Bayonetta's poor design is just another testament to Sakurai's flawed understanding of competitive play. Players who are competitively avid of fighting games don't want long, flow-chart combos; they're looking for interactions. Because that's the idea in the first place: a good fighting game is one full of interactions. Bayonetta shuts down the whole cast in her advantage with highly damaging combos that are very difficult to escape; the minimal interaction with the opponent goes against the design philosophy of a good fighting game.
As a player, I should NEVER be in a situation where I might as well just put down the controller for the same outcome. If a player doesn't SDI the first hit of Witch Twist, that's at least 30% damage, and at most death. If the player gets caught in Witch Time, all they can do is watch as they take massive damage and potentially die. Bayonetta doesn't 0-death with any consistency, and the misconception that she does needs to be put to rest. The issue is that so much of her damage is guaranteed, while the rest of the cast has to go for reads to extend their strings for a similar damage output.
Let's take a look at Melee, a hallmark in the design of fighting games, and video games in general. It's common knowledge that Melee's engine allows for a much more varied and extensive combo game than in Smash 4. What makes Melee's combo-friendly system so intriguing is that the attacker is always forced to interact with their opponent due to DI. Good DI saves you, bad DI kills you. DI can mitigate damage from combos, but it can also create combos that should have never worked if the attacker reads such DI. In Melee, Captain Falcon on Final Destination has certain 0-death combos on Marth that only work given a specific DI from the Marth player. I, and many other players, love the DI mechanic, because it prevents us from just sitting and watching ourselves get helplessly carried across the screen, and it makes combos interactive rather than brain-dead.
This is where Bayonetta's design fails. She's designed around combos, not interactions. People like to say "learn to DI/SDI," but that doesn't have much of an effect overall, and still doesn't solve the core issue with her design. Let me elaborate:
1) DI in Smash 4 simply isn't as strong as it was in Melee (and works a bit differently)
2) Bayonetta's combos are predominantly vertical, which effectively limits the opponent's DI'ing capacity; remember MK and ZSS ladders?
That brings up another point:
. Call me biased towards my main, but I find it relevant considering we're talking about ladder combos. "No one was really complaining about MK and ZSS, not as much as with Bayonetta. They should learn to DI," is what I see some people saying in Bayonetta's defense. The truth is, MK's and ZSS's ladders weren't as problematic as Bayonetta's. (They still exist, but are much weaker, for those who are still unsure). But why?
's ladder never killed without rage and/or bad DI, and started with a highly punishable grab.
's ladder worked at a narrow 5-10% range (or 2% range if you're getting super technical), started with a shield-grabable dash attack, required well-timed fast-falling, and didn't kill if the opponent ended up above Meta Knight due to Shuttle Loop's blindspot. It was also flat-out unreliable and suicidal against ledge-camping opponents.
's ladders start working at 0%, and can be opened with a variety of moves from a frame 4 Witch Twist, an amazing counter, up tilt, down tilt, and After-Burner Kick. Either she KO's you or you take as much as 50% and even more. Given the right circumstances, she can even carry characters off the side. Unlike MK and ZSS, her combo specials do not cause helplessness, meaning such combos are low-risk, insane reward, and most characters won't be able to get down to the ground fast enough to adequately punish her landing lag.
Pre-patch, outside of the 30-40% range, you would fight MK in essentially the same way as you'd fight any other character. Outside of his ladder, MK dealt on average 15-20% in guaranteed damage off combos, and the same applied to ZSS--this meant that outside of their death set-ups, their damage output was on par with the rest of the cast. Such does not apply to Bayonetta. She has potential KO's at any percent, and if she does not KO, then she's landing on average 30-40% in guaranteed damage regardless of your current percentage, which is beyond the overall damage output of everyone else.
Bayonetta is a problem. Whether or not she really is ban-worthy cannot be truly decided as of yet. Personally, I prefer pre-patch Sheik to Bayonetta. Yes, I prefer fighting against a character who hard-countered my main rather than a character with whom my main arguably goes even. And there's a very good reason: players found a way to circumvent Sheik's intended KOing issue; Bayonetta is centered around such overly rewarding set-ups, and is a problem at the core of her design.
Sakurai has proven already that he has a misguided understanding of competitive play, and Bayonetta provides more proof. 1.1.6 (if it does happen) will nerf Bayonetta, but I highly doubt it will solve the heart of the problem. Tell me, how did the nerfs in 1.1.5 affect Bayonetta? In no major way. Witch Twist is one of the best moves in the game, Witch Time is by far the best counter, Heel Slide was already unsafe pre-patch, and her up and forward smashes are still powerful--quite a lot was changed, but it all had little effect because her core gameplay is still the same. Fixing Bayonetta requires Sakurai to completely overhaul her design, and that is highly unlikely.
