Character Competitive Impressions

[FullMoon]

I'm curious about Pit/Dark Pit though, what exactly do they have going for them?

 

[Smog Frog]

I'm curious about Pit/Dark Pit though, what exactly do they have going for them?

its not so much strengths as it is lack of weaknesses, which in itself is a strength imo

 

[Locke 06]

I suppose the real question is whether or not Palutena or Ike are considered top twenty without customs. If not, they are not really top 20 in a meta-game without customs, correct?

That's my impression of how most people look at the characters. I have no knowledge of how either character has done competitively outside of Ryouga (sp?) doing very well with Ike at one tournament. There was talk about Ike being very very good with the auto-cancel buffs he received in 1.0.4, so he might be in the conversation without customs, but Palutena w/o customs has never really been in the top-20 conversation to my knowledge even though default Palutena has a very good reflector, jab1 cancels, DA, BAir, and mobility.

Villager is another character I thought about adding the customs label to as counter timber & extreme balloon trip are interesting options, but I think he's had enough success as default to stand without it.

I personally wanted to slip in along with default, but for the sake of "undeniably competitively viable" and "top-20" I decided against it. Those 5 with are more considered to be "in the middle/not terrible" than top... which is just technically is 20-30 but considering 28 are considered to be better than "in the middle" it's more likely that they are somewhere between 25-35.

Edit: Puff hasn't had enough results to be in the conversation nor enough discussion while Marth & Ganondorf have had some results but also a lot of discussion about their weaknesses. DH is a personal thing of mine as I experience/see DH play a lot and I think the character is very good despite their weaknesses. However, this isn't a me list, it's a general list.

Palutena is better with her defaults to be frank, maybe replace Counter with Lightweight.

Umm... Super Speed? I know the reflector is great, but... from what I understand about super speed it's basically Sonic's Spin Dash except you can do literally anything out of it (including grab which... what.)

I'll just keep going as I see things to respond to >.>

I'm curious about Pit/Dark Pit though, what exactly do they have going for them?

What do they have going against them other than trouble killing/damage output and semi-light weight (which is reminiscent of one Sheikah)? Disjoints, auto-canceled SH aerials, great grab game (fthrow kills), arrow game, off-stage game with multiple jumps/recovery distance. They can space well with ftilt, anti-air with usmash, Dsmash is hard to punish. Those are all disjointed which helps exploit range issues in the cast (Pikachu, Mario, Falcon).

Pits might not be fantastic at anything (outside of maybe spacing and recovery/gimping) but they're so well rounded.

 

[FullMoon]

Aren't their Smashes all rather laggy and open for punishment? When I go against Pit I mainly look for the opening they give me when I manage to bait it out and it almost always works. Side-b also leaves them pretty vulnerable from what I've soon.

Do note that I don't really think the Pits are unworthy of being Top 20, I'm just curious about the reasons behind it. But from what it looks like they're good because they're basically a jack-of-all-trades?

 

[Tattles]

Aren't their Smashes all rather laggy and open for punishment? When I go against Pit I mainly look for the opening they give me when I manage to bait it out and it almost always works. Side-b also leaves them pretty vulnerable from what I've soon.

Do note that I don't really think the Pits are unworthy of being Top 20, I'm just curious about the reasons behind it. But from what it looks like they're good because they're basically a jack-of-all-trades?

Their smashes are definitely weak. Upsmash is straight up useless. They're fast, lots of pressure with arrows, great throws.

They're definitely the pinnacle of a jack-of-all-trades character, although their smashes are very underwhelming, they stand a chance in any match-up.

 

[Chuva]

Pits' Fsmash is quite good in terms of speed and power, plus it's great for punishing spot-dodges.

 

[Makorel]

Pit's F-smash is somewhat laggy but is also like the fastest Fsmash in the game on start up (frame 10) and has a lot of range so I think it has more going for it than not. It's also true that Side-B leaves you vulnerable, but being able to land a KO move when your opponent thinks they're not vulnerable (aka, in the middle of their attack animation) is just too ballsy a maneuver for me to not love, competitively useful or not.

Up smash is a bit different than, say, Mario's Upsmash, who can run forward towards a grounded opponent for a KO. Pit's is also a KO move I believe(and a comboing move at low percents) but it takes advantage of its long range above Pit's head and somewhat on the sides to catch aerial opponents, and also works as a mixup when the other guy thinks you're going to jump and aerial.

Down smash doesn't have much endlag at all, really only as much as it takes for the second hit to end. It's so quick that I've gotten into the habit of doing double Down smashes when my opponent is in front of me and in shield just because they come out so quick, and usually tricks them into closing because they think they can get a hit on me.

