Djent
Yeah, I'm not one of those people to discount Wifi players immediately. Dee is fantastic. Some and Ron both started on Wifi and have done some amazing things. Ally started on Wifi, so did Emukiller in Project M. Freaking Nairo says he mostly trains by playing For Glory, and I can believe it; that game mode encourages adaptability above all else.
People love to discredit Wifi but the fact is, if you can beat someone on Wifi where reaction time means less and reading ability means more, chances are (with a little practice) you're gonna be fearsome offline as well. Also, I'd bet my left nut that plenty of players who discredit Wifi players play a lot more Wifi than they let on.
Keeping all that in mind, I still don't think that one fairly unstacked tournament where Luigi was barely used in Grands means that the character is still top 20. Beating 9B is certainly impressive but Luigi was barely used to do so. I would say Concon getting 5th yesterday is stronger evidence for the assertion of Luigi still being top 20. But even then, this is Concon, widely considered the best Luigi in the world, getting 5th in stuff he used to get 1st and 2nd in. The character is a lot worse off.
FWIW I don't think top 20 is out of the question. I can agree that Luigi is in a similar spot to Falcon in terms of solo viability, however there are a whole mishmash of characters who fall into that group (specifically Falcon, Ike, Luigi, Greninja, Pit, Dark Pit, Yoshi, Peach, and maybe ROB, Pac-Man and Lucario) and I feel like Luigi has a greater number of bad MUs than most of its inhabitants. I would say he has a better Sheik MU than Falcon, though both lose, with more bad MUs overall.
Hmm, I would dispute that Ness' landing aerials were already safe, they seemed good but to be properly safe they both had to be timed and spaced really well (I think I knew some of the numbers/data at one point but don't remember exactly) and were in my eyes one of the things that really stopped Ness being able to play footsies effectively. In fact, previously this was one of the areas Ness stopped being an easy character and to succeed at higher levels you had to master spacing/timing. It is true that his OoS and running shield became worse off though.
Bair was -11 on shield before and -7 now. So if you don't space properly you'll still get shieldgrabbed. It's gone from being -4 on shield drop to 0, but -4 still wasn't enough time to dashgrab OR shield drop Ftilt Ness if he spaced properly. So it's not really any different.
Uair was -9 on shield and is -5 now. I'll grant you that this does make a difference, as Ness can now only be shieldgrabbed by characters with a f6 grab (he has 1 frame to spotdodge but f1 of spotdodge is still vulnerable), but there're only a handful of MUs where this will make a difference; against the characters with f7-10 grabs. The faster grabs can still grab him, the slower grabs never could.
, but he won game 1 of GF2 with
Both aerials are pretty easy to space so that you don't get shield-grabbed, but it became a 50/50 against faster chars like Sheik as to whether they'd try to punish you with a shield drop ---> running grab or a DA or something similar. Now that's significantly harder, even if theoretically he can still be punished in the same/similar ways.
