Bowser Balance Thread

[MookieRah]

Mookie's Bowser Buffs 2.0

Knockback resist
Damage resist*1
Increased Weight (I still think he needs more weight)
Normalized Gravity*2
UpB Speed Increase (not animation speed)*3

All of these buffs would be relatively small, but they would all work towards making him a major tank. He would have an easier time coping with combos and gimps as well.

*1 A slight damage resist so he can shrug off attacks better. In a way I hope this works in integers than percents. It would be really cool if it negated 1% of damage from every attack. This would make him shrug of multi-hit jabs and possibly slightly decayed fox lasers. It would just be a really unique feature for a character, IMO. If a crouch canceling code becomes implemented I think that instead of increasing Bowsers knockback resist it would increase his damage resist, allowing him to shrug off the projectiles like you guys wanted, and give hiim a nice approach.

This has been accomplished. W00t.
*2 Normalizing his gravity, or making him floatier, is so far the best defense against comboing outside of finding a way to lower opponents hitstun against Bowser. Floatyness allows for better DI options as his trajectories would be better for surviving/combo breaking. This also would help slightly against gimping. With a short hop buff he should be fine even with the floatyness, as fast falls are pretty fast and significant. Besides, Bowser should be slow anyways :-P, why not have him slower moving in the air? He was in Melee too, floaty but heavy as ****.

*3 This may or may not be a possibility. I talked about it a little in the recovery thread. Almas mentioned that there may be variables for the speed of upB's. I'm not talking about speeding up the moves animation, but speeding up the movement speed of a move that causes you to move. This would not only buff Bowser's fortress as an attack, but an increase in speed would mean that his recovery would cover a longer distance and improve his survivability as well. It would kill two birds with one stone.

 

[Almas]

I suggested integer damage reduction a while ago, and people told me that it was introducing rogue mechanics and a bad idea. -.-.

But the one stored in memory is currently a %age, I'm afraid. I guess I'll have to work on having a look at writing up a code for it.

 

[leafgreen386]

On the topic of bowser's upB, I'd like to make sure that whatever changes we do make to it allow him to combo it into an aerial at nearly any percentage. For this we may need to make it IASAable near the end, but I think that being able to combo off of this one move will greatly help him. I'm not sure if all of these changes would even be necessary if he could just use upB OOS to start his combos.

 

[The Cape]

I love the idea of making Bowser a tank. Make the up and B a bit faster so its more defensive, and make it so it doesnt suck on recovery. Then boost his defenses. The character should tank and be a mindgame heavy character (IMO).

 

[MookieRah]

I suggested integer damage reduction a while ago, and people told me that it was introducing rogue mechanics and a bad idea. -.-.

**** em, it's super awesome. Bowser should have it. It will make him a tank. Seriously, light jabs won't phase him, but he's ****IN BOWSER!!

In all seriousness, it doesn't matter if it's foreign, IMO. It's a nice buff that would go a long way to making him better and we wouldn't have to rely on that many changes with this one thing implemented. I think that plus a lil knockback resist and the up B thing would be all you'd need to do to balance Bowser.

 

[The Cape]

Be sweet if Bowser could super armor jabs. Make jab grab worthless on him.

Then again, that might be too powerful.

 

[MookieRah]

Well, he'd have some stun from it, but most jabs do about 2% damage right? I'm thinking that'd at low percents he could shrug them off, but at higher percents jab > grab would be effective.

 

[The Cape]

Sounds like a cool idea. I think Bowser being the one hit wonder, but having great defense is quite cool.

The three heavies can all be different.
DK has combos and power
Dedede has edgeguarding and recovery
Bowser has defense and knockback

That would be really cool. 10% overall knockback boost to all of Bowser's moves?

 

[shanus]

I think bowsers forward smash should literally hit the opponents 2 times just so it can be a literal bowser combo now.

But seriously I like the idea of making bowser take less damage. I mean he has a ****in spikey shell :-O If we can incorporate this and get some quality bowsers to take the helm that would be excellent. Maybe KishSquared can toy with it if we get it incorporated?


And 10% knockback on his dtilt would be :-O, that move hits like, 5 trucks
It we just boosted his fortress + damage reduction I think that would work too :O

 

[The Cape]

Fix his physics so he can do the SH forward B infinite jump too.

Give him more knockback on each hit for all his moves too.

And the F smash DOES hit twice

 

[shanus]

Fix his physics so he can do the SH forward B infinite jump too.

Give him more knockback on each hit for all his moves too.

And the F smash DOES hit twice

I first wrote three times, then editted it to twice. Now I look like a ******. Thanks cape

 

[KishPrime]

I don't know what Bowser plays like in the new version, but you guys should really run any Bowser changes through Jeff. Up-B is already ridiculous, I'm not sure why it needs to be buffed.