 

[Trifroze]

I'll piggyback off Chuva's list and say that the following characters in the "conversation" of top-20 based on 2014 results and theorycrafting that's been done in this thread in no specific order. If I missed a character, forgive me, but this is purely to say who has been in the discussion and who is viable based on the scene now.

(customs)
/(customs)

Ironically I think the order seems fairly accurate to me, although I'd basically switch Shulk and Villager around. Just count Pit and Dark Pit as separate characters and remove the last 9 and that's our top 20. The remaining characters are decent enough, some more than others, but I wouldn't consider them viable in a major tournament even if extremely good or dedicated players are able to get into grand finals with them.

E: DK with customs is probably as good as Ike and Palutena, but considering customs may not be legal I'd throw Palutena out and let Pac-Man, Luigi, Ike or DK take #20.

 

[Conda]

I'm curious about Pit/Dark Pit though, what exactly do they have going for them?

Speed, priority, multiple jumps. Basically being Marth-0like but with more tools and multihit options, as well as a good grab game and great 'tools' - upperdash, counter, projectile, etc.

Pit's F-smash is somewhat laggy but is also like the fastest Fsmash in the game on start up (frame 10) and has a lot of range so I think it has more going for it than not. It's also true that Side-B leaves you vulnerable, but being able to land a KO move when your opponent thinks they're not vulnerable (aka, in the middle of their attack animation) is just too ballsy a maneuver for me to not love, competitively useful or not.

Up smash is a bit different than, say, Mario's Upsmash, who can run forward towards a grounded opponent for a KO. Pit's is also a KO move I believe(and a comboing move at low percents) but it takes advantage of its long range above Pit's head and somewhat on the sides to catch aerial opponents, and also works as a mixup when the other guy thinks you're going to jump and aerial.

Down smash doesn't have much endlag at all, really only as much as it takes for the second hit to end. It's so quick that I've gotten into the habit of doing double Down smashes when my opponent is in front of me and in shield just because they come out so quick, and usually tricks them into closing because they think they can get a hit on me.

I've been playing a lot of Pit/Dpit and I totally agree. I talk about them a lot on my channel, in the videos I upload with them. Great all-rounder characters. The Marios of the swordie class.

 

[FullMoon]

I see, honestly Pit always looked a bit bland to me in terms of gameplay so I never really knew what he was capable of, outside of the few times I went against them.

It's actually really tough for me to rank the characters in this game myself, in part due to having little knowledge of how some of them play. Still, outside of the Diddy and Sheik, I feel the gap between how good the characters are compared to the others to be very small almost to the point of not making much of a difference, that's just me though.

I still vouch for Greninja being in the Top 20, mostly because of bias, I'll admit, but honestly I don't feel like there's any MU that gives him a lot of trouble, at least going from my experiences. I myself struggle against R.O.B but that may be just me.

 

[Mr. Johan]

General consensus seems to be that Diddy and Sheik share the cake at the top, while the next seven spots are a battle royale between Sonic, Yoshi, Rosa, Fox, Ness, Lucario, and Pikachu, while the other places are a massive slobber-knocker between literally everybody else, sans Zelda, who was left in charge of both the cleanup duty back in the Brawl barracks and the disposing of Ice Climbers', Wolf's, and Lucas's bodies after Snake killed them and ran away.

There's some variance between those places, but there are, in effect, three distinct "tiers" - the two on top, the seven scrambling for seconds, and the other 45 fighting for a piece of a single slice of that cake.

 

[Nidtendofreak]

E: DK with customs is probably as good as Ike and Palutena, but considering customs may not be legal I'd throw Palutena out and let Pac-Man, Luigi, Ike or DK take #20.

I'm very doubtful DK's customs are as good as Ike's or Palutena's. Palutena has speed x2, enough said there. Ike has Tempest (best windbox in the game, recovery boost/offstage gimp tool, and is basically superior Storm Punch.), Close Combat (good approach option, beats or clanks with a lot of projectiles, pops the opponent up into the air for free juggles), Counter 2 (also known as "free combo for me if you touch me, or free utilt/ftilt/fsmash for me"), and we can't even agree which version of Aether is the best but it can either be whipping out massive amount of damage while greatly improving our recovery range or being noticeably quicker while having a projectile to cover onstage landings/uses. And then you still have people who like Eruption 3/Aether 1/Counter 1 better all with fairly legitimate reasons. The only dud custom option Ike has is Counter 3.

