I'm going to talk a bit about the 3 characters I've played & labbed the most
While I hate to say it, I wouldn't be surprised if
gets his own tier.
I don't want to explain every general mechanic of the game that he dislikes, there would be too much to talk about, however, here's a list of direct nerfs he received :
- U-Tilt strings against fastfallers are entirely gone
- D-air lost 4 frames of advantage on hit, making even D-air to grab escapable. No longer scales with rage to confirm into D-Smash. Offstage, it doesn't confirm into footstool anymore and is an absurdly weak spike.
- F-Throw makes him hop on BF's platforms, making any kind of decent follow-up impossible from what is his most reliable combo starter. Combined with his atrocious platform pressure and overall advantage state, he's downright unplayable on BF. Also a big nerf to the % range of F-Throw UpB.
- Copy abilities are lost super easily for absolutely no reason, rendering all the work you did to acquire it useless with a character that NEEDS copy. A new neutralB can make match-ups go from a hopeless struggle to just an uphill battle, and sometimes allows you to put up an even fight.
- U-Throw is now terrible and almost never used to kill, though it was his primary killmove in Smash4 (with trump B-air, which is also gone)
- Stone no longers shieldbreaks, because it doesn't hit twice anymore
All in all, he gained more than he lost directly, but I'm just showing you how many nerfs he received for an
already bottom tier character.
Even though if we compare directly to his Smash4 counterpart, he seems better in a vacuum, we need to realize that every other bad character got buffed too. This is not a smart thing to deem Kirby better, just because he got buffs.
Here's why :
By losing his U-Tilt strings, he lost his niche as a pseudo-counterpick to certain fastfallers (
)
He also can't rely on getting the copy ability to get a better shot at certain match-ups, since he can lose it so easily. (
)
Most importantly, look at which characters are played in SSBU : Swordies, projectile-heavy zoning characters, and even super heavy weights. This is the kind of characters he had been struggling to face in Smash4, whereas characters that aren't ranged and can take risks that you could punish are very rare, and now Kirby lost his way of getting a lucky opening (shielding).
Which means he went from mostly trash but with decent relevant match-ups to completely trash.
There is currently not a single match-up I can think of that Kirby wins. I'm not even sure if he goes even with someone.
I have not played SSBM and therefore can't compare it, but it wouldn't surprise me if Kirby was closer to the other bad characters than he is now. If we compare it to the top tiers, it's obviously another story, considering how the game was unbalanced (even though it was surprisingly okay for the time).
I'm sorry to say this, but just playing Kirby makes you realize how unbalanced the game is already. I've labbed everything one could think of and know almost all optimized punishes, but I'm doing better with any other character that's easy to play (
).
And it's only two weeks in.
__________
is a character I had high hopes for from having played the demo. Unfortunately, they got nerfed really hard from it (mostly damage output, but other things got cut). I still played (mostly labbed actually them a lot), and I have mixed feelings about them.
On the one hand, they seem to have so much potential, with already heaps of advanced techniques and desyncs & probably more to come, they can deal a LOT of damage from one grab, their U-air is amazing...
But on the other hand, getting an opening to pull that out in a game is much harder than you'd think.
New powershield makes it impossible for them to approach without one of them getting hit from a mindless projectile spam with no risk involved (and of course if you powershield Popo's attack, you'll auto-powershield Nana's attack). Faster movement means separating them a lot easier (combined with the huge amount of invincibility on throws) & also make desyncs a LOT more risky, especially since they're now a harder commit than in Brawl unless we find a reliable & practical desync.
While they don't instantly lose to swordies like they do to projectiles, it's not exactly easy for them either, considering they can't really do anything to punish thrown hitboxes without shielding, and everything is safe in this game.
Ice Blocks can now be reflected by attacks and will hit the ICs, making it useless against projectiles without being desynched first (which you can't set up if people throw things at you), which basically forces the character to approach in a lot of match-ups. Needless to say, they're not good at doing such a thing.
Nana is absolutely ********, I've even seen a montage of Nana dying by herself.
They have trouble killing (surprisingly), U-air will be stale, B-air is good but hard to land, U-Tilt can set up something but can't confirm it, their smashes have an abyssmal range (why?), they can't edgeguard (obviously) and they lack any kind of killthrow.
I think they can perform decently well against some characters without any kind of good projectile, but they require a ton of work to just be decent, and a lot of match-ups are straight up unplayable (think
).
If I had to rank them, I'd probably say mid tier, with a very optimistic point of view. They will probably be low tier in terms of results for a long time considering how hard it is to not only master them, but just be able to compete, though.
__________
is a very interesting character. When you watch her for a short time, you see her still pulling off some nasty strings/combos and think "Ok, she's still good". But when you watch the whole set, everything falls apart.
Witch time now longer exists (except vs reactable projectiles, such as
or
SideB, which people won't throw out in the first place after seeing that it's range is now bigger), meaning you can now rightfully abuse her long start-ups. The only time where you should watch out for it is at ~90-100%, but even then throwing a smash is less risky. Yes, Bayonetta's super laggy and slow smashes. People punish it with a dashgrab like they did in Smash4, but once they understand that it's even laggier, they will start to dash -> smash.
Her long-range game is basically a non factor at this point. NeutralB was already situationnal (good against tall/big characters), but now it's pretty much useless in the neutral. D-Tilt (bullet arts) got murdered and now has no range (as if a projectile that doesn't cause any flinch was problematic).
Her recovery is now super exploitable, it was already slow in Smash4 but that wasn't a problem at all since you couldn't contest it 90% of the time, but now that Witch Twist doesn't sweetspot, oh boy. When people start to learn to punish her recovery she's successfully dead.
There are lots of unnecessary nerfs here and there too (HeelSlide being now a high risk low reward move, impossible to use a second sideB after hitting a shield, bouncing with SideB on the ledge to recover now randomly making you die if you don't airdodge into the ledge, Bat within killing you if you dare to recover with airdodge now that you don't sweetspot with anything, generally lag everywhere, etc...)
And of course, she can't kill. Except with B-air/F-Throw. Like, at all. Sometimes you ladder people at 100+%, you're already in the blastzone and F-air3 doesn't kill with DI (even though you have the slow-motion). If you could hit people while they're dying in the background, I'm sure that U-air would save them.
Most people that say she's still okay have no idea how she works. You can even see Cpt Zack (which is the person that masters Bayonetta the most in the world) having to go
when he needs to win. She's still somewhat fun to play, but I feel like she wasn't designed to be able to win in this game.
I'd have loved to say she's still mid tier, but I am convinced she belongs to low tier. She can still see some success here and there, but that's only because people don't abuse her and respect options she doesn't have anymore. Right now she's probably somewhat playable, but if people aren't too lazy to develop the counterplay to her, I don't see her being played at all anymore.
I say she'll fall off even further when people abuse her new weaknesses (and she still has her old ones, which weren't abused by most players). She's a lot better in theory than in practice.
