Official Competitive Character Impressions 2.0

[Gleam]

First off i don't think anyone has ever called ultimate bayo one of the worst characters in smash history. Maybe one of the most frustrating character to play in smash history.

Not really the same tho. Ganon has always had a clear gameplay design and focus. Read based, hard hitting slow (or now semi slow) movement.In previous smash games the movement being as poor as it was lead to him being a bad character. an immobile smash character has never been good, heck in most fighting games if you list the characters movement from best to worst often that mirrors the tier list. Ganon's tools were constent and when the moves landed resulted in kills and strong reward. Ganon felt like the character he was: the king of evil.

WHat smash has thrived on and why people love it so much is because how accurate characters feel to their source games and personalities. Characters from third party games almost always incorporate pieces of their gameplay to smash. This is the core of the issue to many bayonetta mains especially those that have played her games.

smash ultimate bayonetta is a combo character with inconsistent combos. its similar to zelda's flaws when people call her a zoner or spacer. she's incomplete as a zoner because she cannot control enough space. Bayonetta is similar except on the combo side. Bayonetta will never have a neutral even in her own games she taunts to get enemies to approach her.

you can read this about bayonetta is a full analysis of her in ultimate and why her playerbase is really unhappy. https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/bc1r2x/how_good_or_bad_is_bayonetta_an_in_depth_look_at/
people love calling out her playerbase thinking they want her broken again that simple isnt true. What the bayonetta playerbase is asking for is really not different from what the marth playerbase in the beginning of smash 4 was asking: buff our character back to a playable state.

There have been plenty of people who proclaimed Bayonetta as a terrible character and while that ideology may or may not have died down, the entire point of my statement was that, we have actual results supporting or not supporting certain claims.

When someone claims are low tier despite having average or above average results.

When someone claims is this high tier badass despite having at best, average results.

My entire point is that people need to stop basing their impressions on personal bias and start doing 5-10 minutes of simple research. If someone says is a horrible character whose only good aspect are Gordos and crouch animation but a quick look at results show a character at #26 on the OrionStats and character ultimately achieving above average results. Perhaps there might be a reason Dedede is getting these results. Maybe those flaws aren't as bad or his positives help outweigh them.

I can bet, that with rare exceptions, anybody who makes Tier Lists, pro player or otherwise, doesn't do a darn bit of research. It is based entirely on personal bias and maybe a few very large tournaments that they've gone to. While a certain level of personal input is needed, the idea of simply checking out results or seeking out results across the board has been lost on people.

People constantly say "This character isn't that low, they've got all these skills and techs and people just need to know them."

Then I ask one question. Why does that character have such poor results? Because unfortunately not everyone has Marth's excuse that a sexy female clone is stealing his thunder.

 

[NINTENDO Galaxy]

I also didn't mean to imply that Lucas was better than Ness, if I came off that way. I personally believe both characters have their strengths and weaknesses, and the two are so different that comparing them wouldn't really make that much sense.

I guess the reason I made that post was because if you play Lucas creatively, there's a lot you can do with him which is why I personally prefer playing as him over Ness. When I play as Ness, I'm typically going for the usual PK Fire -> d-throw, fair, fair. 90% of the damage I'm doing to my opponent is probably from fairs alone, and I got kind of bored with his playstyle. But when I picked up Lucas, I felt like there was just a lot more room for creativity with his moves. I find Lucas lacking a solid kit and sense of purpose is what allows him to be so creative. Let me get into my experience and what I mean by this.



Whenever an opponent continuously attacks from above, I found an easy solution with Lucas. On the surface, it doesn't seem that he has any way to really defend himself from these types of attacks, as you've mention, but I found his PK Thunder can actually work wonders on-stage if you learn how to properly control it and time it correctly. Players who tend to attack from above can get in the PK Thunder (which goes through enemies unlike Ness'), and that not only racks up damage but also throws off your opponent's strategy. Nobody is expecting a Lucas to pull out PK Thunder on-stage, so it can also be used as a surprise tactic. But yeah, I find Lucas' PK Thunder can get a lot of usage. However, I'm not gonna pretend this is always a useful strategy because this is definitely an area Lucas is weak in.

I've found some interesting combos with Lucas. For starters, bair -> fair/bair -> fsmash. Lucas' bair is a quick attack that spikes opponents when you sweetspot it. At low percents, spiking opponents onto the stage with this attack will cause them to bounce upwards and remain vulnerable for a few seconds, giving you time to follow up with a bair or fsmash.

At the end of the day, I agree with you guys that Lucas is mid-tier, but I don't think he is as average of a character as most people suspect. I don't think the character is utilized to his full potential in the slightest, and I truly believe there's a lot more to uncover with him if only more people gave him a chance. Lucas is one of the most interesting characters on the roster in my opinion, I feel like the meta surrounding him just needs to develop more.

If you want to see Lucas information then this post has some, but the discord has more recent stuff.

Link: https://smashboards.com/threads/competitive-character-impressions-2-0.464762/post-23078096

As for down throw to up air, that was a crutch for Lucas mains in S4. Many players have learned to give up on that non-existant confirm in Ultimate, others still go for it and complain, and some players have learned to work around the new down throw and make it work for them.

B-air to F-smash does not sound true at high percents, nor does B-air to F-air. You should check in with the lab team or ask in the metagame channel of Lucas Discord. If you were using the combo counter then that's not reliable.

As for Lucas's meta evolving, I think that will happen very slowly, since a lot of players love to goof off in lounge while many vods get posted in the match analysis channel and they don't get reviewed unless I go over it; i've been over too many vods and I feel like I'm exhausted. There is the rare chance, that one or 2 players will give a short review of a vod instead of my lengthy play-by-play.

Besides that, we have recently gained a huge influx of lab members (the regulars are helping out) so that's a positive. We've also gained a new channel recently dedicated exclusively to specific match-ups for a period of time. There are like 3-4 players who share tweets and videos of creative stuff they come up with, so progress depends on how fast they pump out content and if Lucas players will even try to use what has been found in bracket.

 

[FruitLoop]

There have been plenty of people who proclaimed Bayonetta as a terrible character and while that ideology may or may not have died down, the entire point of my statement was that, we have actual results supporting or not supporting certain claims.

When someone claims are low tier despite having average or above average results.

When someone claims is this high tier badass despite having at best, average results.

My entire point is that people need to stop basing their impressions on personal bias and start doing 5-10 minutes of simple research. If someone says is a horrible character whose only good aspect are Gordos and crouch animation but a quick look at results show a character at #26 on the OrionStats and character ultimately achieving above average results. Perhaps there might be a reason Dedede is getting these results. Maybe those flaws aren't as bad or his positives help outweigh them.

I can bet, that with rare exceptions, anybody who makes Tier Lists, pro player or otherwise, doesn't do a darn bit of research. It is based entirely on personal bias and maybe a few very large tournaments that they've gone to. While a certain level of personal input is needed, the idea of simply checking out results or seeking out results across the board has been lost on people.

People constantly say "This character isn't that low, they've got all these skills and techs and people just need to know them."

Then I ask one question. Why does that character have such poor results? Because unfortunately not everyone has Marth's excuse that a sexy female clone is stealing his thunder.

The thing with early Ultimate's meta is that results imo shouldn't factor into a char's viability but rather how effective their tools are being applied. It's a matter of whether or not its the player or the character. Wolf is dominating tournaments, he's not top 10 because of tournament results imo. But rather he's top 10 because with the results we can make of, we see just how oppressive his neutral game is in practice and how despite Wolf's recovery having limited range, it has a big enough hitbox to cover him and using what we see from how Wolf plays, we can infer that Wolf's results are based around the character and not the player.