DK has some good options for sure... but Ike and Palutena in general shatter the custom move mold. The game doesn't give Ike nearly enough custom move set slots for all of the different variant setups he might want to use, and Palutena with two speed boost types is just... mindboggling. Its almost like they setup the Miis and Palutena's customs first, then set up Ike's, and then promptly got lazy with all of the other characters' custom options.

 

[thehard]

I vote we stop saying "...but with customs..." and instead treat all specials as interchangeable, and on the same wavelength. I really want them to be tournament-legal but if they're continuously referred to as non-essential it will be harder to make that happen.

 

[FullMoon]

General consensus seems to be that Diddy and Sheik share the cake at the top, while the next seven spots are a battle royale between Sonic, Yoshi, Rosa, Fox, Ness, Lucario, and Pikachu, while the other places are a massive slobber-knocker between literally everybody else, sans Zelda, who was left in charge of both the cleanup duty back in the Brawl barracks and the disposing of Ice Climbers', Wolf's, and Lucas's bodies after Snake killed them and ran away.

There's some variance between those places, but there are, in effect, three distinct "tiers" - the two on top, the seven scrambling for seconds, and the other 45 fighting for a piece of a single slice of that cake.

Yeah, I can actually agree with that. Though is Zelda really that bad? I found her tricky to use but I dunno, she never felt really bad to me.

 

[FlareHabanero]

Yeah, I can actually agree with that. Though is Zelda really that bad? I found her tricky to use but I dunno, she never felt really bad to me.

Zelda will always be a heavily flawed character due to her characteristics. Being slow, light and tall with rather wonky attacks is never a good combo in a game like Smash Bros. On the bright side, at least this is the best incarnation of Zelda (Not counting Project M prior to 3.5) mainly since she feels more "complete".

 

[RE-DAZ]

¿Why is DK so underrated? Also people stop looking at Wario with the changes he got but he can still handle in smash

 

[Spinosaurus]

Smash 4 having less BS than Brawl is the best thing to happen to DK.

Wario benefits too.

 

[Nu~]

Why is Mario so high? It seems like he's being extremely overrated. He still has trouble sealing the kill, can be gimped by any character with a solid offstage game.
I really want to know why

 

[Makorel]

The Marios of the swordie class.

I agree with this. I actually switched from Mario to Pit early on because I looked at both and saw Pit as a Mario with longer range and recovery and figured Pit was a better Mario than Mario. Go figure.

honestly Pit always looked a bit bland to me

And also this. I like a well rounded character, vanilla ice cream, and to keep my options open. I can get why people think the Super Pit Bros. are bland because they don't do any one thing best but when a character does lots of things well to me that's a character that always has an open avenue to victory, even if you won't be walking the same road each time.

 

[RWB]

Why is Mario so high? It seems like he's being extremely overrated. He still has trouble sealing the kill, can be gimped by any character with a solid offstage game, and doesn't really excel in anything.
I really want to know why

Frame 9 Up Smash and Frame 5 Down Smash both seem pretty good choices for kill moves. Mario has extremely quick startup in this game...

 

[mimgrim]

Palutena is better with her defaults to be frank, maybe replace Counter with Lightweight.

I don't even....

Super Speed is like the best move in the game. She goes into a super sped run where she is the hit-box and can do anything out of that she can out of a dash and more, it gives her so many options.

Lightweight makes her already good mobility better and and allows her to follow from throws more and it can be refreshed constantly on stages with platforms as long as she keep stage control.

AR and EF are both kinda eh but EF is cool for edge guarding, last hit is unblockable, and has better synergy with SS.

Palutena easily becomes a top 10, top 5 imo, character with customs on from being somewhere more in the middle.

Palutena is not better with her defaults.

 

[ParanoidDrone]

I vote we stop saying "...but with customs..." and instead treat all specials as interchangeable, and on the same wavelength. I really want them to be tournament-legal but if they're continuously referred to as non-essential it will be harder to make that happen.

This will be hard until they're widely allowed in tournaments. Character and tier discussion based on customs is close to meaningless if the majority of competitive play still doesn't use them. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation.

 

[Sinister Slush]

Now that the Yoshi results are slowly piling up, I can feel a bit more comfortable saying Yoshi is either Top 5 or just almost hitting that point of being in the realm of top 5.
Still hoping a big tournament win or some rep at APEX happens. I don't think a good portion of the Yoshi's that have submitted results are gonna be joining APEX tho, so guess gotta hope for Aiba or yoshidora to do well if japan goes.

 

[Kofu]

Personally I think Samus and Wii Fit Trainer may be joining Zelda at the bottom of the barrel, but at least they gain significant buffs from customs. Doc and Little Mac feel like they could be down that direction as well.

