Character Design in PM

[pooch182]

I think it'd be awesome to see Ganon have a new Up-smash. If he could do like a double kick, sort of like his f-tilt and then an up-angled f-tilt but more BKB and slower start up would be ****ing cool. As for the other complaints, I feel like the only valid one is his grab game. He needs to have a worse down-throw, but he deserves a better grab range for sure.

Everything else you mentioned seems to just be bias that favors your character. Not every character has stellar OoS options, mainly because not every character is supposed to. His damage output is great where it is. He's supposed to get juggled hard, and he's supposed to have a bad recovery. That's the design of his character.

 

[CORY]

errr... ganon's power is way good enough, especially combined with his damage, especially considering all of his aerials (outside of sourspotted hits) deal 10 or more damage.

the wizkick bit is in regards to anything that moves a character rapidly forward and/or down. they don't put hitboxes at the front of the move because it becomes stupid to deal with. look at mk's dair: the hitbox isn't even on his sword, it's up in/near his body. falcon kick, shoulder bash, dive kicks, spacey illusions, anything that moves forward and/or down quickly has a negative disjointed hitbox.

most everything else i agree with. espcially ****ing t-rex grab >: ( like, i wouldn't even be as mad if characters could just do good shield options UNDERNEATH the grab, making them even better D : get rid of chaingrabs, even ganon's, and give him a good grab!

 

[_Ganondorf_]

I think it'd be awesome to see Ganon have a new Up-smash. If he could do like a double kick, sort of like his f-tilt and then an up-angled f-tilt but more BKB and slower start up would be ****ing cool. As for the other complaints, I feel like the only valid one is his grab game. He needs to have a worse down-throw, but he deserves a better grab range for sure.

Everything else you mentioned seems to just be bias that favors your character. Not every character has stellar OoS options, mainly because not every character is supposed to. His damage output is great where it is. He's supposed to get juggled hard, and he's supposed to have a bad recovery. That's the design of his character.

No doubt I have some bias lol he is my main after all, but I do try to be objective with it. a longer reaching hit-box on the swipe at the end of up B wont make his recovery good just a little safer against bad edge guarders right now I think its way too easy to edge guard Ganon, like waaaaaaaay too easy. Bigger/longer hit boxes on Smashes also isn't OP I actually think its warranted for how slow they are it only makes sense they cover more space/ground. And fsmash sending side ways just makes sense. And I don't think a new B move and better grab range (although you agree on the grab range) is pushing it either. All these make complete sense from a design point of view. everything else I listed could be yes or no. But these (^) things need some attention.

 

[Chevy]

I can't say I agree with this due to the move having absolutely no horizontal range, so even with dacus you need to be right on target to hit with it. Both hits deal 41% total, btw, though that's not much of a difference.

The move that I'd list for your examples for Ganon would be dthrow, chaingrabs that go on for so long are pretty dumb imo. Nerf chaingrab buff grab range and that situation is dealt with perfectly.

Up-smash actually has pretty damn good horizontal range compared to the animation, huge hitboxes and whatnot. Take it from someone who gets killed by the Gerudo Dong way too often. I'd rather they revert to his Brawl Up-smash though, no reason to re-clone Falcon's. His Brawl one was swag as ****.

 

[NisforSmash]

I'd rather they revert to his Brawl Up-smash though, no reason to re-clone Falcon's. His Brawl one was swag as ****.

That plus it fits his personality more. His current up smash is the only move in his moveset that actually looks like it took effort for him to do. Ganon's moves are supposed to look effortless.

I'd like to see him get a hover and a passive dark shield. The hover could be vertically locked like how peach's is horizontally locked. The passive dark shield could be like lucario's aura system where comboing would charge it. Once it's fully charged, on the next attack he takes he'll ignore all damage and knockback but it'll completely deplete the shield. I think those could help him out significantly along w/ a slightly faster running speed and grab range.
I don't think giving him access to his sword is necessary though.

 

[Bazkip]

Up-smash actually has pretty damn good horizontal range compared to the animation, huge hitboxes and whatnot. Take it from someone who gets killed by the Gerudo Dong way too often. I'd rather they revert to his Brawl Up-smash though, no reason to re-clone Falcon's. His Brawl one was swag as ****.

The topmost hitbox is kinda big but amounts to "You were pretty much directly above me"
The rest of the hitboxes are "Your face is literally in my crotch"

 

[Lil Puddin]

People are always looking for someone to blame. So whatever complaints they have about Project M they just blame it on Strong Bad, not realizing that Pm is made by a huge *** dev team and not just a single Wario player. The man has been around for a long time he knows his stuff.

You are a beautiful person, can I marry you?