Bayo and DDD (Ridley is actually pretty good so imo i think it's both factors) still have clear issues and even with their good results you can clearly see that these characters are mostly carried by their players's fundamentals. You can see how Bayo even after constant reads and conditioning and optimizing the most out of her tools still can't reliably kill with any of her moves or combos and she still gets punished for doing the most basic of features that most of the cast wouldn't be punished for. You can still see that many DDD mains like Big D, Zaki, and Peli all take 100 off of a hit and practically struggle to cover options or approach which usually has them at a disadvantage for most of the match. While results are the most objective way to look at chars, I feel like actually looking at the matches at higher levels of play to see how a char's strengths and weaknesses are applied is more important. It's a bit too early to always attribute results to tiers as almost everyone isn't really looked too up upon and anyone that's not top 15's results are practically just popularity contests at this point. So I still think theorycrafting at this point works best.

Also regarding the marth case. Usually most low to mid-high tier chars tend to be outclassed in their niche by other top tiers and high tiers that practically makes them inferior versions of accomplishing a certain gameplay. For example, why play Duck Hunt when you can play other high tiers like Pac-Man? Or why play Diddy/Falcon when you can just play Fox? Things like these cause chars to inevitably drop in results as theres chars of a similar archetype that are generally seen as better which usually causes a decline of results which can sometimes leave underdeveloped meta. That's why again Theorycrafting is important at this stage and NOT pure results.

If you want to see Lucas information then this post has some, but the discord has more recent stuff.

Link: https://smashboards.com/threads/competitive-character-impressions-2-0.464762/post-23078096

As for down throw to up air, that was a crutch for Lucas mains in S4. Many players have learned to give up on that non-existant confirm in Ultimate, others still go for it and complain, and some players have learned to work around the new down throw and make it work for them.

B-air to F-smash does not sound true at high percents, nor does B-air to F-air. You should check in with the lab team or ask in the metagame channel of Lucas Discord. If you were using the combo counter then that's not reliable.

As for Lucas's meta evolving, I think that will happen very slowly, since a lot of players love to goof off in lounge while many vods get posted in the match analysis channel and they don't get reviewed unless I go over it; i've been over too many vods and I feel like I'm exhausted. There is the rare chance, that one or 2 players will give a short review of a vod instead of my lengthy play-by-play.

Besides that, we have recently gained a huge influx of lab members (the regulars are helping out) so that's a positive. We've also gained a new channel recently dedicated exclusively to specific match-ups for a period of time. There are like 3-4 players who share tweets and videos of creative stuff they come up with, so progress depends on how fast they pump out content and if Lucas players will even try to use what has been found in bracket.

Anything to add regarding my two posts for lucas btw?

 

[NINTENDO Galaxy]

No, not really. I'll just be repeating myself. I'm not gonna entertain the Ness vs Lucas argument again as I have done so many times during the life of the S4 threads and so have the other Lucas (what Lucas mains, do they even exist?) and Ness mains here.

It's pointless. Just play who you want and push their meta as far as you can. You're free to dig through my posts, Envoy of Chaos, and PK Bash posts if you want to see old Lucas conversation.

Edit: Seriously though, anything that I would have to add to your post should already be covered in the post I linked above. Hmm... Now that I'm thinking about it, one of you guys mentioned Lucas having weird sourspots on his aerials which I found odd. F-air's sourspot is near him, so if you are getting that a lot then you need to work on spacing your attacks.

I also agreed with being creative. Not having a defined playstyle or a playerbase for that matter can allow you to be creative with a character and find strategies or uses for moves that others have quickly written off. I like your idea of using PKT1 into PKT2 on-stage if an opponent is above you. It's great to be unpredictable but make sure you weigh the risk vs reward before you commit to the option. I'd say to only go for it after you have conditioned an opponent to fall into it and if you know that you can reap a big reward like stage control, 40%+ damage, a kill, or if you have the stock lead and you are confident in losing a stock or taking a lot of percent or losing stage control in return, should your plan fail.

Another way to look at this is going for style points when instead you could play it safe and stick to reliable moves and not risk throwing the match. Just slowly poke away at your opponent until they realize they are at kill percent.

 

[Kiligar]

Meta Knight is way underrated. The community overlooks the strengths of characters often in favor of what is popular. Inkling is still very strong but opinions of Inkling have watered down, just because. I think there is a bias towards certain characters depending on how the public portrays them. How well they’re represented. As for people talking about Shulk, he’s a good character regardless of how many people play him. Is Olimar not as good as Mario because less people play him? I believe we need to focus on the characters themselves if they’re to be accurately ranked.

 

[Lacrimosa]

It is just like everywhere else: You don't see that many Shulks because that character is rather complex and harder to bring to a high competitive level then for example Wolf or Fox . We really should give the competitive scene some time before we say that character x has no result. Saying that after only 4 months doesn't really help that discussion so of course we are bound to base certain characters more on the theoretical side.
It might look different after the next Genesis next winter or maybe Shulk will still have next to no results outside of Nicko. Then it's much more appropriate to value the factor of tournament performance for a character's viability.

 

[Baby_Sneak]

If we're wanting to change the atmosphere of this thread and pull it back to quality discussions, I think the best way to do that is to post the videos here, and put a timer on. The timer will keep the next user (or any user) from making the next post until the allotted time has past (except Mods I guess, those guys always get cool stuff). This keeps people from posting too much, which then makes them think a bit more about the content they're posting and the content they're reading, slows down the thread to make it more analytical instead of spontaneous, etc.

The reason I thinking of videos is due to what they bring. They are fairly objective demonstrations of the theory we discuss, and the results we see. And they provide plenty of content to be dug up and to learn from.

like instance:

I been recently watching some Tea, and this match was pretty interesting to me. Tea in general has so many mixups and real-time puzzles I just lose track, and have a hard time figuring out how I would solve them. I say Tea, because he orchestrates pac-man in a way I think no one can really imitate. It's his style.

With my bias coming from smash 4, I always see pac-man as a really vulnerable character without his traps set-up, and when hit, he takes so much percent. So, i was seeing this match for a while from his perspective. When I forced myself to switched to Marss's perspective, I noticed a lot of different things. He dances in and out of close range, getting openings and going crazy, but sometimes falling back, using Zairs, Bairs, Side Bs, and other moves to box out Tea, and make him fall into a kill move. This made me see ZSS as a mix of both a character with a lot of explosive combo potential, but also the normals to slow things down and be more delicate, unlike fox who's much more of a boxer (unless someone shows him threatening outside close range, or something). So, it was interesting to see what ZSS is good at, and likes to do (especially with the aggressive edgeguarding attempts by Marss).

After that, and y'all can help me with this, There was a change. Tea started to hang out off stage a lot longer than Marss is comfortable with, and though this stopped Tea from getting killed as much, on stage, I don't know what happened. I was also half-paying attention, so it may be obvious, but Tea just seemed to find ways to maneuver around ZSS and make her run into Aerials and strings, that went into weird puzzle games with hydrant and fruits. from 15:16 to 15:40 just shows difficulty in breaching Tea's defenses. Of course, Marss didn't really address the hydrant good enough to knock it over at 15:20, but overall, there's restraint and fear getting close to Tea.

I didn't finish the match, cuz I have work to do, but yeah, this is an example. Then you guys watch the vid, and provide thoughts on what you think, blah blah, etc. And this ain't deep, but again, just an example.

 

[NINTENDO Galaxy]

FruitLoop

You can be creative for any character not just Lucas. There's no need to stick to the same playstyle that everyone else uses if you do not like it.

G Gleam

I was going to respond to that Marthcina results comment from earlier but I did not want to go on about results don't tell everything and so on since that topic has been beaten to death in the CCI threads. Instead I'll say this. When choosing a character in any game, these are 3 things that you should ask yourself:

1. Do you like the character?
2. Do you like their kit?
3. How hard do you want to work for your win?

Lacrimosa

I don't believe in that hopeful thinking anymore since that was thrown around in S4 for Lucas and Shulk, and nothing came of it. You can't just wish for a character to be better down the line. If they do not perform well, that is on the fault of the players.

 

[ARISTOS]

It is just like everywhere else: You don't see that many Shulks because that character is rather complex and harder to bring to a high competitive level then for example Wolf or Fox . We really should give the competitive scene some time before we say that character x has no result. Saying that after only 4 months doesn't really help that discussion so of course we are bound to base certain characters more on the theoretical side.
It might look different after the next Genesis next winter or maybe Shulk will still have next to no results outside of Nicko. Then it's much more appropriate to value the factor of tournament performance for a character's viability.

Don't think this is actually true.

We as a community are very good in identifying strong characters. If you look at tier lists for Smash 4, pretty much the same characters were seen as the strongest from the beginning of the game to the end of the game. Diddy/Sheik/ZSS/Rosa/Sonic/Mario/Fox were all quickly identified as great characters and even with nerfs those characters remained strong throughout.

The only character that I remember initial impressions were incorrect on was , and he had the double whammy of both a. being hugely nerfed from Brawl, and b. a yet to be discovered 0-death (which was quickly removed). No other character really rose as a result of meta development, most just fell (poor Yoshi) due to being figured out (it's hard to learn defense on your own, while practicing offense is much simpler).

Anyway Nicko being power ranked 2nd in SoCal is huge, as it generally has been one of the strongest regions in NA (2nd only to Tri-State, does the like of Tweek/The LoFT still live in Michigan?) and it's a decent jump from where he was typically ranked in 4.

 

[Heracr055]

^ I disagree about the community being very good at spotting potential. Look how long it took for people to come around on Zero Suit Samus. She's only recently started getting spectacular results with Marss. Prior to that, despite the work that Choco and lesser known players have been putting in, she'd been stuck with the stigma that she's not that good since she's not Smash 4 ZSS (and her usage had dropped as a result of thst opinion as well). It's funny because that latter observation will likely hold true; few want to actually pick up ZSS in this game, even after the recent results.
Another (outdated) example is the post patch Bayonetta from last game. So many people dropped her as a result until the few remaining & determined mains figured her out and made everyone realize her true power. Edit: Post patch ZSS in 4 is in the same boat too. People only considered her to be in top 8 at the end of the game's lifespan

 

[Justin Allen Goldschmidt]

^ I disagree about the community being very good at spotting potential. Look how long it took for people to come around on Zero Suit Samus. She's only recently started getting spectacular results with Marss. Prior to that, despite the work that Choco and lesser known players have been putting in, she'd been stuck with the stigma that she's not that good since she's not Smash 4 ZSS (and her usage had dropped as a result of thst opinion as well). It's funny because that latter observation will likely hold true; few want to actually pick up ZSS in this game, even after the recent results.
Another (outdated) example is the post patch Bayonetta from last game. So many people dropped her as a result until the few remaining & determined mains figured her out and made everyone realize her true power. Edit: Post patch ZSS in 4 is in the same boat too. People only considered her to be in top 8 at the end of the game's lifespan

I still think ZSS struggles too much against small characters to really be a viable solo main, but I could very well be wrong. I mostly find the Olimar match-up to be pretty darn bad for her I suppose, but I think Inkling and Pikachu (sort of Pichu) are also rough.

 

[Lore]

^ I disagree about the community being very good at spotting potential. Look how long it took for people to come around on Zero Suit Samus. She's only recently started getting spectacular results with Marss. Prior to that, despite the work that Choco and lesser known players have been putting in, she'd been stuck with the stigma that she's not that good since she's not Smash 4 ZSS (and her usage had dropped as a result of thst opinion as well). It's funny because that latter observation will likely hold true; few want to actually pick up ZSS in this game, even after the recent results.
Another (outdated) example is the post patch Bayonetta from last game. So many people dropped her as a result until the few remaining & determined mains figured her out and made everyone realize her true power. Edit: Post patch ZSS in 4 is in the same boat too. People only considered her to be in top 8 at the end of the game's lifespan

Heck, Greninja is another example from early on in Ultimate.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

I have played ZSS since day 1 Brawl and I barely play her in this game because she's just not fun. Her hitboxes are tiny, her throw is back to being Brawl tier (slow, bad recovery, and no reward) so it's tough to beat campy shielding opponents, and they took away a lot of what made her fun. Her stuns were nerfed at low %s to the point where using them is pointless for half of each stock. I understand why they did that but at what point is her unique identity gone? It's basically all that makes her different from someone like Captain Falcon. I liked her Brawl design best despite her weaknesses there, she had a unique playstyle and now she's like every other dumb speed character.

 

[Gleam]

When it comes to Shulk (and anyone for that matter) something I might suggest is to see how their win rates compare to other characters. For example let's take Shulk and Wolf.

Let's say we have 20 and 120

12 get first place and 72 get first place.

Assuming my math isn't wrong here, even though Wolf has about 6x more wins than Shulk, their victory rates are both around 60%.

Now I don't know what Shulk's actual win rate is, but if you took the time to find out, you could use that to compare to other characters. Therefore, even though Shulk may not be that popular, if his win rate is similar to other characters, that could help you theorize where he might be. If there's 20 Shulks but only 2 are placing well, that might indicate a poor character.

And amazingly enough, increasing the number of players doesn't mean their win rate will automatically increase because of it.

If I did 500 Wolfs instead of 120 and Wolf got 300 first places, that would still be a 60% win rate, the same as 12/20 victories for Shulk.

Wolf has an extremely large # of victories, 25x the amount of Shulk but their rates are the same in this theoretical example. That could easily skew Wolf across a board that looks directly at victory numbers. But you'd realize that despite the gap in victories, the rates are very similar.

While tedious to collect such data, if done, this could really help discuss placements and not resort to the typical "popularity" issue we often come to.

 

[Baby_Sneak]

guys, I had no idea luigi was this scary.

specifically, 2:04, 2:47, and 5:25

I knew about his dumb combos from grab, but i didn't know the tether grab could used as a projectile to combo into other moves, or ya know, a actual grab. Not to mention the use of initial dash looks bonkers. that luigi's movement and crispness was pretty intimidating to me.

which brings me to him again, only going against a pichu:

Only watched game 1, and it's one of the best games i've seen in ultimate i think.

2:00 being one of things I find super interesting about luigi. chaining those Dtilts like that, really cool (not to mention his use of tether grabs to pressure opponents on the ledge. almost laughably scary). among that are very nuanced things like air-dodging back onto the ledge, the combos from pichu are interesting to see, and use of wavelanding.

just watch that match. suuuuuuuuuper dope.

oh, and Supermodel From Paris ? What do you think of Marss then?

 

[Lavani]

When it comes to Shulk (and anyone for that matter) something I might suggest is to see how their win rates compare to other characters. For example let's take Shulk and Wolf.

Let's say we have 20 and 120

12 get first place and 72 get first place.

Assuming my math isn't wrong here, even though Wolf has about 6x more wins than Shulk, their victory rates are both around 60%.

Now I don't know what Shulk's actual win rate is, but if you took the time to find out, you could use that to compare to other characters. Therefore, even though Shulk may not be that popular, if his win rate is similar to other characters, that could help you theorize where he might be. If there's 20 Shulks but only 2 are placing well, that might indicate a poor character.

And amazingly enough, increasing the number of players doesn't mean their win rate will automatically increase because of it.

If I did 500 Wolfs instead of 120 and Wolf got 300 first places, that would still be a 60% win rate, the same as 12/20 victories for Shulk.

Wolf has an extremely large # of victories, 25x the amount of Shulk but their rates are the same in this theoretical example. That could easily skew Wolf across a board that looks directly at victory numbers. But you'd realize that despite the gap in victories, the rates are very similar.

While tedious to collect such data, if done, this could really help discuss placements and not resort to the typical "popularity" issue we often come to.

While numbers on that sort of thing would be interesting to see, I'd say the factors contributing to that win rate are more important than the win rate itself. If Wolf has 6x the successful representation, it suggests a character that "just works" versus one having barriers to entry (character-specific nuances, tech skill barriers, etc. - things that increase how much the player needs to focus on what they're doing versus what their opponent is doing, and in general make the character harder to pick up). If Wolf is that much more popular while maintaining a comparable success rate, it would also seem likely that the percentage of "successful Wolf players vs successful Shulk players" isn't equivalent to "top Wolf players vs top Shulk players", likewise indicating Wolf as being a better character. In the given example, my impression would be that Shulk's tiny pool of probably-character specialists reaches the same level of success as a character being played across a wider level of skill - suggesting Shulk is markedly worse, or at least markedly harder to play, but either way there's a real deterrent to him being picked.

Or maybe he really is just unpopular, since unpopular top tiers are also a thing (hi ). Comparing his win rate to other unpopular-but-successful characters could be interesting (would you expect a higher win rate out of a character like Olimar, or would he still have higher usage weighing down the average?), but still isn't necessarily telling of the big picture (e.g. Olimar having the highest win rate with lesser usage than Wolf wouldn't indicate him to be the best character).

If someone were interested in compiling that info it'd make for some fun stats, but I don't think it's the sort of thing one can make direct conclusions about character viability from, as a number of factors go into why someone picks a character or what the W/L ratio looks like.

 

[TheBeastHimself]

NINTENDO Galaxy Thank you very much for all that information, I really appreciate it. Would I be able to join the Lucas discord? (I feel like that would be a great resource to have as a Lucas main).

I also agreed with being creative. Not having a defined playstyle or a playerbase for that matter can allow you to be creative with a character and find strategies or uses for moves that others have quickly written off. I like your idea of using PKT1 into PKT2 on-stage if an opponent is above you. It's great to be unpredictable but make sure you weigh the risk vs reward before you commit to the option. I'd say to only go for it after you have conditioned an opponent to fall into it and if you know that you can reap a big reward like stage control, 40%+ damage, a kill, or if you have the stock lead and you are confident in losing a stock or taking a lot of percent or losing stage control in return, should your plan fail.

I didn't mean PKT1 -> PKT2, though that also works on many occasions. However, that can be extremely risky depending on where you're situated on the stage, because PKT2 cover a long distance and if you accidentally miss the enemy, you might go off the stage and fall to your death. What I was referring to was using PKT1 only, and having the lightning travel around in a circle while your enemy is inside it, trapping them temporarily. It throws off opponents who are constantly trying to short-hop into their aerials, though one would have to get the timing of PKT1 down in order to properly implement the technique into their move-set.

Also, I have a question for you. Do you have any recommendations for approaching moves for Lucas? I struggle with approaching sometimes because I feel as though his dash attack is risky due to start-up lag, and fair isn't always reliable for me...

 

[Phoenix_is_OK]

To hop onto the Shulk train, the big issue with Shulk's placement is that you have an absurdly technical character that simply wasn't labbed enough in the previous game, as opposed to other technical characters who have had results in other games and some tech carries over (Peach, the Pikas, Ryu, Bayo, Sheik), so we know how they do. But Shulk has never been considered "good" due to the terrible frame data that bogged him down, and his ground game being quite bad. Shulk had a terrible dash attack and good tilts, and now you can actually use them out of a dash. His aerials have stupid low landing for how massive they are (Nair is 6 FRAMES PEOPLE).

He basically has a version of Cloud's limit, with no limit (https://media.tenor.co/images/231e2f67bc42bbfcff592d58f0e9517e/raw ), where he can gain stupid movement, have a stupid recovery, kill stupid early, do stupid damage, and survive stupid late.

He hasn't been used to his fullest, and if we drop him on the tier list we are going to have to bump him super high up when people realize "Hey, this guy is pretty damn good". Because he is pretty damn good.

 

[Gleam]

I think composing such data on victory percents would be very interesting.

It would also be tedious as all hell but it would be an interesting hypothesis to see if these less popular characters do still get similar win rates as the more popular, good characters. Marth would be another good character to test this out on. He is considered to be a good character but his results are fairly bad due to lack of results.

If we could gather data on the # of Marths compared to their victory/placements, would we see a character whose win-rates are similar to those of popular good characters? We'd have to build up a specific sample, taking the # of Marths (or whatever character) across several different tournaments and do a lot of contrast and comparison.

In other words, tedious mathematics that nobody likes.

But if it could be done, I think it might give some interesting insight on the characters and their meta.

My hypothesis is that, if Shulk is as good as those in Top Tier, than his overall win-percentage should be similar.

 

[KakuCP9]

guys, I had no idea luigi was this scary.

specifically, 2:04, 2:47, and 5:25

I knew about his dumb combos from grab, but i didn't know the tether grab could used as a projectile to combo into other moves, or ya know, a actual grab. Not to mention the use of initial dash looks bonkers. that luigi's movement and crispness was pretty intimidating to me.

which brings me to him again, only going against a pichu:

Only watched game 1, and it's one of the best games i've seen in ultimate i think.

2:00 being one of things I find super interesting about luigi. chaining those Dtilts like that, really cool (not to mention his use of tether grabs to pressure opponents on the ledge. almost laughably scary). among that are very nuanced things like air-dodging back onto the ledge, the combos from pichu are interesting to see, and use of wavelanding.

just watch that match. suuuuuuuuuper dope.

oh, and Supermodel From Paris ? What do you think of Marss then?

Worst part is that his grab reward used to be even better pre-patch since his dair caused an untechable ground bounce making his death combos borderline un-escapeable. Thankfully they only worked at 0-10%. I feel right now the biggest thing holding him back is his comically bad airspeed since without rising tornado, his recovery is unbearably bad and unlike Chrom/Cloud, he doesn't have the neutral game to make up for it. I can understand why they did it since cyclone gimps are low-key degenerate, but the lack of recovery mixups kinda cripples Luigi. The airspeed buff will also make him less susceptible to air camping since that's also Luigi's second biggest weakness.
To be honest, I feel the tether grab gives Luigi's midrange a good set of teeth he needed since he already has good CQC, but lacks range which was historically another problem he had. The tether grab gives him that range while being deceptively hard to punish unless you have a really good burst option.
Edit: I forgot that the aerial tornado is invincible frame 1-7 making it even more difficult to juggle him in conjunction with his infamous nair (even swordies have to respect the tornado).

 

[Rizen]

When it comes to Shulk (and anyone for that matter) something I might suggest is to see how their win rates compare to other characters. For example let's take Shulk and Wolf.

Let's say we have 20 and 120

12 get first place and 72 get first place.

Assuming my math isn't wrong here, even though Wolf has about 6x more wins than Shulk, their victory rates are both around 60%.

Now I don't know what Shulk's actual win rate is, but if you took the time to find out, you could use that to compare to other characters. Therefore, even though Shulk may not be that popular, if his win rate is similar to other characters, that could help you theorize where he might be. If there's 20 Shulks but only 2 are placing well, that might indicate a poor character.

And amazingly enough, increasing the number of players doesn't mean their win rate will automatically increase because of it.

If I did 500 Wolfs instead of 120 and Wolf got 300 first places, that would still be a 60% win rate, the same as 12/20 victories for Shulk.

Wolf has an extremely large # of victories, 25x the amount of Shulk but their rates are the same in this theoretical example. That could easily skew Wolf across a board that looks directly at victory numbers. But you'd realize that despite the gap in victories, the rates are very similar.

While tedious to collect such data, if done, this could really help discuss placements and not resort to the typical "popularity" issue we often come to.

The problem with using win rates is they create a false equivalency between a much smaller and larger pool of results. Wolf is indeed popular and his usage snowballed significantly but that doesn't change that many wolf players fought through tournaments, beating match after match, and took a high placement with him. Every tournament counts. Wolf stacks up consistently against the competition. Smash isn't an exact science but the larger the sample size, the less likely a fluke happened. Wolf may be popular but he gets results, unlike say Ganon. Shulk may be unpopular but he hasn't proven himself nearly as much as Wolf. The numbers matter.

 

[SwagGuy99]

No other character really rose as a result of meta development, most just fell (poor Yoshi) due to being figured out (it's hard to learn defense on your own, while practicing offense is much simpler).[/QUOTE]
That's not necessarily true. While it is true that most characters are more likely to fall as time goes on (unless they are directly buffed through game updates), there were a few characters in Smash 4, for example, who did rise through the tiers as their meta developed. and (following nerfs that many people deemed detrimental to their viability) were able to be optimized and as their meta's grew, they became much better than they were thought to be after being nerfed. actually rose pretty significantly in viability as his meta developed as well and he was hardly changed through the patches.

This is just something that people should think about when talking about characters rising or falling with time as I think that characters are more likely to rise up in the tiers over time than in Smash 4 because A. There are more matchups and characters than Smash 4 B. Edgeguarding is better so characters have more room to grow in that area and C. Characters strengths in Ultimate are generally much more noticable than in any other Smash game (except maybe 64) and this goes for low tiers even. This means that if a character's strengths are optimized more over time, they may be able to cover for some of their weaknesses as well.

 

[Baby_Sneak]

Worst part is that his grab reward used to be even better pre-patch since his dair caused an untechable ground bounce making his death combos borderline un-escapeable. Thankfully they only worked at 0-10%. I feel right now the biggest thing holding him back is his comically bad airspeed since without rising tornado, his recovery is unbearably bad and unlike Chrom/Cloud, he doesn't have the neutral game to make up for it. I can understand why they did it since cyclone gimps are low-key degenerate, but the lack of recovery mixups kinda cripples Luigi. The airspeed buff will also make him less susceptible to air camping since that's also Luigi's second biggest weakness.
To be honest, I feel the tether grab gives Luigi's midrange a good set of teeth he needed since he already has good CQC, but lacks range which was historically another problem he had. The tether grab gives him that range while being deceptively hard to punish unless you have a really good burst option.
Edit: I forgot that the aerial tornado is invincible frame 1-7 making it even more difficult to juggle him in conjunction with his infamous nair (even swordies have to respect the tornado).

Are you saying luigi doesn't have a good neutral game? Or a neutral game that isn't good enough to mask his recovery game?
Cuz:
Luigi has fireballs, very quick aerials that enforces his (a bit small) threat zone, a tether grab that doubles as a projectile, a CRAZY initial dash that works extremely well as a burst option, good OOS, and combos that can start from so many moves. I'd say he has a fairly threatening neutral. And his reward seems good if he's about to get about 80% off of a grab (though 50% was what the luigi player got consistently). That's pretty much right into kill percents.

I don't think he's crippled. His on stage presence matters too much for his recovery to stop him. Like, you have to keep him from touching you or else you're taking 40-50% consistently. Then you have Usmash, UpB OOS, Bair, Tornado, Dair, Any smash attack, Nair, Uair, Etc. Once you're at kill percentage. I only showed two matches, but they showed a glimpse of how threatening luigi can be in neutral, and especially in your face.

 

[MG_3989]

I never once compared the two directly. It's pretty clear half the **** I say here is gonna get met with salt and angry opinions, so I think I'm just gonna keep my discussions limited to tournaments and go off my own experience. The elementary school climate is a bit old, it's only a 'discussion' here until you say something someone disagrees with, then everybody is salty and its an argument or a **** measuring contest.

I base damned near everything I saw off of personal experience, not living vicariously through sets on YT.

You made a post and in my opinion didn't offer sufficient evidence to why you think those things so I simply asked for that evidence and stated why I think Ness is better. I did not come at you personally in anyway nor attack you. If you feel attacked that's not my problem. I based my analysis on my experience, tournament results, looking at their kits side by side and then went in depth and explained my reasoning. I'm sorry if I offended you but I didn't do anything wrong and if I can't post what I believe is a different opinion and quality content on this board what's the point? If we all had the same opinions this thread wouldn't exist

 

[NotLiquid]

So I know Prime Saga is the tournament most people are paying attention to this weekend, but Japan had its own major today as well - Umebura SP3. There were quite a quantity of ZSS and Inkling players in attendance, though most notable of all is the fact that Nietono, who won the tournament, didn't lose a single game in bracket. Pichu is still as deadly as ever in some parts of the world.

 

[Nah]

It would also be tedious as all hell but it would be an interesting hypothesis to see if these less popular characters do still get similar win rates as the more popular, good characters. Marth would be another good character to test this out on. He is considered to be a good character but his results are fairly bad due to lack of results.

If we could gather data on the # of Marths compared to their victory/placements, would we see a character whose win-rates are similar to those of popular good characters? We'd have to build up a specific sample, taking the # of Marths (or whatever character) across several different tournaments and do a lot of contrast and comparison.

I think that something like this was done once during Smash 4 and complied and placed into a graph, I think that it was Thinkaman who either did it or found it and showed it to us. Might be fun to see again for SmUsh.

I could totally be misremembering things though

 

[Lil Puddin]

Meta Knight is way underrated. The community overlooks the strengths of characters often in favor of what is popular. Inkling is still very strong but opinions of Inkling have watered down, just because. I think there is a bias towards certain characters depending on how the public portrays them. How well they’re represented. As for people talking about Shulk, he’s a good character regardless of how many people play him. Is Olimar not as good as Mario because less people play him? I believe we need to focus on the characters themselves if they’re to be accurately ranked.

tbh just about every fast moving character with decent-ish frame data/aerials will place mid tier at least. This game is very aerial-dependent in its current state. And even if it takes until 150% to kill someone, nobody's stopping someone from playing a very slow match to get the kill. It'll just be a very boring match is all lmao.

Low tier should be reserved for characters who are too slow to fight back properly, characters with very poor aerials for neutral, characters with poor neutral in general, or characters who have a hard time securing kills. However that doesn't mean every character that fits some of those descriptions will automatically be low tier. Like by those descriptions Zelda is low tier. But her kit, despite being very awkwardly balanced and her being slow, is still enough to push her into lower mid tier at the very least... For now.

 

[TimG57867]

So I know Prime Saga is the tournament most people are paying attention to this weekend, but Japan had its own major today as well - Umebura SP3. There were quite a quantity of ZSS and Inkling players in attendance, though most notable of all is the fact that Nietono, who won the tournament, didn't lose a single game in bracket. Pichu is still as deadly as ever in some parts of the world.

To give everyone a visual reference:

https://smash.gg/tournament/sp3-umebura-sp3/events/umebura-sp-singles/overview
Umebura SP 3 (Tokyo, Japan) (509 Entrants)

1. DNG | Nietono
2. R2G | Kameme
3. KEN
4. ProtoBanham
5. SNB | Abadango
5. Lea
7. Choco
7. PG | Cosmos
9. Umeki
9. CND | Raito
9. GEKI | HIKARU
9. JILL
13. R2G | Etsuji
13. Rotsuku
13. Tsu
13. NAKAT
17. PNG | Atelier
17. Somo
17. Nyaha
17. Paseriman
17. Es
17. Yamanyon
17. Kuro
17. GEKI | Gackt
25. Kome
25. Chicken
25. RAIN
25. kept
25. Tubotubo
25. YOC
25. Lickey★
25. Kishiru

As NotLiquid says, you'll quickly notice a good presence of with both Cosmos and Abadango breaking Top 8 with the former doing it solo no less as well as the high turnout of . 3 Zero Suits got Top 24 at 17th while Choco got Top 8. Inkling, despite not being as prolific at top level play as many anticipated, is still turning up quite often while Zero Suit Samus is increasingly proving herslf to be a very capable threat across the globe.

Ken also managed to get 3rd with . An incredible placing for the speedster giving how massive this Umebura was helps to make a case for Sonic being down from SSB4 but quite far from out. If his Up Air gets fixed his advantage state should become even better.
A bunch of under the radar/less popular characters also managed to make some nice pop ups here. One of the first things that jumped to me was 2 in Top 32 at 17th and 25th respectively. Neither of the Animal Crossing reps are getting a lot of love so far (Ranai not being tournaments sure doesn't help) but in terms of results Villager does seem to be showing up a lot more at higher levels of play. Tsu also managed to get his first big placing in a while at Top 16. Pretty good showing considering how overlooked Lucario seems to have been. Because those 2.0 nerfs happened so soon we'll never know how well Lucario could have performed with greater Aura Sphere Charge cancel options but at least Tsu is showing Lucario can still keep up. Still seems to be the only Lucario making notable headway right now though.
Hikaru and Raito also manged to get solid placings for and respectively. However, unlike Tsu, they used secondaries to get through the bracket. I wonder how much they were needed. Out of all the zoners Duck Hunt has gotten some of the littlest attention so it's hard to picture just how much the 2.0 reworks affected him at the top level and while DK closer to launch had a lot of arguments made for him being the best heavy, his results have noticeably been lagging behind a lot of his superheavy contemporaries. Namely and . Still, seeing placings this high for either is lovely no matter how you slice it.

And of course above all that Neitono really solidified his place on the map with a 1st placing all using who have several reps popping up in Top 32 including NAKAT. Both of the Chus have really proved themselves as top threats thus far across the world.

The vods are sprinkling onto SHI-G's Youtube channel. Look forward to watching all the vods and analyzing various matchups. One of the first I've had the chance to watch is this most recent faceoff between Lea and Neitono:

Neitono's greater player and matchup familiarity compared to Void really shows in this set. He never really got caught off guard by an niche tricks or setups. And an interesting thing of note is that unlike Void, Neitono kept the set on stages devoid of platforms in the middle. And neutral was grounded a good chunk of time outside of falling aerials or sending projectiles out to safely poke at each other. Seemed like an even tussle albiet with Lea's projectile being faster and having more range overall than Pichu. But the thing that really stuck out to me here was how both faired in disadvantage. Pichu's Frame 3 N-Air really seemed to give Neitono the edge in disadvantage and close up scenarios. Whenever he caught Lea in shield, Lea was never really able to make him pay for it and had to settle for a lot of retreating. But when Lea had Neitono in shield, Neitono was often able to bail himself out with the Frame 3 N-Air which also helped a lot in various air to air exchanges where Lea didn't have the best options to throw Neitono off but Neitono could often force Lea off the N-Air. Really highlights how much a speedy aerial, even on someone as stubby as Pichu, can make for a big advantage in this game with shield options beyond jumping being so much worse as well as mid air defensive options being more limited or committal.

Look forward to going through all sets and analyzing more.

 

[boysilver400]

What time does Prime Saga start?

Also, I’ve been looking back at early pages of this thread, and it’s interesting to see how well(and how badly) some opinions have held up. Like with King K Rool; we all thought he was top 10 because he was a heavy with loads of super armor, but when people figured him out, people thought less highly of him. Some people also thought Pichu would still be bad(like myself) because he was still a lightweight that hurts himself, and then Void and Captain L pushed the character and we saw his broken combo game, so we thought more highly of him.

Another thing that has changed is the extent of some characters ranks. Like with how everyone assumed that Inkling was undoubtedly the best in the game(maybe she would’ve been without patches?) and how Kirby and Jr. were in contention for their own tier. They’re still considering good/bad characters respectively, but some people have lowered the extent of how good/bad they are.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that I find it amazing how the meta can change in just a few months. Was sm4sh like this?(honest question, since I wasn’t playing competitively then)

 

[Iridium]

Prime Saga Discussion Thread is here.

The event should start in about half an hour.

 

[KakuCP9]

Are you saying luigi doesn't have a good neutral game? Or a neutral game that isn't good enough to mask his recovery game?
Cuz:
Luigi has fireballs, very quick aerials that enforces his (a bit small) threat zone, a tether grab that doubles as a projectile, a CRAZY initial dash that works extremely well as a burst option, good OOS, and combos that can start from so many moves. I'd say he has a fairly threatening neutral. And his reward seems good if he's about to get about 80% off of a grab (though 50% was what the luigi player got consistently). That's pretty much right into kill percents.

I don't think he's crippled. His on stage presence matters too much for his recovery to stop him. Like, you have to keep him from touching you or else you're taking 40-50% consistently. Then you have Usmash, UpB OOS, Bair, Tornado, Dair, Any smash attack, Nair, Uair, Etc. Once you're at kill percentage. I only showed two matches, but they showed a glimpse of how threatening luigi can be in neutral, and especially in your face.

I don't think his neutral game is bad either, its just that his neutral doesn't warrant how bad his recovery is. Cloud and Chrom also have terrible recoveries, but they also have ridiculous mobility which makes it difficult to run from them coupled with large buttons that are very difficult to contest (the former is better at weaving around in the air to segue from zoning with aerials to going aggro while the latter has an array of kill confirms/high damage off practical neutral tools). Luigi's neutral game is more reliant on bait and punish since his airspeed makes it difficult to chase characters who don't want to play his game and can lead to him being zoned out by aerials and projectiles (i.e Gren vs Luigi). His tether helps a him in that regard being able to snatch people from far way while having endlag comparable to S4 Lucas, but he's too soft to runaway to justify his atrocious recovery and just gives his opponents an easy way to justify camping and then killing him offstage despite him being difficult to pressure thanks to tornado and nair. He's similar to Zard where he definitely has good tools (even though Luigi is a better character), but ultimately falls short due some damning weaknesses.

 

[Rizen]

Last Thursday I attended a 128 player tournament. I beat 4 people but barely didn't make top 48 :/. Here's some more MU impressions:

seems to be everywhere. YL shuts him down pretty hard and if he's spaced far enough he can fire a projectile and still react to wiz foot. Ganon always has to be respected because he punishes super hard with huge hitboxes but YL has the advantage. Dsmash launches sideways and puts Ganon in a terrible position offstage.
Advantage

is a similar story to Ganon except he has revenge. Still a wiffed revenge means YL gets an Fsmash or 30% combo. The match ends up a mind game of projectiles vs revenge but it feels like Incineroar has to adjust to YL. Roar punishes hard but a lot of his great CQC options like A whip lose to projectiles.
Slight Advantage

I've played several DDD's now and this just is a terrible MU for the penguin. All YL's spam bounces back Gordos, DDD's mobility is horrible and he lacks good burst options unlike Ganon. DDD does not have a good answer to YL's neutral then gets exploited hard in disadvantage. Sucking up a projectile doesn't do much because YL can hop over it and angle down another.
Strong Advantage

has good zone breaking tools for a specific positioning in front of her but YL can hop around and angle his projectiles so he doesn't get shut down like other characters. Palu wins at staff attack distance but YL wins point blank CQC. Palu's advantage is scary and she's very mobile but YL's own combos are good too. It ends up the character who forces their spacing game better and punishes harder wins.
Even.

has a top tier advantage state but YL has really good tools in this MU. YL's sword has better reach, projectiles are great at limiting Pichu's movements and out-camps him, and most of all YL's F4 Nair has only 6 f of landing lag and stops most of pichu's options. YL wins the war of attrition for once because Pichu's so light. Pichu can still do Pichu things when he gets in of course.
Slight advantage

has good anti YL tools. Robo beam can snipe zoning, rotor arm reflects, ROB's CQC is very fast and it can zone with burner powered aerials like Nair. Dispite these advantages, YL does alright; he zones faster and harder and combos the gears out of ROB once he does get something started. In a weird way it's sort of like the Pit MU. YL needs to be an annoying bee, hovering just outside ROB's reach looking for oppertunaties to sting. ROB's scary offstage but YL has projectiles to cover himself and ROB has a big hurtbox. A well spaced rotor arm can ruin YL's day but it's a read.
Even.

is one of those MUs where it really feels like you're playing a high tier (YL) vs a top tier (Snake). YL has a great zoning game vs Snake but snake absorbs a lot more damage and is much faster in CQC. Snake is good at backing YL into corners and traps. Nikita is stupidly good and Snake can cancel it and Utilt; either way you're dying at around 100%. C4s also kill very early. Snake feels like an overtuned character and YL's undertuned. It's not that YL gets shut down but Snake's weight and kill power give him a lot more leeway to force his game.
Slight disadvantage

's another character who's everywhere. I lost to one who had excellent zone breaking but think he outplayed me. YL's sword is great at swatting Yoshi away before he can get in and YL's projectiles force approaches. YL's Uair beats everything Y has from below including Y bomb. Y's mobility is great and attacking his shield is dangerous due to SH Nair OoS. Y doesn't kill early or exploit YL hard enough when he gets in and YL generally controls the pace. Y's good but he lacks the tools to really address YL's zoning.
Advantage

is the opposite of Yoshi; she has good tools vs YL but is awkward herself. Nayru's is annoying as heck but that's all it is; the reward is minimal. If YL knows what he's doing Z shouldn't be able to Farow's wind snipe him often. Phantom's good but slow and YL can interrupt it with an arrow. Generally, Zelda's options are slower and/or need precise spacing while YL's are much more flexible. Zelda's a glass cannon but when she spaces right she has a lot of cannon. It feels like Z has to work harder to force her gameplan than YL.
Slight Advantage

 

[Rocketjay8]

Last Thursday I attended a 128 player tournament. I beat 4 people but barely didn't make top 48 :/. Here's some more MU impressions:

seems to be everywhere. YL shuts him down pretty hard and if he's spaced far enough he can fire a projectile and still react to wiz foot. Ganon always has to be respected because he punishes super hard with huge hitboxes but YL has the advantage. Dsmash launches sideways and puts Ganon in a terrible position offstage.
Advantage

is a similar story to Ganon except he has revenge. Still a wiffed revenge means YL gets an Fsmash or 30% combo. The match ends up a mind game of projectiles vs revenge but it feels like Incineroar has to adjust to YL. Roar punishes hard but a lot of his great CQC options like A whip lose to projectiles.
Slight Advantage

I've played several DDD's now and this just is a terrible MU for the penguin. All YL's spam bounces back Gordos, DDD's mobility is horrible and he lacks good burst options unlike Ganon. DDD does not have a good answer to YL's neutral then gets exploited hard in disadvantage. Sucking up a projectile doesn't do much because YL can hop over it and angle down another.
Strong Advantage

has good zone breaking tools for a specific positioning in front of her but YL can hop around and angle his projectiles so he doesn't get shut down like other characters. Palu wins at staff attack distance but YL wins point blank CQC. Palu's advantage is scary and she's very mobile but YL's own combos are good too. It ends up the character who forces their spacing game better and punishes harder wins.
Even.

has a top tier advantage state but YL has really good tools in this MU. YL's sword has better reach, projectiles are great at limiting Pichu's movements and out-camps him, and most of all YL's F4 Nair has only 6 f of landing lag and stops most of pichu's options. YL wins the war of attrition for once because Pichu's so light. Pichu can still do Pichu things when he gets in of course.
Slight advantage

has good anti YL tools. Robo beam can snipe zoning, rotor arm reflects, ROB's CQC is very fast and it can zone with burner powered aerials like Nair. Dispite these advantages, YL does alright; he zones faster and harder and combos the gears out of ROB once he does get something started. In a weird way it's sort of like the Pit MU. YL needs to be an annoying bee, hovering just outside ROB's reach looking for oppertunaties to sting. ROB's scary offstage but YL has projectiles to cover himself and ROB has a big hurtbox. A well spaced rotor arm can ruin YL's day but it's a read.
Even.

is one of those MUs where it really feels like you're playing a high tier (YL) vs a top tier (Snake). YL has a great zoning game vs Snake but snake absorbs a lot more damage and is much faster in CQC. Snake is good at backing YL into corners and traps. Nikita is stupidly good and Snake can cancel it and Utilt; either way you're dying at around 100%. C4s also kill very early. Snake feels like an overtuned character and YL's undertuned. It's not that YL gets shut down but Snake's weight and kill power give him a lot more leeway to force his game.
Slight disadvantage

's another character who's everywhere. I lost to one who had excellent zone breaking but think he outplayed me. YL's sword is great at swatting Yoshi away before he can get in and YL's projectiles force approaches. YL's Uair beats everything Y has from below including Y bomb. Y's mobility is great and attacking his shield is dangerous due to SH Nair OoS. Y doesn't kill early or exploit YL hard enough when he gets in and YL generally controls the pace. Y's good but he lacks the tools to really address YL's zoning.
Advantage

is the opposite of Yoshi; she has good tools vs YL but is awkward herself. Nayru's is annoying as heck but that's all it is; the reward is minimal. If YL knows what he's doing Z shouldn't be able to Farow's wind snipe him often. Phantom's good but slow and YL can interrupt it with an arrow. Generally, Zelda's options are slower and/or need precise spacing while YL's are much more flexible. Zelda's a glass cannon but when she spaces right she has a lot of cannon. It feels like Z has to work harder to force her gameplan than YL.
Slight Advantage

For zelda, there is a tech for her that allows her to be behind her phantom. It's really good to protect herself against projectiles.