 

[Deleted member]

more weight and more damage dealing. those two should be enough to improve him without losing his kind of playstyle too much

 

[KishSquared]

As everyone acknowledges, Bowser receives tremendous damage from combos and from being large in general. One thing they really fixed about him in Brawl is that he no longer dies at lower damage than Fox. His ability to survive in Brawl negates a LOT of the damage he receives in combos. For example, I regularly get CG'ed and comboed by Falco players for up to 60% PER STOCK, not to mention taking 10-20% from laser per stock, and yet I still rarely lose to Falco players.

I've read everyone's thoughts about damage reduction and whatnot. I will say that 1% damage reduction on everything would be a great balancing technique, because Bowser has major issues with projectile spammers. However, I think that this can be equally accomplished just by making Bowser live even longer.

He may live longer than he did in Melee, and yet:

Luigi's fsmash can kill Bowser ~80%
G&W's fsmash and dsmash can kill him at 80-90%
Snake's mines and nair can kill him at 80-90%
MK's anything kills Bowser at 60% (lawl MK)
etc...

Bowser needs to survive long enough to kill these lightweights, who tend to be able to kill Bowser easier than he can kill them. Snake isn't a lightweight, but that's the problem - he survives better than Bowser does. Bowser needs to be the ultimate in surviveability. I think this can be accomplished purely with knockback resistance.

I'm going to sound like Prime here, but CHANGE AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE, and SIMPLE IS BEST. I think that Bowser can be balanced by giving him 15-20% knockback resistance. Trust me, he will be a BEAST with that modification. I firmly believe that he doesn't need offensive buffs.

BTW, I'm willing to play anyone with Bowser online if you want to see a decent Bowser player. seeing what he's capable of my help the discussion.

 

[KishPrime]

All of that is assuming grav changes don't screw him over too bad.

 

[KishSquared]

Good point. I need to test with current gravity settings.

Honestly, I don't think he needs a big gravity change, just increase his knockback resistance and he'll be harder to kill that way. Increasing gravity may well screw over his up-B recovery and other moves.

 

[MookieRah]

Bowser *shouldn't* have any gravity changes. I specifically made sure that all of the big guys, Bowser, D3, and DK have normal Brawl gravity. To compensate for the super floatyness, they were all given crazy fast falls (a 40% boost). At some point Almas said it would save code to have them have 1.1 down grav, but if anything that is the only change to gravity Bowser has. For all intents and purposes he should play nearly identical to how he did before this code.

@KishSquared
We are on the same page. I didn't want to increase Bowser's attack power. I just wanted to make him a tank. A few things I gotta mention about some stuff though.

The 1% damage reduction from all attacks would go a long way. In the course of a fight that would mitigate a ****-ton of damage. This isn't the only fix he needs though. Knockback resist is also a must. The thing about knockback resist is that it affects how everyone elses attacks scale in percentage. So a 10% knockback resist would have a significant effect, because you are scaling down all of the knockbacks by 10% total, not 10% in game numbers. I think if we implemented the 1% damage reduction with 10% knockback resist, he'd be the beast you want him to be. I feel if we put all of our eggs into knockback resist then that just means that he gets comboed to high percent but die much later. It'd help, but not as much as a combination of these two things.

 

[KishPrime]

1% damage reduction combined with knockback resistance seems too strong.

But I don't understand your knockback resist explanation.

 

[The Cape]

I like Mookie's idea. Bowser plays EXCELLENT with these codes now as he feels like Brawl Bowser with no decay (F smash can hit and kills around 80% *giggles*).

Knockback resist and damage reduce make his defense much better. Bowser has always been a defense heavy character, even in Melee.

Also, why the **** is Bowser only 4th heavy? That shell looks heavy as all hell.

 

[MookieRah]

But I don't understand your knockback resist explanation.

I'll try to clarify, I know it's hard to understand what I said. To make it easier I'll refer to percent damage as just damage.

Knockback resist affects the way knockback is scaled on a character. So lets say if we used 20% knockback resist. For example if you were hit when you were at 30 damage your knockback would be as if you were at 24 damage. This is only at low percents mind you. When you get to high percents it really starts to take effect. At 100 you act as if you were at 80, at 200 you act as if you were at 160. Keep in mind this is calculating for every move, and this would make you get comboed to much higher percents, but you'd live for a long, long time.

A damage reduction of one would mitigate a lot of damage, and also serve to be a slight consistent knockback reduction that doesn't scale. You would get comboed for a while longer, but your damage would be roughly at the same level it would have been without the damage reduction because of the mitagation. At mid to high percents it would protect you from light hits and projectiles very well, and would still lighten the load on every hit. This isn't enough to make Bowser a perfect tank though.

