Balancing the characters, a theory

[The Cape]

SS Tier
Meta Knight 15.00

S Tier
Snake 13.91

A Tier
Falco 13.03
King Dedede 12.94
Mr. Game & Watch 12.50
Marth 12.09
Diddy Kong 11.94

B Tier
Wario 11.47
R.O.B. 11.38
Lucario 10.94
Olimar 10.94

C Tier
Pikachu 10.34
Kirby 10.16
Donkey Kong 10.06
Ice Climbers 9.59

D Tier
Zero Suit Samus 8.88
Toon Link 8.47
Pit 8.44
Peach 8.16
Wolf 7.91

E Tier
Luigi 7.41
Zelda 7.03
Bowser 6.91
Fox 6.66
Sheik 6.44
Ike 5.91

F Tier
Mario 4.56
Lucas 4.50
Ness 4.50
Samus 4.41
Sonic 4.16
Pokémon Trainer 3.94
Yoshi 3.66

G Tier
Link 2.28
Jigglypuff 2.03
Ganondorf 1.88
Captain Falcon 1.63


This as some of you are aware is the vBrawl Tier List. The theory behind Brawl+ is to make this list basically disappear. What I would like to see done (and I hope you are on the same page with me here) is to bring the people at the bottom of the list to about the A tier range, and soften up the SS and S tier a bit to bring them down on the same level.

The maximum buff, minimum nerf theory.

Now as we all know, this list is now HORRIBLY innacurate for Brawl+. Ganon and CF have up a few tiers, Sonic has moved up LOTS of tiers, and Kirby is reaching for the top. What I would like to suggest, is that we take a look at this list, consider the reasons why the characters are where they are. Once we have done that, you add in the codes that we have been developing and rethink the list. Who moved, who is better, who didnt go up much. The reconsider why again. Does this character's moves stink, does his recovery blow, does he have a bad approach game?

The original Brawl tiers are mainly based around approach options and the ability to control your opponent as vBrawl was a very defense based game. Now that the game has regained control of the offense, who has gained power and who has not changed much? By looking at the vBrawl list, we can see what character's moves are better than others and who has more options. With these codes it has opened more options for all of the characters, but those who already had excellent options have at the very least only gained a few more. By using this list in conjuction with what we have been experiencing in our personal trials of the game we can definetly begin to see what moves need to be changed.

We should be asking ourselves questions like:

Why is this character so good?
Why is this character so bad?
What does this character have that this one doesnt?
What can I do to close the gap between this character and that character?

This is my personal approach to the balancing theory (to reiterate) maximum buffs and minimum nerfs and the use of vBrawl as a starting point for looking at moves in particular.

What do you all think?

 

[KishPrime]

The danger with trying to make everyone equal is that the game devolves into counter-character matchups. After all, if there are 39 characters with equal amounts of abilities, it is likely that at least one or two of them will be a hard counter to yours.

To some extent, a top tier of 5-7 characters is, in fact, ideal. You can actually focus on balancing among them between themselves.

This is not going to be a popular opinion, and I fully support buffing weaker characters. I just have a feeling that this is a reality.

 

[KishSquared]

Why do people call it vBrawl? I read it is Virtual Brawl, which doesn't make much sense.

Tim, I think the hard-counter idea is a theory that may prove to hold true, but that shouldn't stop us from trying to balance everyone as much as possible. If hard counters develop for some characters, that itself will affect the tier list, making some characters worse than others. The ONLY reason Bowser is so low on the tier list is because of hard counters like MK and DDD (imo at least). In other words, the characters with hard counters will become the new low tier.

To agree with you though, we need to set the expectation that we won't be able to balance everyone perfectly. There will not be one tier by the end of our balancing. I think a good goal would be to have 3 tiers of characters. Not that we should aim for 3, but that by attempting to balance everyone that we should be happy if we end up with 3.

But I'll also state my support for buffing low-tiers and nerfing only the highest tier. I'm not even sure about nerfing anyone other than Snake and MK.

 

[shanus]

But I'll also state my support for buffing low-tiers and nerfing only the highest tier. I'm not even sure about nerfing anyone other than Snake and MK.

You haven't played a good Game & Watch yet in B+ then. SH Dair Spam + dtilt at the very edge is a completely broken and almost unpunishable edgeguard against more than 3/4 of the cast. Its too good. I think his key needs a bit of lag after it still because its just too easy to do it that way.

 

[The Cape]

Its not possible to completely balance every, I just think we should move towards it. I guess that got lost in the shuffle.

 

[shanus]

Yeah I know, but it seems very clear to me that the new g&w can compete with Metaknight and has supreme gimping skills as well. This is a thread about char balance and all and I think he is easily in the top 2 or 3 chars.

 

[KishSquared]

I'll admit that I haven't seen this new strat, but it sounds like that would require a specific move nerf, not a character nerf. Doesn't his key already have landing lag? And how does d-tilt go through the large warp distance?

Either way, I'm talking global offense/defense buffs. We can worry about specific moves when we see what's still possible after all the nerfing/buffing. G&W already dies pretty easily, if anything he might should lose some offensive power. Those darn smashes are ridiculous.

 

[shanus]

So we did something cool to Metaknight in Beta Set 3. We set his upgrav setting to .95 and balanced out all his jumps etc to make him feel identical to before. However, he now dies EARLIER off the top of the screen. Nifty little test ;-)

 

[Almas]

A cute little code which you may find useful:

Whorenado Nerf [Almas, 10 Lines]
0400183C 3FA00000
C281CAD0 00000008
2C080000 3CA0805B
60A54FD8 4182002C
8008F5A0 2C000016
40820020 2C170117
4182000C 7C172800
40820010 3C808000
C004183C EC200072
4E800020 00000000

The code doesn't stack with character specific gravity, but it can be integrated into it without much hassle. The first line (3FA00000) denotes the value of it - I set it to something which feels nice to me. MK can rise during the middle portion of his tornado, but falls slightly at the start and end. It means that players can SDI out of it fairly easily now, but it retains some useful functions.