 

[_Ganondorf_]

Up-smash actually has pretty damn good horizontal range compared to the animation, huge hitboxes and whatnot. Take it from someone who gets killed by the Gerudo Dong way too often. I'd rather they revert to his Brawl Up-smash though, no reason to re-clone Falcon's. His Brawl one was swag as ****.

You are right, compared to the animation it has nice horizontal range but in general it doesn't. After using Ashingda's Triforce mod and having a magic uppercut as Up smash with a nice horizontal range you would never want to go back to the regular Up-smash. just that little increase in horizontal range makes a world of a difference.

 

[Beorn]

Since when did this thread become about ganondorf buffs?

I fear I did this .... I am sorry T_T

So how about them space animals and psychic cats? pretty broke right?

 

[Phaiyte]

It sounds so easy when you just write it like that, but you do realize that in practice that all of those things happen really quickly, right? Or have you never experienced it in practice?


Please tell that to all of the people M2K and Emukiller roflstomped with Mewtwo at SKTAR 3. Tell them that they were just bad to ever get hit by teleport -> Nair.

M2K literally had no idea what was going on in the dittos and Emukiller is beaten on a regular basis with the exact reaction as I posted above. No, it is not hard in practice.

 

[victinivcreate1]

M2K literally had no idea what was going on in the dittos and Emukiller is beaten on a regular basis with the exact reaction as I posted above. No, it is not hard in practice.

ESAM wasn't even jabbing. He was charging Samus' Ice Up Smash XDDD

 

[Hinichii.ez.™]

Wdf does that quote and what was said, even have in common???

 

[victinivcreate1]

Wdf does that quote and what was said, even have in common???

Phaiyte was talking about Emukiller getting beaten by getting jabbed out of tp. I'm saying that jab is t the only option and players (I mentioned ESAM in particular) were up smashing.

Clear now?

 

[Mr.Pickle]

I can't believe that what people took out of beorn's post is a chance to voice their opinion on buffs for ganon. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do this, but please take that to a thread more suitable for that discussion.

He used ganon's DACUS for an example because of how it does so much, while at the same time being extremely safe. To add to that, it's not in the same league as some of the other options the rest of the roster has, and it's a technique that a character that is regarded on the lower end of the character roster viability has. Having said that, it's still a technique that gives the user a lot of reward, with little to no risk, something that most characters have in this game. So basically, almost every character has at least one option that gives them multiple uses with low risk, and very little thought put into it's usage.

is this another one of those threads where someone complains that characters have single tools that are too good and then go on to imply that fox and falco are fine

Bleck I have respect for you, and I know you don't like the spacies, but I'll advise you to stop posting stuff like this so often. It's not the right way to go about it, you're pretty tenacious though so I'll give you props for that.

yes

No it isn't, this thread applies to everyone in the roster, no exceptions.

 

[NisforSmash]

For the record, i always suggest unique or interesting gimmicks to characters that don't have them. Any thread I'm in or have created is susceptible to it so....

 

[Bazkip]

I can't believe that what people took out of beorn's post is a chance to voice their opinion on buffs for ganon. There is nothing wrong with wanting to do this, but please take that to a thread more suitable for that discussion.

He used ganon's DACUS for an example because of how it does so much, while at the same time being extremely safe. To add to that, it's not in the same league as some of the other options the rest of the roster has, and it's a technique that a character that is regarded on the lower end of the character roster viability has. Having said that, it's still a technique that gives the user a lot of reward, with little to no risk, something that most characters have in this game. So basically, almost every character has at least one option that gives them multiple uses with low risk, and very little thought put into it's usage.

That's probably my fault. I just wanted to say that I disagreed with that point though

 

[Strong Badam]

No it isn't, this thread applies to everyone in the roster, no exceptions.

I posted in a different thread that was then merged with this one.

 

[Scuba Steve]

Ganon's upsmash hitbox is ballz. I don't know what you babies are whining about

 

[Mr.Pickle]

I posted in a different thread that was then merged with this one.

Well they're both pretty much the same thing so it doesn't matter too much, unless someone specifically said that
the spacies were fine, which I haven't seen. It isn't a big deal so I'm not stressing it.

That's probably my fault. I just wanted to say that I disagreed with that point though

That's fine, nothing wrong with that, just some people took it a little too far, and kinda focused a little hard on the wrong part of dude's post.

Ganon's upsmash hitbox is ballz. I don't know what you babies are whining about

If you think we're whining, then you've completely missed the point. Tthe hitbox isn't bad, though it isn't the greatest. Saying its, "ballz" is a huge stretch. I also have a ton of experience playing ganon, because I mained him for two years, and I've had a lot of experience playing against the character. So I'm not some scrub who got hit by it once and just wanted to complain about it, because I didn't understand it. I just see some unnecessary qualities about the move, and I think adjustments could be made to make it more thought provoking. Now if nothing is done to it, I don't think that ganon's design is going to suffer heavily from it, but there is still room for improvement is all I'm saying.