I think a combination of the two would better serve Bowser. With a lower knockback resistance of 10%, it wouldn't cause him to be comboed nearly as much as 20%, and with the mitigation he should be able to prevent a lot of damage. At higher percents he'd be able to live a long time because of the nature of how it scales. Considering that a damage reduction also lowers knockback, it should be a much less extreme version of a 20% knockback reduction.

 

[The Cape]

The combination definetly feels like a good way to handle it and give Bowser more resist. Will this make him the hardest character to kill? The would be excellent. Also, with the knockback resist you can be comboed longer, but that means your opponent has to work harder, and you have more opportunities to DI out.

Also, wont this give you some resistance to spikes? Bowser wont go as far down per spike, and that increases his survivability on one of the types of moves that beat him down pretty consistantly.

 

[KishPrime]

I'll come at this from my experience and say that seems like it would completely ruin Fox's game against Bowser. With the number of hits he lands, we're talking about 15-20 damage per stock minimum and a complete loss of the laser as a viable tool (and maybe the drill? how would this affect that move since it's multi-hit?). I'm sure there are other characters who would be severely hurt by this.

When you say that people can just combo for longer, that's not guaranteed. I'm not fully convinced that just because you reduce knockback by 20% that means that combos go 20% longer. You may lose a few percent off the front end, or they may have more time to get out.

Let me also ask, is this even possible?

 

[KishSquared]

Let me clarify - I think the 1% damage reduction is a great idea, and I'd love to see it implemented for funsies. But one thing you'll begin catching on here is that Prime and I believe greatly in keeping the variables to a minimum. If you add the 1% reduction in combination with knockback resistance, now you're balancing two variables rather than one. But honestly, the main reason I'm suggesting the alternative is because of codespace - didn't someone say it wasn't possible to do the 1% thing as it stands?

Regardless, I'm glad we all seem to agree that it's just his defense that needs work. I still stand by 15-20%, because anything else isn't that much, unless some characters get their offense nerfed. This could get really confusing really quick :/

Also, to my knowledge, Bowser is the heaviest character. He's definitely heavier than DDD, and I'm pretty sure Snake too. How does one judge this, have Fox upsmash people on FD and see if it kills?

EDIT: Just to add to Prime's post, Bowser can already get out of a lot of combos because of his fortress. Increasing knockback resistance will give him added combo-escaping capabilities. Don't assume he'll get comboed more because of the 1%.

 

[MookieRah]

The other way to handle damage resist would be to do a percentage resist. The only problem with that is that it would be less effective at low damage moves, because 10% of 2 is not enough to even make a difference (assuming that the engine rounds up). That wouldn't **** Fox, but it would actually make Bowser more of a threat to powerful characters.

Still I stand by the fact that we shouldn't throw it all into knockback resist because that effects how everything scales. Damage reduction is a static knockback resistance if you want to look at it that way. I didn't touch on this before, but some moves have different scales. Some moves start off really low but go up really fast in terms of the knockback scaling. With a 15-20% resistance knockback it would take those moves A LOT longer to kill, perhaps too long. That's why a little of both is the way to go, IMO. It wouldn't take that much more code, and it's not hard to adjust two variables, especially if one of those variables scales and can get out of hand fast.

 

[Almas]

There is coding in Brawl to allow for Knockback and Damage Resistance.

Damage Resistance is pretty much a no brainer - you change a value, and instead of taking 1 damage, you take X damage. With it scaling, of course. It's important to note that this DOES affect knockback, because the knockback of an attack is decided based on the damage the person is on after it's dealt. Note that damage is stored as a float value (a decimal) even though it doesn't show up as this. So it's very possible for an attack to do 1.5 damage. I believe all moves have an integer damage, but stale moves changes this so that you almost always have a non-integer damage.

Knockback Resistance also changes knockback by a ratio. Each attack gets knockback from two sources - it's 'base knockback' and 'knockback growth coefficient'. The total knockback dealt is base+damage*growth.
Knockback Resistance affects the TOTAL knockback. So it's distinct from saying "as if you were 20% less damaged", as it also affects the base knockback of the move. There are a couple of exceptions to this - for example, I believe Fox' Uthrow has some form of fixed movement attached to it that doesn't count as knockback. But the proof is generally from the notion that when this value is set to 0, you don't even flinch - which you would if it only affected the knockback growth.

I'm going to poke around and see if I can find a way to reduce damage by a fixed amount. It should be possible if I can find the right place to look, but I'm not quite sure how to circumvent a couple of errors. There's certainly no way built-in to the engine, but that's hardly a restricting factor.

 

[Deleted member]

there are already codes that change dmg+knockback, but they are player based, not character

 

[Almas]

Eh, it's not too hard to scoop up a player ID from somewhere and then change the damage and knockback stored in memory based on the ID. The only problem is that the only ID locations I know of are incorrect in training mode (the CPU is loaded before you in the memory, but you still show as player 1, so the bonuses are swapped between you).