I really don't know how to feel about Little Mac, he honestly gets screwed by stages more than any other character (Ness comes in second but it's so far removed it almost doesn't matter) and in a lot of ways is missing what is usually a significant part of a character's moveset. I just can't see him going places competitively in the long run. He kind of reminds me of Brawl Ganondorf: a character with powerful options that need to be respected but with gaping holes in his design. Unlike Ganon, though, LM's seem to he intentional and not oversights. At the same time I wonder how many people are really aware of some of what he can do (down-angled FSmash wrecks shields, for example). I personally don't know anything about his customs except that one of the ones for Jolt Haymaker ignores shields.

 

[Makorel]

It's probably crummy to think this way but Mac is the only character in the game who I would be fine with being bottom of bottom tier. To me it just wouldn't be Little Mac if he didn't have the odds stacked against him.

 

[Ffamran]

It's probably crummy to think this way but Mac is the only character in the game who I would be fine with being bottom of bottom tier. To me it just wouldn't be Little Mac if he didn't have the odds stacked against him.

Wasn't that Little Mac's schtick? To be the underdog and go against impossible odds? Y'know, that was also Snake's thing too along with a couple of other characters... Luigi?

 

[Makorel]

Little Mac isn't merely an underdog. He is the undest dog. The guy no one expects to succeed. The guy who everyone thinks is too weak to go the distance. But he's also the guy with the most passion, the most heart, the guy who will take what the world can throw at him and give back as good as he gets because just because he's little it don't mean you can push him around. When the chips are down, and he's on the mat and the count is reaching 10, he thinks of his trainer, the one who believed in him, Doc Louis, and remembers his words:

"Join the Nintendo Fun Club Today Mac!"

And Mac gets right back up ready to fight, because there ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep him from giving it a good Star Uppercut before he goes down swinging.

 

[KlefkiHolder]

Little Mac isn't merely an underdog. He is the undest dog. The guy no one expects to succeed. The guy who everyone thinks is too weak to go the distance. But he's also the guy with the most passion, the most heart, the guy who will take what the world can throw at him and give back as good as he gets because just because he's little it don't mean you can push him around. When the chips are down, and he's on the mat and the count is reaching 10, he thinks of his trainer, the one who believed in him, Doc Louis, and remembers his words:

"Join the Nintendo Fun Club Today Mac!"

And Mac gets right back up ready to fight, because there ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep him from giving it a good Star Uppercut before he goes down swinging.

Jigglypuff is found on Route 3.

No one can complain.

 

[iVoltage]

Little Mac isn't merely an underdog. He is the undest dog. The guy no one expects to succeed. The guy who everyone thinks is too weak to go the distance. But he's also the guy with the most passion, the most heart, the guy who will take what the world can throw at him and give back as good as he gets because just because he's little it don't mean you can push him around. When the chips are down, and he's on the mat and the count is reaching 10, he thinks of his trainer, the one who believed in him, Doc Louis, and remembers his words:

"Join the Nintendo Fun Club Today Mac!"

And Mac gets right back up ready to fight, because there ain't no mountain high enough, ain't no valley low enough, ain't no river wide enough to keep him from giving it a good Star Uppercut before he goes down swinging.

Its true

 

[HeroMystic]

Why is Mario so high? It seems like he's being extremely overrated. He still has trouble sealing the kill, can be gimped by any character with a solid offstage game.
I really want to know why

I'll just repost these.

Mario has fantastic mobility specs, great grab range, good grab game, pretty good frame data. His spot could get worse as time goes on but Mario's ability to move around the stage fast and take positional control is pretty good. Up-B is awesome offensively. Cape and Fireballs are good tools for stage control and mitigating his neutral weaknesses.

Vectoring removal made Mario significantly better than people were expecting, too. Much like Diddy Kong.
Up Tilt "nerf" made it a combo/set up move for much longer, similar to Sheik's fair.

As per Mario, have you guys been following our work in the frame data topic? This is a breakdown of the start-up frames of every normal and grab every character has (Olimar's full data isn't entered into that table yet but we do know it, not important right now):

http://pastebin.com/NJ4Q5PzU

The only character who has better average frame data than Mario is Luigi, and it's reasonably close. Yes, Mario has better average frame data than Sheik and Fox (barely but he does, though that calculation does give perhaps undue weight to grabs which doesn't matter for Sheik but is very slightly biased against Fox), and there's a pretty big gap between the characters with the best frame data and the rest which means in most match-ups Mario has a large attack speed advantage. However you look at it, Mario's frame data is incredible; only two normals with double digit start-up frames with those being merely f15/f16 is pretty great. Mario doesn't have slow moves that are hard to hit with given that only two of his moves are even physically possible for a human being to react to and even then not by a very big margin.

