Smashboards

Because it works :^)

Windboxes are my mortal enemy, but at the same time I love them to bits. Seeing peeps go to the corner after Greninja's hydro pump or G&W's Dtilt is just so ridiculous and hilarious.

Windboxes vs. Ness, huh? Yeah, that sounds awful.

One thing I've never understood. Why does Ness not have Teleport?

I mean, he has it in Earthbound...

I can see why they gave him lasting PK thunder as a custom but rolling PK thunder is just ridiculous, so yeah they probably should have given him teleport in that situation.

I think they wanted to keep his unique recovery. It's just hard to make it good in this game.

To be fair they made it so that it basically kills you if you mess up the edgeguard.

Good thing I never miss the edgeguard :D

Yeah it's a polarising recovery in that it's medium/high risk ---> medium/high reward, which can be game changing when applied to a recovery move.

I wonder if that was the only thing going through the dev team's heads when they designed Ness: "Small but midweight and with more kill-power than an atomic missile... but his recovery is kinda interesting so BALANCE ACHIEVED let's go home!"

It's funny how that's actually kind of true and makes Ness a balanced High/Top Tier.

Yeah we got quite lucky, I think. I remember Shaya saying quite some time ago that Ness is about as strong as you'd want a top tier to be. I wonder if the game would be more interesting if more of the top tiers had similar weaknesses. :o

I remember you made a post about it, except your focus was on balance instead of interesting... although my memory on it's a bit foggy. :o

By the way, I think Pikachu wins the Ness MU with Heavy Skull Bash.

I killed a Diddy at 35% with it offstage on Smashville, while he was trying to recover with side-b.

I can do the same to Ness :D

Does heavy skull bash have super armour? I wonder whether PK Fire Burst would be useful in that scenario...? Or Lasting Pk Thunder?

It doesn't have super armor, but it's basically an aerial Bowser f-smash. If there's ever an opening in the air (like when Ness pauses to use up-b), Pikachu gets a KO.

Lasting PK Thunder may actually be good against it? Not sure.

It has more knockback than uncharged Bowser f-smash, with the same range, only it's in the air

Ewwwwww that sounds disgusting!

When I get the chance I'll do some testing or ask someone to do some testing with PK Fire Burst and Lasting PK Thunder against it. What are the tradeoffs meant to be? :o

There are no tradeoffs, it's a straight upgrade.

It has a tiny bit of extra lag when you miss compared to regular Skull Bash, like 10 frames? Doesn't really matter, no one is going to punish you in the air.

Good golly, time to ban Pikachu!

But in all seriousness, does this put him in top 4 again do you think?

I still think that Pikachu is top3 without customs.

With customs, it's hard to say. It's a really nice move, but like, how do I edgeguard Dark Fists Ganon? Or Dragon Rush Charizard?

Ah fair. It's nice to see customs has been shaking up the meta so much already. We had them since so early on, it's weird to think people only realised the beast that is DK a couple months ago

Yeah, a lot of people used to think that Ness had no good customs, too.

To be totally fair though, even we underrated our own customs until Noa decided to experiment with them in depth. He's an absolute hero, you know. Did you hear we did a project to find out Ness' Bthrow kill percents on every character? He did most of it by himself when we started finding inconsistencies in our results. Check this out too: