Official Competitive Character Impressions 2.0

[L9999]

People are going to be calling for Joker nerfs until the end of time aren’t they?

People want him to be nerfed into the ground but they just won’t say it out loud for fear of backlash I take it?

I won’t forget how overjoyed people were when Olimar got wrecked, same with Pichu.

Same thing will happen with Joker, and it’ll be a sad day when it does because that just goes to show people are actively looking for, and becoming heavily reliant, on nerfs making things easier for them.

From what I’ve seen, the introduction of nerfs into the game brings out the destructive side of people who like to tear down what’s good for ****s and giggles.

People will find any excuse to justify nerfs, and once Nintendo obliged them, they’ll move onto a new target for nerfs.

God I hate this obsession and over reliance on nerfs people have ingrained into them these days.

Those scrubs could care less about the balance of the game or how good a character is. They are such imbecile individuals they cannot comprehend the concepts of power levels or what is high level competition. Some nerfs in the past were justified, was objectively degenerate back in the Hoohah days and deserved nerfs. But those people are quickly to switch opinions if their pathetic utopia isn't met.

"is so bad!" is good. "Nair is so dumb, nerf!!! Palutena is so boring!!!"

"Buff the " Why did you threw a crab at Hbox and constantly harass him for playing Jiggs? What if she had pressure options again and Rest killed at 20%? I would guarantee you she would be hated.

" are so bad omg." Whose fault is that they got over nerfed?

" wobbling is cancer, I hope they get deleted." "I WANT ICS BACK!!!!!" "suck." So much for attachment.

"came to kill the witch! YEY Snake!!!" (game comes out) "Ew, Snake is a boring character. Sakurai nerf!!!"

" needs to be banned!!!!" (game comes out) Who plays Meta Knight? He is so irrelevant it is laughable.

They can also cannot comprehend that zoning and patience are key to fighting games. They think that is is all dumb hype plays. In a lot of cases those "hype plays" are the most optimal options the players had atm. So many scrubs ask for nerfs and curse players even though the character is barely mid tier.

No matter who is top tier the scrubs will hate them, even if no character in Ultimate has proven to be degenerate like , who proved how broken he was in a month and had a tier zero (pun intended) meta that revolved entirely around him. The worst part about this people is how quick they are to compare the flavor of the month character to . I bet none of those kiddies played Brawl, or even comprehend how ridiculous MK truly was (and how dumb Brawl was in general). I myself did not compete in Brawl, but sure as hell doesn't have a completely lagless DSmash that kills, a Dtilt with 0 lag that outranges a lot of things, big disjointed hitboxes on everything, a get out of jail special that wrecks shields, multiple jumps with a frame 2 Uair, and so on.

Thankfully the patches have not been nasty to characters (besides ) but I think that will also make the devs resistant to buff low tiers.

 

[NotLiquid]

I'm of the belief that if you're looking for a MU that can deal with PT, you're looking for a character that can handle Ivysaur, Charizard, and a mix-up option.

Right now I think the crux with Squirtle is people are generally taken aback by just going with him as a general option because he's still the weakest link of the three, so you kinda end up just not preparing for it. There's more than enough characters on the roster that can handle him simply by playing defense due to his operative range being dismal. Using Inkling as an example, Jab, BAir (+ the setups out of it) and Splattershot kinda kneecap him pretty severely (side note: Inkling would have an advantage MU against PT if it weren't for Ivy forcing her to resort to hit-and-run tactics). He's got some good combos, granted, and his jab lock makes for a circumstantially good thing, but in the case of the latter I'm seeing all too often way too many players who fall into the mistake of disrespecting Squirtle's stubby range just a little too much. If you're maining any Top 20 character, find your best disjoint/large range attacks and don't even give Squirtle the satisfaction of an approach. Characters like Ness, Mega Man, any of the swordies, Palutena and most of the top tier except Snake do this well.

As much mileage as Tweek has gotten out of Squirtle, I feel like the counterplay makes the character a bit more of a gimmick compared to the other two. Obviously having that option is far from a bad thing when the opponent has to contend with a character that can change MUs on the fly and we can't just objectively measure a character like that by how much each character loses since we're all just human behind the controllers being forced to alter mentalities in minutes' notice, but y'know, perspective. At the end of the day, Squirtle's main purpose is to get you off-stage so Ivy can come out to play, but denying him that option is more than doable and not exactly a cast-unique rarity.

 

[Arthur97]

People are going to be calling for Joker nerfs until the end of time aren’t they?

People want him to be nerfed into the ground but they just won’t say it out loud for fear of backlash I take it?

I won’t forget how overjoyed people were when Olimar got wrecked, same with Pichu.

Same thing will happen with Joker, and it’ll be a sad day when it does because that just goes to show people are actively looking for, and becoming heavily reliant, on nerfs making things easier for them.

From what I’ve seen, the introduction of nerfs into the game brings out the destructive side of people who like to tear down what’s good for ****s and giggles.

People will find any excuse to justify nerfs, and once Nintendo obliged them, they’ll move onto a new target for nerfs.

God I hate this obsession and over reliance on nerfs people have ingrained into them these days.

While nerf culture is excessive, it's hard to justify some of the Arsene jank. Specifically, how easy it is to get him. He could afford to have those numbers toned down as Arsene is already really strong, but also really easy to get.

 

[SwagGuy99]

Looks like isn't a problem after all.

I summed this up in a post on reddit, but, I personally think that if Hero's normals were a lot better, he might be a Top Tier and the argument of banning him may be a bit more valid. But since most of his normals are below average in comparison to the rest of the cast, he relies way too much on his specials for him to be really good.

 

[R-senpai]

I won't go much into detail, but 's Magic Burst is basically useless against .

can still switch to Shield midway through the move. If he activates it at the beginning of the move though, the several hits will eat up his Shield art and force it to deactivate.

Just a tip out there for my fellow mains.

 

[Impax]

I dont think hero is a problem but I would still wait a few months before deciding that.

Some characters take longer to optimize (dhd, links, shulk, wft, etc) .

 

[Deleted member]

I dont think hero is a problem but I would still wait a few months before deciding that.

Some characters take longer to optimize (dhd, links, shulk, wft, etc) .

Who even talks about banning Hero anymore? I see it as a unique, fun twist to an already fun and unique game. Higher learning curve characters () might take more time to learn but it’s funny to see how quick people are to jump to conclusions. (*Insert country here*) was not built in a day. “Oh X isn’t going to do well because of B factors”. That’s very often not the case, and will often be proven wrong. That’s silly. Theory and Results are two completely different things. You can’t make a proper sandwich without putting the ingredients together. And you get cases where such things aren’t put together properly.

Then again, will show up to eat everybody up.

 

[Kokiden]

"

While nerf culture is excessive, it's hard to justify some of the Arsene jank. Specifically, how easy it is to get him. He could afford to have those numbers toned down as Arsene is already really strong, but also really easy to get.

It’s not hard at all. Just leave characters alone. I got killed by from centre stage at 70% by his f smash, I get killed a lot below 100% quite often when I play online by characters that aren’t Arsene.

People like to go on about how unfair his percent damage is when a lot of the cast can do that too.

If anything, people try too hard to justify nerfs.

If Joker/Arsene is that easy to abuse, how come no one has been able to abuse him to do well at tourneys?

Joker has a high skill ceiling. He’s not easy to learn.

I still stand by what I say: the smash community is too trigger happy when it comes to nerfs / bans.

Look at how they treated Hero. Wanted him banned within the first week before any evidence indicates he would ruin the competitive scene.

This is no different.

The stupid nerf, knee jerk, sheep mentality bandwagon is one of the things I detest most about this community.

I love the game for the most part, but my
God, I was warned to be wary of the smash community before diving in. Now I know why.

 

[Arthur97]

"

It’s not hard at all. Just leave characters alone. I got killed by from centre stage at 70% by his f smash, I get killed a lot below 100% quite often when I play online by characters that aren’t Arsene.

People like to go on about how unfair his percent damage is when a lot of the cast can do that too.

If anything, people try too hard to justify nerfs.

If Joker/Arsene is that easy to abuse, how come no one has been able to abuse him to do well at tourneys?

Joker has a high skill ceiling. He’s not easy to learn.

I still stand by what I say: the smash community is too trigger happy when it comes to nerfs / bans.

Look at how they treated Hero. Wanted him banned within the first week before any evidence indicates he would ruin the competitive scene.

This is no different.

The stupid nerf, knee jerk, sheep mentality bandwagon is one of the things I detest most about this community.

I love the game for the most part, but my
God, I was warned to be wary of the smash community before diving in. Now I know why.

Even if he's not broken and only one person has had breakout success with him, it is still a bit ludicrous to let him fill up his gauge so easily. Is it game breaking? No. Could it stand to be tuned down? Most definitely. If Wolf and Lucina get hit with nerfs, then it's not unreasonable to have something that is just not a good mechanic (either Arsene being made weaker or harder to get, I suggest the latter) be changed. Ask yourself if you're not just a little biased in the other direction yourself.

 

[|RK|]

My issue with Joker nerfs is that I haven't seen a good reason. I've seen vague justifications "other good chars have been nerfed," "nerfs can be healthy" but not any actual reason for nerfing Joker in particular.

 

[Frihetsanka]

Personally, I'd rather we stopped discussing hypothetical nerfs and buffs in this thread. None of us, as far as I know, works at balancing the game, and it is unlikely any of the balancing team is reading this thread, so it's not really all that useful, and people asking for nerfs tend to be annoying. If nerfs do happen, then we can discuss how they affect the characters and the meta game, but until then could we focus on what is instead of what could be?

That's my opinion, anyway. Perhaps someone could create a thread for like "Wishlist for buffs and nerfs" for people interested in that kind of thing. I'd rather see discussion of the current state of the game in this threat.

 

[sedrf]

So what makes characters like oppressive in neutral ?

 

[PK Gaming]

So what makes characters like oppressive in neutral ?

Nothing

It's his advantage state that's ridiculous

Even when he has Arsene, he has to open you up to get big damage

 

[Lacrimosa]

So what makes characters like oppressive in neutral ?

Nothing at all if you ask me, it's all just Leo's work that makes him look oppressive but we should know by now that Leo can succeed with any character. He also installed fear in the opponents with Isabelle when he used her in friendlies against top players.
He isn't like previous Diddys that can throw you with 2 bananas or something like that.

 

[|RK|]

So what makes characters like oppressive in neutral ?

Gun and Eiha. It's technically not oppressive, but like Bayo's bullet arts in S4, it forces you to approach a char that is really tough to hit/catch.

 

[Arthur97]

My issue with Joker nerfs is that I haven't seen a good reason. I've seen vague justifications "other good chars have been nerfed," "nerfs can be healthy" but not any actual reason for nerfing Joker in particular.

Arsene is just too easy to pull out. If they made it a flat rate, then fine, but the combeback part of it could stand to go. At least with Lucario you actually have to survive a good while, but even then it's consistent growth with damage.

 

[Thinkaman]

Perhaps someone could create a thread for like "Wishlist for buffs and nerfs" for people interested in that kind of thing.

Suggestion: Don't.

I'm leaning towards making it infractable to complain about buffs/nerfs, and to complain about people complaining about buffs/nerfs. The horse is dead.

Join me on the superior bigger brain level of complaining about people who complain about people who... Or go biggest brain and actually talk about the game.

----------

So my wife is talking about going to Genesis, and spending money on a national means I probably need to be responsible and actually pick a main; I invite you to indulge the narcissism of my story.

I mained Jigglypuff in melee, because I liked aggression and melee Jigglypuff was a very aggressive character in 2007. My timing was bad and my spacing was good, so Jigglypuff fit well.

My focus on spacing made me thrive in Brawl, where I continued playing puff and was the top player in St. Louis for a few years. Brawl Jigglypuff sucked, but had a surprisingly workable matchup against MK and actually countered Diddy pretty hard. I found that I could rely on matchup inexperience against many of her counters. Over time, I started using Ness or Squirtle in her very worst matchups, and twice I used Ganon as a successful personality cp.

When me and Amazing Ampharos made BBrawl, the process required learning a lot of additional characters at a level close to my puff. My Ganon got better, I had to learn Lucas, and I got proficient with people ranging from Bowser to Sheik. (I even had a good ICs by the end, but that character doesn't translate across games well.)

I ended Brawl being about equally good with 6-8 characters, and Smash 4 only made things worse. I broke top 100 at EVO with a mix of Ness and Mac, but also was playing WFT/Palu and picking up DH. DH might have been my best by the end? I stopped attending nationals and spent most of my smash time playing people who were worse than me, and started playing Doc as a slight handicap. Eventually, Doc ended up being roughly as good as my others--way better than my Mario at least. I gradually picked up Robin, Mewtwo, and Corrin in the same way.

Then Ultimate came out and things have devolved into sort of a mess. I focused mostly on the true newcomers, and ended up getting good with random people like Samus too. We're to the point where I play about half the roster at the same level, very unfocused.

(My wife: "GEE, IT'S TOO BAD THERE'S NOT A TOP TIER CHARACTER WHO REWARDS PLAYING DIVERSE PLAYSTYLES. C'MON, HOW IS THIS HARD???")

Yeah yeah, I should probably be primarily playing PT. I do really enjoy the character!

So now I'm focusing on who I want to perserve as secondaries, for specific matchups.

is Ness, with all the good and bad matchups that implies. He'd be nice to train up as a response to Pikachu and PT, and I might prefer him for Wolf?
is fine against Ness and Snake, and A+ vs. Lucas/Plant/Belmonts/KRool/WFT/Ridley in case anyone ever decides those characters exist. Nice against Link and ROB too. She is also supposedly good against Peach??? (In 3.1 Samsora listed Villager as a counter and Isabelle even) I pick her in Squad Strike a lot and she is almost always the unexpected MVP. I have put zero time into this character and am baffled at my performance with her.
is a good character who seems to generally have opposite matchup affinities as PT--he likes fighting slower characters and usually doesn't care what they are trying to do to him from a distance. Certain opponents really have trouble dealing with the unusual cognative load of fighting DH.
is my best overall doubles character. I actually like the Pikachu matchup, even though the 0% part is rough. Wolf, Palu, Chrom too. He generally has the same worst matchups as PT though, so he doesn't bring much to the table as a secondary.

I don't see a place for. He's underrated but the characters he is solid against are rare, maybe I'd use him vs. Palutena? (But PT does fine against Palu, without such extreme stage preferences.) I might keep him around as a personality cp against players who are too greedy with their punishes.
Similar case. How many ICs, Samus, Isabelle, and Mac players are out there?
I'm not sure I could commit to fully. But he does have very attractive matchup spreads that perfectly compliment Ness.

I'm currently leaning towards +. I think they cover... pretty much everyone? Not sure how much value there is in maintaining for what would be primarily personality-based counter-picking.

 

[Nathan Richardson]

I'm late due to my internet dying but with PT you typically can get away with only knowing two out of the three pokemon excellently against low to mid-level players. It's only when the high level players come in that you need to learn when to switch pokemon and the timing in which to do it.
I'm an oddball since I start with Zard and keep going from there but that doesn't necessarily work out because as mentioned multiple times, they're a team, so going solo only makes you handicap yourself.
So I put in a little work learning how to control ivysaur and squirtle, they're nowhere near as good as my zard but I have to admit getting the heck out of the way of attacks is super necessary.

 

[Game7a1]

I'm currently leaning towards +. I think they cover... pretty much everyone? Not sure how much value there is in maintaining for what would be primarily personality-based counter-picking.

Well, those other three could be useful for 5 v 5 Squad Strikes... if they ever happen.

Just speaking from experience here, but I find if you want to play multiple characters (like, more than 3), expect some highs and lows with some of your lesser-used characters. They're the ones that tend to fluctuate the most and might be best left alone for some time until you feel strong with them again. As always, play characters you enjoy.

Also Duck Hunt is good against all big bodies, and I didn't see you mention Bowser, so there's one potential motivation to keep using him. Since Incineroar is your best doubles character, consider keeping him fresh for doubles until you feel confident your PKMN Trainer, Ness, and Isabelle are on or close to on par. I got nothing for Mac, though. Could be a good pocket for playing against casuals and whatnot (just so you don't have a massive advanatge), but that can apply to the rest of the characters you listed and isn't exactly a competition-related reason.

 

[Rizen]

Suggestion: Don't.

I'm leaning towards making it infractable to complain about buffs/nerfs, and to complain about people complaining about buffs/nerfs. The horse is dead.

Join me on the superior bigger brain level of complaining about people who complain about people who... Or go biggest brain and actually talk about the game.

----------

So my wife is talking about going to Genesis, and spending money on a national means I probably need to be responsible and actually pick a main; I invite you to indulge the narcissism of my story.

I mained Jigglypuff in melee, because I liked aggression and melee Jigglypuff was a very aggressive character in 2007. My timing was bad and my spacing was good, so Jigglypuff fit well.

My focus on spacing made me thrive in Brawl, where I continued playing puff and was the top player in St. Louis for a few years. Brawl Jigglypuff sucked, but had a surprisingly workable matchup against MK and actually countered Diddy pretty hard. I found that I could rely on matchup inexperience against many of her counters. Over time, I started using Ness or Squirtle in her very worst matchups, and twice I used Ganon as a successful personality cp.

When me and Amazing Ampharos made BBrawl, the process required learning a lot of additional characters at a level close to my puff. My Ganon got better, I had to learn Lucas, and I got proficient with people ranging from Bowser to Sheik. (I even had a good ICs by the end, but that character doesn't translate across games well.)

I ended Brawl being about equally good with 6-8 characters, and Smash 4 only made things worse. I broke top 100 at EVO with a mix of Ness and Mac, but also was playing WFT/Palu and picking up DH. DH might have been my best by the end? I stopped attending nationals and spent most of my smash time playing people who were worse than me, and started playing Doc as a slight handicap. Eventually, Doc ended up being roughly as good as my others--way better than my Mario at least. I gradually picked up Robin, Mewtwo, and Corrin in the same way.

Then Ultimate came out and things have devolved into sort of a mess. I focused mostly on the true newcomers, and ended up getting good with random people like Samus too. We're to the point where I play about half the roster at the same level, very unfocused.

(My wife: "GEE, IT'S TOO BAD THERE'S NOT A TOP TIER CHARACTER WHO REWARDS PLAYING DIVERSE PLAYSTYLES. C'MON, HOW IS THIS HARD???")

Yeah yeah, I should probably be primarily playing PT. I do really enjoy the character!

So now I'm focusing on who I want to perserve as secondaries, for specific matchups.

is Ness, with all the good and bad matchups that implies. He'd be nice to train up as a response to Pikachu and PT, and I might prefer him for Wolf?
is fine against Ness and Snake, and A+ vs. Lucas/Plant/Belmonts/KRool/WFT/Ridley in case anyone ever decides those characters exist. Nice against Link and ROB too. She is also supposedly good against Peach??? (In 3.1 Samsora listed Villager as a counter and Isabelle even) I pick her in Squad Strike a lot and she is almost always the unexpected MVP. I have put zero time into this character and am baffled at my performance with her.
is a good character who seems to generally have opposite matchup affinities as PT--he likes fighting slower characters and usually doesn't care what they are trying to do to him from a distance. Certain opponents really have trouble dealing with the unusual cognative load of fighting DH.
is my best overall doubles character. I actually like the Pikachu matchup, even though the 0% part is rough. Wolf, Palu, Chrom too. He generally has the same worst matchups as PT though, so he doesn't bring much to the table as a secondary.

I don't see a place for. He's underrated but the characters he is solid against are rare, maybe I'd use him vs. Palutena? (But PT does fine against Palu, without such extreme stage preferences.) I might keep him around as a personality cp against players who are too greedy with their punishes.
Similar case. How many ICs, Samus, Isabelle, and Mac players are out there?
I'm not sure I could commit to fully. But he does have very attractive matchup spreads that perfectly compliment Ness.

I'm currently leaning towards +. I think they cover... pretty much everyone? Not sure how much value there is in maintaining for what would be primarily personality-based counter-picking.

and are both solid characters. IDK their matchups but in terms of play style they're strong and unique so I could see them complimenting each other. The only issue might be their coverage of the cream of the crop could mean even at best MUs vs characters like Joker, Fox, Lucina and other top tiers but that's about the best you can hope for with anyone. Theoritically it's best to pick the best characters but playstyle's a big deal. I tried to pick up Lucina but couldn't make her work and my tournament team ended up /. You have to go with who you like. It's important to have fun too.

I fully support counter picking characters. Even if MUs aren't the best, having a fresh style and lesser known MUs can be extremely valuable. If you keep your secondaries trained they could be great to whip out if someone's downloaded your mains. I don't suggest using them for an entire set or the opponent might catch on. Especially Richter and DH would be good as CP characters.

 

[SwagGuy99]

Thankfully the patches have not been nasty to characters (besides ) but I think that will also make the devs resistant to buff low tiers.

I think the devs not buffing low tiers is true to an extent.

Since they are balancing characters based on Elite Smash results, I think this is true to an extent. Some mid/low tiers may not be buffed because of how they are determining who gets changed.

For example, thrives online (or he used to before people figured him out) during laggy matches where he can just sit on one side of the stage spamming projectiles. This caused him to get nerfed, despite him already being considered a Bottom 5 character by many people by this point in time. is similar, where her tools work much better online verses inexperienced players during laggy matches, and her fishing rod was further nerfed for seemingly no reason because of this.

Some low tiers/mid tiers have received some good changes, but not enough to make them significantly better as they're changes don't fix the flaws that they already have. were all unfortunate enough to suffer this fate.


However, some low tiers have been buffed to the point where their has (or has potential to) improved. Characters like received changes that may seem minor at first, but these changes have addressed some of their worse moves and have made some of their weaknesses a bit less severe.

Some characters however, were completely overhauled which is why I think that the devs aren't resistant to buffing these mid/low tiers that have more noticeable issues. have revived significant overhauls to their movesets which make them noticably better characters than they were before.

I agree that the method that is being used to determine which characters are buffed is weird. I also think that while there are some characters who only need a few adjustments to make them better () or need obvious changes () that should have already been addressed, I'd say that the balancing of mediocre characters hasn't been as bad as some people might make it out to be.

 

[Kokiden]

Arsene is just too easy to pull out. If they made it a flat rate, then fine, but the combeback part of it could stand to go. At least with Lucario you actually have to survive a good while, but even then it's consistent growth with damage.

Doesn’t sound like a good reason to me still.

“Whenever Arsene comes out, it equals an instant KO” sounds like one. Yours doesn’t.

Good, and broken to the point of game breaking, are different things. People keep confusing the two.

If people had their way, everyone would be nerfed into mediocrity.

 

[MrGameguycolor]

Personally, I'd rather we stopped discussing hypothetical nerfs and buffs in this thread. None of us, as far as I know, works at balancing the game, and it is unlikely any of the balancing team is reading this thread, so it's not really all that useful, and people asking for nerfs tend to be annoying. If nerfs do happen, then we can discuss how they affect the characters and the meta game, but until then could we focus on what is instead of what could be?

That's my opinion, anyway. Perhaps someone could create a thread for like "Wishlist for buffs and nerfs" for people interested in that kind of thing. I'd rather see discussion of the current state of the game in this threat.

Got what you're looking for: https://smashboards.com/threads/ultimate-community-balancing-thread-little-mac.486165/

 

[Lacrimosa]

I think the devs not buffing low tiers is true to an extent.

Since they are balancing characters based on Elite Smash results, I think this is true to an extent. Some mid/low tiers may not be buffed because of how they are determining who gets changed.

For example, thrives online (or he used to before people figured him out) during laggy matches where he can just sit on one side of the stage spamming projectiles. This caused him to get nerfed, despite him already being considered a Bottom 5 character by many people by this point in time. is similar, where her tools work much better online verses inexperienced players during laggy matches, and her fishing rod was further nerfed for seemingly no reason because of this.

Some low tiers/mid tiers have received some good changes, but not enough to make them significantly better as they're changes don't fix the flaws that they already have. were all unfortunate enough to suffer this fate.


However, some low tiers have been buffed to the point where their has (or has potential to) improved. Characters like received changes that may seem minor at first, but these changes have addressed some of their worse moves and have made some of their weaknesses a bit less severe.

Some characters however, were completely overhauled which is why I think that the devs aren't resistant to buffing these mid/low tiers that have more noticeable issues. have revived significant overhauls to their movesets which make them noticably better characters than they were before.

I agree that the method that is being used to determine which characters are buffed is weird. I also think that while there are some characters who only need a few adjustments to make them better () or need obvious changes () that should have already been addressed, I'd say that the balancing of mediocre characters hasn't been as bad as some people might make it out to be.

You have a very large list of so-called low-tiers.
Some of them should be easily considered mid-tier characters or I wouldn't place them there at all like or . Sure, they got buffed but they seem to be still one spot above the other mentioned characters (except Zelda because obvious bias :3) in this overall list.
Also about There is probably a reason why he performs so poorly and I don't mean the absence of Magister at tournament: It's more a case of too many unfavorable stages for this character. At least that's what M2K believes and I honestly think the same: Incin is very, very slow and so he does very poor (meaning he is at a disadvantage from the beginning) on stages that are big and nearly all legal stages are huge (Kalos, PS2, even BF or FD). The same probably goes for as well. downB would also work better on smaller stages because it gets harder to navigate around it and Isabelle.

Like, in short: I don't think the character design is to blame here but rather the non-amount of counterpick stages for these characters. Some of them would do much better if WW or Castle Siege were still legal.

 

[Browny]

I wrote this (its long)

Spoiler

There has long been a fairly narrow, yet extremely strict criteria to ban a character used in all fighting games. The character must be over-centralising, and/or 'breaks' the game. I'll go into all of these in detail. If you actually care about the topic and have thoughts deeper than 'hoes mad' or 'zoom op ggnore', please let me know what you think if you read it all.

A character having RNG abilities has, as far as I know, never actually been a criteria applied to any character that would be banned in a fighting game. If this is the angle people want to take to apply a Hero ban fine, we will discuss it. But you need to be very honest and upfront about it. You are inventing a new, subjective criteria to ban a character, one which has absolutely no historical precedent despite there being tons of examples of characters with feature RNG elements. You are attempting to draw a line between what is as acceptable, and unacceptable level of RNG.

