YerTheBestAROUND
Smash Journeyman
Except it's Sheik, so she doesn't have to consistently outplay because it's likely she's already winning/won neutral anyway. She's not even that tied to up air, she's more tied to bouncing fish. And if Sheiks struggle to kill against players that know what they're doing then why are we seeing VoiD kill around 130% rather consistently? Does that really sound like struggling? And not all characters need raw kill power. Diddy Kong does dtilt to a smash attack. Weak hit to strong hit. Ryu does d/utilt to Shoryu. Weak hit to strong hit. You don't need raw kill power when you can safely combo/string into your stronger attacks.Sheik objectively struggles to kill against players that know what they are doing and are able to avoid edgeguards (which is admittedly character dependent). The video is a testament to how much Sheik can leverage her big and devoted playerbase/technicians to compensate for her issues, but it also speaks to the greater issue. Like Duck Hunt, except with exponentially more talent investment, she has developed all of these very specific and detailed setups in order to compensate for a lack of raw kill power.
She has to consistently and repeatedly outplay players in footsies to get into one of those setup positions, whereas almost every other character in the entire game can throw out a random kill and punish her the one time she makes a mistake. This is why people keep claiming that all of the heavies that have 7/3 matchups against Sonic and Pikachu (who I'd consider the two closest top tiers to Sheik in nature) have close to even matchups against Sheik. They can get bodied the entire game 90% of the time then land that one grab and end it then and there.
She's very clearly one of the best characters in the game, but she also has the lowest tolerance for for mistakes by a noticeable margin. It's unrealistic to always expect a top Sheik player to always outplay another similarly skilled top player 70% of the time in a given set.
It's also important to take into account how tied in she is to her up air.
If the dev's had made up-air just flat up not kill until 180% instead of the 1.1.5 changes, she would have dropped like a Luigi rock, as opposed to dropping from definitive 1st to definitive top 3.
For what it's worth though I am glad that for once a character got nerfed in a way that still preserved most of what they were and still left them with the tools to compete at the highest level.