever try to represent 'potential' in characters - the only reason it would have to is if people want to use tierlists as a guide to what character they should main. Which is not what tierlists are about. They're about ranking performance of characters based on how the game is currently played. Characters who are not played don't get special treatment.
It's also inherently less arguable, which is great on its own. You can't really argue your way into saying Jigglypuff is a national threat, or that Diddy is only a regional threat, or that charizard has the 'potential' to be a national threat.
Tierlists shouldn't ever try to represent 'potential' in characters - the only reason it would have to is if people want to use tierlists as a guide to what character they should main. Which is not what tierlists are about. They're about ranking performance of characters based on how the game is currently played. Characters who are not played don't get special treatment.
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Baby_Sneak
Smash Champion
Doc mario isn't viable in the "can get top 8 in majors and has little bad MUs" definition sense, but all his MUs are winnable, it just takes a lot of effort. But that's my view.
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DunnoBro
The Free-est
I just think "consistently bad" is worse than "sometimes broken"
TDK
Smash Master
The way I've found to play doc to the best is to spam pills and cape projectiles until your opponent commits to something unsafe, then punish. Works pretty well, especially vs.
from what I've seen/
TTTTTsd
Gordeau Main Paint Drinker
I think he has more of a niche than Little Mac when you pair him with Mario, personally. In like, 2-3 MUs (as discussed before, usually Luigi is the common one), due to his better defensive options and having a fireball that is not energy based (even if it's mediocre). His edgeguarding is insanely better than Mario's in that it's actually a scary factor.
I mean yeah I agree he's not a highly viable character though but I'm not about to like, underrate him. Character DOES have a place it's just usually niche/CP, kinda like Mac I guess.
Baby_Sneak
Smash Champion
Except that doesn't work against anybody with a concept of footsies or fundamentals. As a doc, you have to be very solidThe way I've found to play doc to the best is to spam pills and cape projectiles until your opponent commits to something unsafe, then punish. Works pretty well, especially vs.
The big issue with tier lists around here seems to just be the fact that people can't accept what it implies, which is usually that their character isn't worth their competitive efforts. This is probably where alot of the "arguing" comes from, and having a list that validates those kinds of arguments i feel is a bit counterproductive to explaining what tier lists really are. I agree that tier lists should not ever represent "potential". It's a silly thing to account for, the character will naturally gain ranking positions when the "potential" is applied in tournament settings, trying to artificially boost characters because they like them is just more of the stuff the Smash community excels at.
However, tier lists are nothing more than compiled statistics. Using them to choose mains is actually an excellent, completely and totally rational idea. Why wouldn't you? A player that does this is either playing to win or deciding whether or not to stick with a character they're (probably) struggling with.
I also don't feel like you ever need to account for underplayed characters. No good character will ever fly under the radar for too long in this age of social media and accessible streaming, and players who decide to main characters regardless of tiers will only continue struggling to win with that character. It really only takes one instance for the workshop players to catch on. If something is there, it'll be found out eventually.
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TDK
Smash Master
I actually modelled it after the Smogon Tiers list, sort of:Too many tiers, I'm not going to re-arrange anything but I think condense them all to deal with reality and were good. I will happily put Zelda in the same tier as Falco
Ubers
OU
BL
UU
BL2
RU
BL3
NU
PU
That's why there was so many of them.
So true.
Or, inversely, some people could look at a tier list and purposely choose a low tier just for the sake of attempting to defy a list.
DunnoBro
The Free-est
Ally is actually trying to change characters and slayerz had brawl peach skills transfer over and it still look him this long to start pulling in decent results.Well, not for Ally or Slayerz and other people.
I don't know for sure but I don't think they consider it easy, also neither mario or peach are actually bad
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Zelder
Smash Journeyman
Who do you consider a good character?Well, not for Ally or Slayerz and other people.
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Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
That could describe a lot of characters though. Any character can win almost any matchup if you genuinely outplay your opponent. Tiers almost become irrelevant if there's a significant difference in skill levels. Yeah, the matchups can be winnable but how much effort do you have to pour in as opposed to your opponent? That's where the difference lies. Sheik can still lose to someone like Zelda but that Zelda either needs to be scary good or that Sheik needs to be hilariously bad.
TDK
Smash Master
User was warned for this post
Sheik would need to be a level 3 CPU.
Baby_Sneak
Smash Champion
That depends on how disadvantaged the MU is, how well I. Know the MU, how well my opponent knows the MU, how well my opponent plays the MU strategy and how good I am at playing the MU strategy.
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Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Which is exactly the point. Any matchup is technically winnable under the right conditions so it's kind of a moot point. With Doc, if any matchup is theoretically winnable but he doesn't have the results to back him up, it's a dubious statement because it shows that either 1. most Doc players aren't very good or 2. Doc has flaws that keeps him from winning. I mention this because I remember some people used to say this about Shiek and Sonic in Brawl and how, from a theoretical standpoint, the characters didn't have any glaringly bad matchups and yet the characters stayed low-middle tier almost the entire duration of the game's main lifespan. Both characters had some really impressive tricks they could pull off and yet they never really went anywhere. That's kind of where Doc is at right now.
PUK
Smash Ace
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