 

[Beorn]

Well they're both pretty much the same thing so it doesn't matter too much, unless someone specifically said that
the spacies were fine, which I haven't seen. It isn't a big deal so I'm not stressing it.



That's fine, nothing wrong with that, just some people took it a little too far, and kinda focused a little hard on the wrong part of dude's post.



If you think we're whining, then you've completely missed the point. Tthe hitbox isn't bad, though it isn't the greatest. Saying its, "ballz" is a huge stretch. I also have a ton of experience playing ganon, because I mained him for two years, and I've had a lot of experience playing against the character. So I'm not some scrub who got hit by it once and just wanted to complain about it, because I didn't understand it. I just see some unnecessary qualities about the move, and I think adjustments could be made to make it more thought provoking. Now if nothing is done to it, I don't think that ganon's design is going to suffer heavily from it, but there is still room for improvement is all I'm saying.

What he said. It's not like Usmash is broken or anything close to that. I brought it up because, one, people consider ganon a bad character, and two, because it's a perfect example of moves that seem fine, but are just over the edge of safety and speed to be in a game like melee. When I say "like melee" I'm referring to the punish-ability and speed of the limited options most characters have in melee, that requires more thought, better spacing, and a greater understanding of your character to hope to have a chance.

I could have brought any of the other characters up to get my point across. My original point being the amount of overlapping and safe options characters in pm tend to have in their nuetral, combo and recovery games. Again I stress that this was my point in saying anything at all, because I tend to lurk and play the game rather than posting. If I didn't see that the PMDT/BR had answered my and other players prayers about the overabundance of safe and thoughtless options in the recovery game, I wouldn't have bothered posting at all.

I feel that the longer this game is out, the more players will become proficient enough with their characters and at the game in general to see these glaring flaws in the design of some aspects of Project M. Just as it took 4 or more years to see that recoverys were too good. I expect it will be some time before the level of play and consistency among the average player gets to a place that brings about another big change in the design of the game. Fingers crossed the next things to be tweaked are the overlapping or overly safe neutral options, but I would be down for combos being less powerfully overwhelming as well.

 

[Blank Mauser]

A lot of what I like about Melee characters is their lack of an extended moveset, but for the moves they do use to be really versatile. Using soft hitboxes for comboing, and sweetspot for finishing just feels natural for smash. Rather than a lot of characters who simply have no reason not to sweetspot. Also Falco/Fox are pretty much on the edge of broken in terms of how much freedom they give you which is what makes them so fun. Without shield pressure most other characters end up relying purely on anti-air abilities or combo starters. That's not to say a lot of characters can't have an intricate neutral game, but especially this early in PM's lifespan everyone is just looking to combo the **** out of people so they resort to using their starters more often than not. Rather than figuring out what move is best for each situation in neutral.

I do think people complain about PM a lot, partially because people think it could influence the next patch or whatever. If the current version of PM came out instead of Brawl I think everyone would have already embraced all its changes. The context and enthusiasm that came with Brawl's release would have changed everyones tone. Example "Space animals are so easy to play in PM..." to "Space animals are so much easier to play in PM!" Not to mention we would have years of metagame development to figure things out. Rather than patches, the thing PM needs most are really good players to lab it out over time.

Likewise I think Melee is a great game, and don't see why its a negative thing for PM to draw inspiration from it as many people seem to imply. I think right now PM is a pretty irregular all-star mix. You have a game where somewhat more offensively tooled Brawl top tiers can fight mostly restored Melee top tiers and I think thats a good appeal. While lower tier characters became Melee-esque(ZSS, Wolf, Lucas) or practically PM original(Ivy, Lucario, Zelda) And people can't decide whether they want more of the Melee-esque direction or more of the PM originality. Hence "character design" and "direction" go hand in hand as topics I suppose. I prefer if every character had some sort of Melee inspiration as we've had time to realize it "works." Formulating a gameplan around respecting your opponents implied options rather than simply "Don't get hit by this combo starter" feels more fun to me. But hey maybe thats just a vast over-simplification. =3

 

[CyberZixx]

Well they're both pretty much the same thing so it doesn't matter too much, unless someone specifically said that
the spacies were fine, which I haven't seen. It isn't a big deal so I'm not stressing it.

Firstly, I'd like to look at a few very well designed characters, at least well designed from my perspective. The first would be Falco.

