Can you elaborate on this a little?
I felt Smash 4 was a big shift away from the spacing oriented style of Brawl. Outside of characters like Marth, Diddy Kong and arguably Bayonetta and Cloud, most characters don't have the tools to utilize the spacing triangle as often. Compared to Brawl which had a lot more autocancel aerials and significantly less punishable projectile games, along with reduced risk for getting hit, Smash 4 has a lot more risk to attempting pokes and deep pokes and is more focused on whiff punish.
Without a sufficient amount of strong ranged grounded moves, you see a lot of top players trying to reposition themselves by either doing a short hop aerial, double jump away, or roll when they whiff a move, especially on when they cannot retreat to a platform. I see most meaningful interactions that involve spacing when an opponent lands (e.g. short hop aerial, tomahawk grab/attack, cross ups) but landing is still an unfavorable position. You can see this with Fox vs. Mewtwo as there are a solid amount of ways both characters to land but neither of them want to be in that position where they are above their opponent. I feel grounded interactions are more prominent (as it is safer than committing to landing), with its prevalent shield dominant play and counterplay (run up shield, run up grab, shield drop punish, cross up on shield) that feels all the more important to getting meaningful damage.
Forgive me if I seem a little short sighted as I haven't been on this forum or this thread for a long time. The metagame surely has progressed a lot since then. But these are my impressions of sets I have looked at recently (including Tweek vs. Mr. R from last weekend).
I doubt Jigglypuff and Wii Fit Trainer got too many meaningful changes, so I wouldn't call her the worst. But even if Palutena is worse than Zelda in this game, I'm going to cry.
I genuinely don't know what Sakurai is trying to do with her. Is she supposed to force approaches? Is she supposed to pressure with her strong dash and throw game? I seems like Sakurai designed her as a character with free-for-alls and customs in mind and didn't emphasize her viability for 1v1s. My guess was he was concerned about her ranged attacks like her specials, smash attacks and tilts being too abusable in Smash 4's development, so he made them easy to punish. I don't really get it though when we have a game with Marth and Cloud in it
But I heard dash attack is frame 4 now and ftilt is frame 8? Yay?
I still don't get why her fsmash and dsmash have a windbox
Tbqh she looks like the worst character. (If you put a gun to my head and made me pick one) None of the systematic changes work in her favor, and her specials all still seem mediocre.