 

[mean_]

who do think the "best" character in ultimate is? personally, I think it is peach, but I wanna know what other people think

 

[Y2Kay]

Watch out today for the Scarlet Classic V.

It blew up from 100 entrants to 345 entrants overnight. Many strong players from NY/NJ (including muah )will be here for this C tier.

 

[Lacrimosa]

For zelda, there is a tech for her that allows her to be behind her phantom. It's really good to protect herself against projectiles.

Yep. Although I don't really see that implemented in Zelda's playstyle, yet. Even the top player (Ven of course) isn't doing that or only very rarely.

 

[Shaya]

The necessity to chime in to the beating drum of complaints is growing.
I'll try not to make it as personal as possible. I'm very glad there are so many long-stayers whom reminisce of the Smash4 threads as something so great, I put a lot of time and love into moderating that thread to the ideals I upheld. Upheld instead of uphold not to imply a change in stance, more so a lack of confidence and energy.

The game's so much more massive than Smash4, which was a lot more massive than Brawl. There's just so much information out there to absorb (addendum: I dedicate barely more than a few sentences to this point, but it could very well be 90% of the problem, feel free to see this as almost the tl;dr). It makes the "personal experience" thing almost seem relevant. My personal experiences have primarily been my posts here; of course, reflecting on tournament results too, but it just so happens I believe most of my posts here have been about how Zero Suit Samus might still be pretty darn good.

To nurture the new generation/new posters is important, so it seems fair that in what's still an early part of this thread that we let people get their toes wet. But I haven't really gone out of my way to hammer what discourse should be about, although I'm pretty sure I had been more proactive in the past.

One of the most difficult things as a moderator is to keep a thread on path and relevant. It's very rare a post is 100% relevant, let alone 80% relevant, but what seems to naturally happen no matter the circumstances (without a conscious effort to mitigate), is a natural degradation of relevance of subsequent posts.
If a moderator isn't there to be active and putting a stop as things go from 70% to 65% to 60% ... (p.s. all of these are "magic numbers"), you arrive at a point where every post is similar in eh-quality, but they didn't pass the "super obvious" threshold yet. It's hard to infract individuals when they're just participating in a conversation of only minor separation to posts near it, at least compared to what the ideal would be - they don't see the justification nor what actually substantiates A grade thread-relevancy.

It's important posters in this thread notice the drop and either help to steer it back themselves, or just outright ignore the person dirtying up the place (and sending a report would be really helpful too!)

At this early stage of Ultimate's lifetime there aren't a lot of 'canon' to base things around, and stuff like "base" tier lists and match up charts used to contrast to inhibits discourse noticeably. And while I can't be certain, I feel like the early S4 thread would've been like this too anyway.


Another difference is the gap between Brawl/S4 was a lot larger than S4/Ultimate. Those who were wounded by Brawl had moved on already, but this is not the same case as S4 where the wounds are still fresh and stinging.
As someone speculated, players are caring less about what others gain from their post but what they get out of it themselves. "My character is great, I need people to know" is pretty tolerable and often endearing within reasonable quantities.
But aggressive or emotionally charged "you are wrong, all these people are wrong, etc" or "I should get to say what I want" type of rhetoric is pretty toxic... In the past you'd expect someone to post like this once and it wouldn't necessitate intervention, they maybe would even apologize for it before returning to constructiveness. But now that 'mode' just seems to be the standard for some people? It's an inherent part of their personalities and how they express themselves? What are you meant to do about that? I'm not sure.


Anyway I'm losing cohesion in my thoughts now and I won't be getting them back anytime soon. But I wanted to hammer this 'notion' - and if people don't perceive a hole in the logic (or that I forgot something else), are okay with helping maintain this.

Posts in this thread should be made and otherwise highly striven towards being of an objective nature.
If your post relies on personal anecdote, it should be openly acknowledged and should not be the crutch of any statement or argument. We can be personal with each other if relating to competing, but high/top level anecdote should always be preferred if it can be made.
If a post cannot be of an objective nature, for whatever reason, your bias should be stated and a fair acknowledgement of the alternative view should be made. Tone should NOT be authoritative in these instances (neither in general too!).

What is 'objective'?:
Tournament data/results. Character data (frame data, animations, implementations/options). Analysis of third-party relevant sources with which discussion can be based upon (contains justifications / substantial primary source of high or top level play).

I don't think this thread should EVER be a place to attack a person's opinion when they aren't here to respond to it. An analysis, "why would they think this", is your means of doing so - in a FAIR way.

It's about time we make it a common sentiment that content creators are just that. If it's discernible that a primary source is predominantly catering to their cult-of-personality without any substance to be derived from it to discuss: we shouldn't care.
Some players explain themselves pretty well, some are open to responding to people so more can be learned of their perspective, but single tier list pics on twitter or a 10+ minute video of someone dragging dots around a screen only gives us VERY little.

But to be fair/repeat a point, it's difficult to be objective right now.
I also can just say 'okay so, should certain characters have discussion banned for the time being?' /shrug

It's been like an hour since I typed "I'm losing cohesion", what is even the day of the week right now?.
Feel free to private message me.

 

[Rizen]

who do think the "best" character in ultimate is? personally, I think it is peach, but I wanna know what other people think

IMO ultimate doesn't have a single best character but rather a small group:
/ followed closely by
who comprise (my) top tier (yes I caved and put Wario in top tier; he's good enough at killing w/o waft and waft is stupid on top that).

 

[$.A.F.]

So are your opinions on D3 risen somewhat after the Zaki set? At the very least, I’d provide that as evidence against him being low tier, especially coupled with his top 8 placements at majors like Umebura and BoBC3. Thoughts?

 

[bc1910]

who do think the "best" character in ultimate is? personally, I think it is peach, but I wanna know what other people think

I don't think there is a single best character.

Firstly I think there are too many MUs and scenarios in this game for one character to definitively be the best in even 50% of them, let alone anything close to 100%. Secondly, there is no clearly overpowered character in the same vein as Brawl MK or S4 Bayo.

That said, in terms of overall consistency, I believe best character is a toss up between Inkling and Wolf with Inkling just edging it out for the #1 spot. These two come the closest to the typical "best character" trope of having no exploitable weaknesses. They are extremely potent in most situations, have an answer for everything and do not to my knowledge have many, if any bad MUs.

A little below these characters I can see the arguments for Peach, Olimar and Pikachu. These are incredibly strong characters with massive damage output, higher than the top 2 in many cases, but with more obvious and meaningful weaknesses to balance them out (Peach's disadvantage, Olimar's disadvantage/recovery, Pikachu's range; weight is an issue for all 3 of them too). In a lot of scenarios these characters can be stronger than Inkling and Wolf and I can see them as candidates for best in show.

Pichu, Fox, Lucina, Wario, Greninja, Palutena and (hot take) Pokemon Trainer round out top tier for me. These characters are again stellar, but with more defined weaknesses and bad MUs than the characters above them. This is the level of balance I personally think is healthy for top tiers. With some small adjustments to the characters above them, or potentially metagame development for these characters, I can see most of them (certaintly the first 5) having a shot at the #1 spot.