 

[PlateProp]

Wtf is up with Yoshi's side b hitting on canceling it

Thats some bs

 

[Phaiyte]

No doubt I have some bias lol he is my main after all, but I do try to be objective with it. a longer reaching hit-box on the swipe at the end of up B wont make his recovery good just a little safer against bad edge guarders right now I think its way too easy to edge guard Ganon, like waaaaaaaay too easy. Bigger/longer hit boxes on Smashes also isn't OP I actually think its warranted for how slow they are it only makes sense they cover more space/ground. And fsmash sending side ways just makes sense. And I don't think a new B move and better grab range (although you agree on the grab range) is pushing it either. All these make complete sense from a design point of view. everything else I listed could be yes or no. But these (^) things need some attention.

Yo, I'mma let you finish but, completely invincible U/Dair are the most ultimate **** ever.

 

[Joe73191]

Almost every character in the game is done so beautifully that I really want to take a moment to thank and congratulate the PMDT for such a great job. Well done guys!

I would have said the glide mechanic is a bit OP but I think that is coming out in 3.5 so that's cool. IC's were nerfed a bit too much imo. I have never been a fan of lucario I just don't know what could be done for him.

The best done characters imo are Wolf, Mewtwo, Lucas, Snake and Roy. Mewtwo and Roy are just top of top. Absolutely PERFECT!!!!!

 

[pooch182]

The best done characters imo are Wolf, Mewtwo, Lucas, Snake and Roy. Mewtwo and Roy are just top of top. Absolutely PERFECT!!!!!

Oh God no . . . maybe Roy, but the rest definitely need work still.

As for how to fix Lucario, I really think that it boils down to giving him a better projectile to be able to manage in the neutral at all. I don't see how switching the properties of shadow ball and aura sphere would cause any problems for either Lucario or Mewtwo, and I feel as though it'd really help balance the two out immensely.

 

[Mera Mera]

Oh God no . . . maybe Roy, but the rest definitely need work still.

As for how to fix Lucario, I really think that it boils down to giving him a better projectile to be able to manage in the neutral at all. I don't see how switching the properties of shadow ball and aura sphere would cause any problems for either Lucario or Mewtwo, and I feel as though it'd really help balance the two out immensely.

I don't really feel like Lucario needs much help. I definitely wouldn't support this if it included getting Mewtwo's full charge kill projectile.

Lucario has a bad dash dance, which isn't great for neutral, but honestly I don't think his neutral is bad. His projectile is decent simply because it travels different speeds based on how charged up it is, which helps it not get powershielded so often (if they don't mix it up, it's fairly easy to reflect admittedly).

That said, he has some pros in neutral that no other character can boast. His down b cancels allow him to approach, be invincible, and have a hitbox out all at the same time. The invincibility doesn't last the whole time, but it means if you space it right, they can't trade with you. The opponent HAS to take a defensive action.

Also, even if Lucario doesn't have a charge, non-canceled down b is a surprisingly good approach. He has two frames of vulnerability at the end, and the move is fast enough where 7 frame grabs are not likely to intercept it on reaction. This means he can down b and keep holding down, which will ASDI down if he's hit in those two frames and he can counter. It means he can get in and be scary to attack, particularly at low percents.

Down B aside, keep in mind that his fair has sword level disjoint, is fast, and lasts a bit longer than most sword moves. Generally all his moves are fairly disjointed, which helps in neutral as well.

Lastly: his recovery and combo game are ridiculously good (if he has a charge and DI's well, he recovers for free with an invincible down b canceled attack). He can also gimp fairly early with side B. If they nerfed his down b and recovery, a projectile buff might be warranted, but even then I wouldn't give him Mewtwo's super fast fully charged kill projectile.

I'd put Lucario in the top half of the cast, but below the god characters who imo clearly need to be nerfed. I personally think some small nerf tweaks should happen to Lucario because I think his down b can be somewhat toxic, but that he's in a fairly good spot in the game balance wise. So if they did said nerf tweaks, buff tweaks elsewhere would be fine.

 

[Joe73191]

I never meant that Lucario is bad. I meant I never liked how he worked. I didn't like his mechanics in Brawl where you were rewarded for taking damage and I'm not a fan of his on-hit-cancel mechanic in this game. I feel that is better left to Turbo Mode. I just don't know what could be done to balance Lucario without giving him some goofy mechanic.

 

[DraconisMarch]

I absolutely adore Lucario in this game. I love all of his moves and how they string together. I love the mechanic of him gathering charges as he deals damage (as opposed to rewarding him for doing bad as in Brawl).

I feel diversity makes for a healthy game, and he's most definitely unique. Maybe there's still room to tweak him a bit, but don't ruin how he works fundamentally.