 

[KishSquared]

But Mookie, I'm just tossing the 15-20% range our arbitrarily. If it's too much, it can easily be reduced. In that sense, we're accomplishing the same thing, whether we do it with method A, method B, or a combination. I just see no reason to use a combination if we can use one method, and the one that allows the most variation is knockback resistance.

If we're talking damage reduction, and if damage really is treated as a float/decimal value, then I see no reason why we couldn't give Bowser a 10% damage reduction. Again, I don't think anyone has stated whether they know if it's possible to issue an exact 1-percent reduction on all moves.

 

[The Cape]

Bowser taking 1% less (on the damage bar)

Completely resists:
Most of Wolf's up and B
Most of Squirtle's up and B
Most of Sonic's fair
Most of Mario's dair
Most of Meta Tornado
After effects of Jiggs rest
Lucas PK thunder tail

Among others.

Go 1% reduction on all moves!

 

[MookieRah]

LOL @ Bowser not being flinched by Meta's whorenado. That'd be ****in sweet. Honestly I think we should at least make a code for that just to see how it actually affects the game.

 

[KishSquared]

Do we have a code for it yet?

 

[Almas]

I'm taking a couple days break from coding now that the char specific sh etc. is out the way, that stuff was a pain. This'll probably be right near the top of my list.

 

[KishSquared]

Thoughts on 1% reduction: Okay, it's INSANELY fun, especially for a Bowser main. Major props to Almas for development. But here are some concerns:

1. This makes Bowser a HARD counter to characters with quick, low-damage moves, like MK, Fox, and Diddy
2. This does almost nothing against power characters like DDD, Ganon, and DK

In other words, this is an incredibly complex aspect to change because the amount of balance it brings is totally skewed depending on which character he's fighting. This is going to cause Bowser to be extremely effective against certain characters, which does little to bring full balance to him as a character.

To keep things short, I honestly think that we should consider only giving him knock reduction.

 

[Almas]

A considered alternative was including a minimum damage per attack. For example, attacks could do 1.5% less damage, but always deal atleast 0.5% damage. It's a significant reduction to some moves, but atleast they still do something.

I could also multiply it by a ratio and then subtract something. E.g. 0.9x-1 damage (where x is the damage that would normally be dealt).

 

[The Cape]

I like Alamas's second theory here, as knockback reduction would really only lead to more comboes.

Squared, did you like his physics at least?

 

[KishSquared]

His short hop seems a bit low. I need to play with it more to see how well I can koopa klaw bounce, I've not had much luck yet. Fast fall is fun, I don't see a problem there.

His grav wasn't changed, so he feels great there, lol. Whether the 1% reduction of some kind stays or not, I want to see his knockback resistance increased a bit. He needs to be the hardest character in the game to kill.

 

[The Cape]

I played with his SH, he can SH claw hop and auto cancel uair and fair (albeit a bit harder to do).

The floaty nature is good for survivability and avoiding combos and a reworked Bowser dont care code for percentages instead of an actual physical number will be alot better.

What about Bowser take 20% less damage from all attacks? (thats 1/5 of the full damage)

 

[KishSquared]

Before we dive too deep into ways to mod Bowser, we need to look at what his true weakness is. He's easily combo'd for massive damage. That's the problem he needs to overcome.

So if we look at a pure %-based damage reduction, I think that's almost equivalent to a knockback reduction. So I'm fine with either, really. I think it would be a bit better to go with knockback reduction because it doesn't change anything for anyone other than that Bowser lives longer. This would be a standard code as for any character, so Bowser doesn't need his own code for balance.

The 1% reduction isn't a bad idea, but it specifically serves to nerf a few things:
1. Light jabs
2. Grab jabs
3. Some throws (Kirby/MK dthrow, etc...)
4. MK Tornado
5. Projectiles

The tornado is getting nerfed already, so that might not be a factor. Bowser's not unique in that his large body has a hard time dealing with it - DDD and DK struggle with this too. In fact, Bowser may well be the best suited for escaping the tornado via his fortress.

Believe it or not, Bowser doesn't do that bad against projectiles. His air-dodge is well-suited for evading them, and the koopa klaw bouncing can help too. If we add landing lag to air-dodging, Bowser will COMPLETELY lose his anti-projectile game, so at that point I'll vote for a 1% reduction, lol.

As for the rest, I feel like this really punishes only certain characters, and it helps Bowser live longer against them, but no one else. So I'm not sure that the 1% thing is needed. At the same time, I'm fine with playtesting this more and seeing what others think.

 

[Almas]

Thought I'd bump this to discuss new code.

I integrated into the code that makes MK receive more KB the ability to reduce Bowser's KB quite easily.

With Bowser's damage set to 0.9x-0.4, does he also need the knockback reduction?

 

[KishPrime]

Why the heck are people adding landing lag to airdodging?