Reducing the damage bowser takes is going along reasonably well.

 

[shanus]

A cute little code which you may find useful:

Whorenado Nerf [Almas, 10 Lines]
0400183C 3FA00000
C281CAD0 00000008
2C080000 3CA0805B
60A54FD8 4182002C
8008F5A0 2C000016
40820020 2C170117
4182000C 7C172800
40820010 3C808000
C004183C EC200072
4E800020 00000000

The code doesn't stack with character specific gravity, but it can be integrated into it without much hassle. The first line (3FA00000) denotes the value of it - I set it to something which feels nice to me. MK can rise during the middle portion of his tornado, but falls slightly at the start and end. It means that players can SDI out of it fairly easily now, but it retains some useful functions.

Reducing the damage bowser takes is going along reasonably well.

I dont think this nerf is necessary. Is there any way we can give it landing lag instead, like 20 frames or something :O

 

[Deleted member]

nice code, but why don't we just give MK some more upgrav so he can't lift the tornado off the ground or use it as recovery?

 

[shanus]

nice code, but why don't we just give MK some more upgrav so he can't lift the tornado off the ground or use it as recovery?

Higher upgrav affects the ability to KO vertically. We dropped his upgrav so he gets KO'd easier.

 

[leafgreen386]

Um... are you sure upgrav has an effect on vert kills? I never noticed a difference, but I noticed a BIG difference with downgrav.

 

[Almas]

Well, I know that whenever you land a hit it reads from the target's universal gravity value. So even if upgrav doesn't explicitly affect it, the up/down grav DOES. It depends if you also increased his downgrav to make up for the decreased upgrav, I guess.

 

[KishSquared]

But there's a defensive value for each character that affects their knockback, right? I think we should use those values for making someone easier/harder to kill. Adjusting gravity to get the same result is a bit complicated and unnecessary unless you want him to die easier off the top but not off the sides.

MK just needs to die at 40% period. I think we all agree to that XD

 

[The Cape]

But there's a defensive value for each character that affects their knockback, right? I think we should use those values for making someone easier/harder to kill. Adjusting gravity to get the same result is a bit complicated and unnecessary unless you want him to die easier off the top but not off the sides.

MK just needs to die at 40% period. I think we all agree to that XD

Mario vs Metaknight
Mario does dair, uair, uair, sneeze
Meatknight dies.

That would be excellent. I was thinking that she should die from uncharged Fox U smash around 65% and build from there.

 

[shanus]

MK now has two nerfs in B3. Just need lag post tornado and he is set.

He dies earlier now.
He has lag post downsmash now.

Now we just need nado lag.

 

[KishSquared]

I'd like to toss out there that we should slow down on editing individual moves. MK is perhaps an exception, but we should make defense/offense changes first before trying to handle individual moves.

This has nothing to do with a philosophy for changing little, etc... It's that if we start editing individual moves, we'll never get done. Plus the balance might change once we edit someone's offense/defense such that a certain move is fine.

 

[shanus]

I'd like to toss out there that we should slow down on editing individual moves. MK is perhaps an exception, but we should make defense/offense changes first before trying to handle individual moves.

This has nothing to do with a philosophy for changing little, etc... It's that if we start editing individual moves, we'll never get done. Plus the balance might change once we edit someone's offense/defense such that a certain move is fine.

I think part of it was just that the code came out yesterday. Thats part of the reason I wanted to release Beta3 today. To get people testing our codeset and now trying to change 299238923983289 moves.

 

[KishSquared]

Trust me, I'm excited about getting to that point, and we'll get there. But as you indicate, we'll have hundreds of requests to tweak specific moves. A few to show what your codes can do is awesome, but I want to make sure we don't embark down the path of "okay, now which moves do we tweak?"

 

[shanus]

Trust me, I'm excited about getting to that point, and we'll get there. But as you indicate, we'll have hundreds of requests to tweak specific moves. A few to show what your codes can do is awesome, but I want to make sure we don't embark down the path of "okay, now which moves do we tweak?"

I realize I made an important typo in my post. It was supposed to say so that they DON'T make a million change requests to characters instead since they will have our codeset instead.

 

[KishSquared]

Isn't the point of beta testing to offering suggestions? Even if our intent is to receive feedback about the current codes, I think we will have people posting a list of every character and what should be changed. I mean, just look at the Beta thread in this forum. We have moves being tossed out left and right that people want to see changed.

But that's kind of beside the point. The real point is that we should take care of global changes of a character before jumping in to edit specific moves.

 

[The Cape]

I agree with what you saw Squared for sure. I just brought in a few things that I felt should be addressed as we go. The list should wax and wane with time. Its a good directing point really.

 

[KishSquared]

I really think we need to make individual threads for each character, similar to what was done for Bowser and DDD. I feel like there's pure chaos right now in throwing out suggestions. Some are very good but will be ignored, and some are frankly absurd and are getting implemented just because someone said it. I have no idea what to do about it, but we need organization, and we might need a group of people to be in charge of what makes the cut and what doesn't.

 

[Nakamaru]

One thing that would help is one thread of all of this. It is kind of crazy trying to track down certain character arguments in like 3 different threads. We do need a kind of panel per character to sit down and go *bam* this is DK. Whats he got thats good? and whats kind of s***ty. How can me make them less s***ty and more situational.

We can take suggestions from the people that play the characters and their words will have more weight than say me talking about mario or cape talking about sheik.

But this really all needs to be centralized into one spot, and possibly doing it one character at a time. : /


Its an idea.