Oh I've played Smash for quite a while. Deficiencies in characters were always very noticable from when I started in Melee. I use to live and breathe games, so I could pick up new playstyles and see what's wrong with whatever mechanics I had quite quickly since I'm used to doing that. Smash just interested me more since there's a lot more playstyles that aren't like other games. In my Melee newbie days I mained Marth, though he had competition with Link for a long time. Safe to say emphasis on spacing attacks properly is still felt today. Smash 4 is when I started to try playing competitively as I got inspired by Link vs Snake, so playing a bunch of Link + Samus in early Smash 4 has me used to projectile play as well. I swapped through half the roster trying to find a main. I tried to force myself to play Meta Knight for a while, but it ended up making me burnt out on Smash and quit for other games since Smash felt like a chore. I kept wanting to play other characters and I was having difficulties improving, and he's not the most forgiving character to play. So I'm trying to get myself to be a bit more confident in the character I main. instead of swapping every month or so.
I definitely know about how every character can be cheap/annoying. I actually looked into characters that are most hated. It's usually either how a person plays a character, or if a person is forced to not play "normally". I don't see what would be annoying about Joker nair compared to many other nairs, but I will say being gun camped when you're a slow character is really annoying. Snakes never give me a problem, and I don't see them use dash attack nearly enough, especially since most of them are too busy with their grenades and think their grenades give them invincibility, so I haven't seen how annoying his dash attack can be yet.
Picking a character and sticking to them and not juggling 10 is precisely my problem. I originally came to smash because of so many playstyles I liked. Then when I wanted to be more competitive I decided to choose smash because I've played it a lot. However that makes it hard to stay on one character, whereas most fighting games before I tried to stay on Smash it was hard to even find one character I liked.
Lately I've been trying to find excuses to narrow down who I play, hence what was in the spoilers of my previous message. Using archetypes made me realize how similar some characters are, so it helped me narrow it down a little bit. Though I'm still trying to figure out which kind of playstyle I like the most right now, which is hard because I like all playstyles. Trying to rotate between the 11 characters I have now seeing if I can narrow it down.
Since my last post I removed Joker and Fox. Since I probably will prefer Wolf over Fox anyways, and Pichu is a more extreme rushdown. Also tried Joker again, but something clicked and I realized just how insanely strong and annoying the guns are for the opponent. I want to fight the opponent at their best, and not tilt them to make them feel miserable. They are still incredibly tempting though as these reasons can be kinda weak. Fox is still pretty extreme as is, and probably more "fair" than Pichu. Joker's guns aren't really a deal breaker because it's not like I'm going to do nothing but gun spam the whole match.
Though it's hard to decide between these characters because they are so different. Much less decide to stay on one of them.
I definitely know about how every character can be cheap/annoying. I actually looked into characters that are most hated. It's usually either how a person plays a character, or if a person is forced to not play "normally". I don't see what would be annoying about Joker nair compared to many other nairs, but I will say being gun camped when you're a slow character is really annoying. Snakes never give me a problem, and I don't see them use dash attack nearly enough, especially since most of them are too busy with their grenades and think their grenades give them invincibility, so I haven't seen how annoying his dash attack can be yet.
Picking a character and sticking to them and not juggling 10 is precisely my problem. I originally came to smash because of so many playstyles I liked. Then when I wanted to be more competitive I decided to choose smash because I've played it a lot. However that makes it hard to stay on one character, whereas most fighting games before I tried to stay on Smash it was hard to even find one character I liked.
Lately I've been trying to find excuses to narrow down who I play, hence what was in the spoilers of my previous message. Using archetypes made me realize how similar some characters are, so it helped me narrow it down a little bit. Though I'm still trying to figure out which kind of playstyle I like the most right now, which is hard because I like all playstyles. Trying to rotate between the 11 characters I have now seeing if I can narrow it down.
Since my last post I removed Joker and Fox. Since I probably will prefer Wolf over Fox anyways, and Pichu is a more extreme rushdown. Also tried Joker again, but something clicked and I realized just how insanely strong and annoying the guns are for the opponent. I want to fight the opponent at their best, and not tilt them to make them feel miserable. They are still incredibly tempting though as these reasons can be kinda weak. Fox is still pretty extreme as is, and probably more "fair" than Pichu. Joker's guns aren't really a deal breaker because it's not like I'm going to do nothing but gun spam the whole match.
Though it's hard to decide between these characters because they are so different. Much less decide to stay on one of them.
Once you have the fundamentals to play at higher levels then you will naturally start having second thoughts about your character as their deficiencies become much more apparent. That's when you'll really make a decision whether you want to stick with your character despite their deficiencies or whether your more comfortable going with other characters instead. But the most important thing is to go with whatever feels natural and will keep you motivated to play the game.
And to that end, don't worry so much about whether other people say a character is "cheap" or spams or whatever. All characters become annoying after a certain level of play. Trust me when I say Joker Nair or Snake dash attack is no less annoying than whatever is complained about generally. It's just that their obnoxiousness isn't always apparent at lower levels of play.
But most importantly, pick one character and stick with them. Don't be those players that juggle 10 characters that they call their main. It takes a long time to become good with one character let alone 10 radically different characters. Get really good with a character you want to main and then consider if you want a second one to deal with MUs where their deficiencies are too much or too annoying to deal with.
I started with Zelda in Smash 4 based on the fact that her franchise is one of the few I've played and is my favorite. I ended up liking her general moveset and her style meshed fairly well with mine. After a couple months I stopped being a stereotypical WiFi Zelda, got a LAN adapter, and started taking the game more seriously, I ended up struggling with the her issues. When Cloud dropped that effectively spelled my end as a Zelda main and I went searching before I settled on Robin, Corrin, Lucina, and Cloud to switch between. They are all the same archetype and the sword archetype suited my natural tendencies as a player so it made it easy to switch between them based on MU.
But what I ended up realizing was that my fundamentals were the most important factor after all. I ended up becoming skilled to the point that I could beat the average For Glory Cloud with bottom tier Zelda.
In Ultimate I went back to Zelda after I heard about changes to her design. The sword archetype kind of blows and is not fun to play in Ultimate, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised by how good Zelda is as a character now. I found that she ended up suiting me best and I wasted no time in maining her on the first day.