I think people have this long standing notion that Mario is some average guy. No, he's not. Mario is a speed character, one of the fastest in the game, and I think that has to become the main way we look at him if we're going to understand how he works in this game. There's a lot to be said about him and about how this game plays, but just looking at the numbers I'm seeing examining the game on a technical level, it's hard not to be impressed with Mario and very hard to see a character with this level of raw numeric quality not being good on some level.

To note, as a Mario main, getting gimped is an overrated issue. You first gotta get him off the stage first, and his mobility and aggressive playstyle makes that pretty difficult. Even then, he's not Lil'Mac. A sneeze won't gimp Mario off-stage.

 

[HeavyLobster]

Personally I think Samus and Wii Fit Trainer may be joining Zelda at the bottom of the barrel, but at least they gain significant buffs from customs. Doc and Little Mac feel like they could be down that direction as well.

I really don't know how to feel about Little Mac, he honestly gets screwed by stages more than any other character (Ness comes in second but it's so far removed it almost doesn't matter) and in a lot of ways is missing what is usually a significant part of a character's moveset. I just can't see him going places competitively in the long run. He kind of reminds me of Brawl Ganondorf: a character with powerful options that need to be respected but with gaping holes in his design. Unlike Ganon, though, LM's seem to he intentional and not oversights. At the same time I wonder how many people are really aware of some of what he can do (down-angled FSmash wrecks shields, for example). I personally don't know anything about his customs except that one of the ones for Jolt Haymaker ignores shields.

Mac is strictly a pocket character. He has a number of stupid character/stage counterpicks that keep him from solo viability, but in cases where you can pick your stage and opponent he's very capable, including against many of the stronger characters in the game. If the stage list were trimmed down to FD, BF, and Smashville he'd be just fine, though you'd still probably want to carry a secondary for certain MUs.

 

[Road Death Wheel]

Personally I think Samus and Wii Fit Trainer may be joining Zelda at the bottom of the barrel, but at least they gain significant buffs from customs. Doc and Little Mac feel like they could be down that direction as well.

I really don't know how to feel about Little Mac, he honestly gets screwed by stages more than any other character (Ness comes in second but it's so far removed it almost doesn't matter) and in a lot of ways is missing what is usually a significant part of a character's moveset. I just can't see him going places competitively in the long run. He kind of reminds me of Brawl Ganondorf: a character with powerful options that need to be respected but with gaping holes in his design. Unlike Ganon, though, LM's seem to he intentional and not oversights. At the same time I wonder how many people are really aware of some of what he can do (down-angled FSmash wrecks shields, for example). I personally don't know anything about his customs except that one of the ones for Jolt Haymaker ignores shields.

samus is not bottom at least in my opinion. all maybe i would have agreed a month and a half ago but not now. simply because at first few shots samuses option kit feels very unintuitive untill you really start understanding her kit. than it starts to mesh. expecially her anti recovery game like my god she can force on very punishable way of getting back on stage in the form of bombs jeez just place one down near the edge weave a bit to fake them out place another one and just wait for that ledge jump and nail em with a fair uair bair what ever ur pleasure really or u can just turn them into wusses with the threat of charge shot.

 

[ChronoPenguin]

I don't even....

Super Speed is like the best move in the game. .

Lol no its monado arts.
Superspeed is all well and good till you figure out the combo games and KO power MA would allow on someone like Ness, Sheik or even sonic.

 

[Road Death Wheel]

Lol no its monado arts.
Shaya would have a heart attack if Sheik or Sonic got their hands on it.

warlock punch want a word.
kirby is already scary when he gets his mouth on it.

 

[ChronoPenguin]

warlock punch want a word.
kirby is already scary when he gets his mouth on it.

Monado art canceled thunder stomping.
Or Monado Jump Ganon.
Or Monado Speed G- tl;Dr Monado boys

 

[Road Death Wheel]

buster ganon and defence lucario

Monado art canceled thunder stomping.
Or Monado Jump Ganon.
Or Monado Speed G- tl;Dr Monado boys

 

[Chuva]

Monado Shield Lucario...the horror...

 

[Nu~]

Monado Shield Lucario...the horror...

Buster first, THEN switch to shield.
GG
Then you have smash pacman. Key and other fruits killing at 90%

 

[Nidtendofreak]

Speed Ike and Buster Ike

All da extra combos. All of dem. And then Smash Ike for kicks like KOing with Utilt at like 50%.

 

[FullMoon]

I wonder how crazy Speed Sonic would be.