However If you start to define how much RNG a character has in terms of how many attacks feature it, that's a weak argument since that's arbitrary and completely subjective. If a G&W player doesn't use sideb once in a match, which is certainly not uncommon, the character effectively has no RNG at all. A hero main can simply choose never to use Hocus pocus in a match and now peach is more RNG than hero. In fact, Hero can have twice as much RNG as he does currently, it doesnt matter since attempting a limit a character on the instances of RNG is unprecedented and you have invented new rules explicitly for him. If that is your argument, you know must consider a peach player who obsessively pulls turnips and lets say pulls 2 bombs in a match. Is it possible that this would have a greater effect on the outcome of a match, than a typical Hero player will through their own RNG? It absolutely is. I'll get into the counterplay later, for now I'm just talking about the quantity of RNG used as an argument. There really is no value of 'too much' RNG that has ever been defined in fighting games, let alone smash. With Hero all I see is people not sure where to draw the line between 'too much' and 'acceptable' amounts of RNG, so they simply put hero on top of every character in history, put a line between them both and declare 'there, thats proof he has too much RNG'. If that seems like I'm grossly over-simplifying the argument, find me any evidence of a level of RNG being considered unacceptable in the past in smash. Literally one single element anywhere, because you can't. And that's why the line was drawn arbitrarily and instantly fails any objective ban criteria.
On the other side, how powerful the characters RNG is also irrelevant since the only time any consideration of how strong a character is in order to be worth of a ban, you now must fit the criteria of the character being over-centralising and clearly, Hero is no where close to fitting this bill. I see people trying to mix these 2 together and its intellectually dishonest. You can not have a non-banworthy amount of RNG mixed with a non-banworthy effectiveness of RNG to combine to make a banworthy character. This flies in the face of any objective, logic based approach, has never been applied before and is a classic case of fudging the hypothesis so you arrive at the conclusion you wanted. 2 + 2 does not = 5.

There is one and only one definition of whether something is competitive or not; Can people compete in an objective match that involves any sort of skill, where one is determine a winner and one is not. Whether anyone likes it or not, Rock paper scissors is competitive. 'Competitive' is not a spectrum where some sports are 'more competitive' than others. Its Binary, either competitive or not. This is often a hard concept for people to understand, but we have to deal with objective measures here. As soon as subjectivity comes into play, the pro-ban argument falls apart. Can you tell me whether NBA is more competitive than NFL? Is chess more competitive than synchronised diving? Is car racing more competitive than horse racing? Its impossible to define, so don't bother. And there are a ton of random elements in those sports, namely umpires and judges. You can absolutely play the exact same way with different referees and have different results. The referees themselves may not be random, but who actually referees, partially is. If you are a fan of cricket, you'll know just how potent and game changing this can be.

The two ways something can be defined as non-competitive; if it is legitimately violating the spirit of competition such as repeatedly pitching the ball at the batter in baseball in order to make the other player/team lose by preventing them from actually playing the game and by simply refusing to keep score so there is no objective measure of who won. Nothing else.

And I haven't even mentioned competitive card games yet.

RNG can not be talked about being 'anti competitive' when MtG and poker etc remain immensely popular, and highly competitive. If you want to argue that hero is anti-competitive because he is too random, I implore you to find your local card playing scene and lecture them all about how their game is anti-competitive because of the high random factor.

No aspect of Hocus Pocus changes this. We can consider a smash game where no items ever existed, and hocus pocus made hero big/small at random. It wouldn't be considered 'introducing items' because it would be just the same as shulks monado arts. When talking about bans, you have to consider every aspect of the character as a whole an how it interacts with the game in competition, no one cares what happens in casual play. Truly, him having the effects of items means absolutely nothing since Peach can do the exact same in melee and was never close to being talked about banned. I can't stress it enough, it is utterly irrelevant whether Hocus Pocus gives him the effects of items (Villager anyone?), what matters is whether this makes Hero fit the universal ban criteria. The issue with items is that the spawn of them is random, not that the items themselves are inherently broken. ZSS in brawl for example could 0-100 you with her items but it was predictable, so it was ok. Charging a smash and having a bomb spawn on you, or a star spawning on your enemies head is not. It was the randomness of the items that mattered. Has Hero getting item effects made him over-centralising or does he fundamentally break the game? No, this argument is over. Once again, 2 + 2 does not = 5.

Another common argument on this line of thought is that his RNG has no counterplay, a hero can mash down b to which you can not possibly react, or even predict. Same for his critical hits. This argument actually has some merit whereas the other arguments are weak, so lets go into this one.

The argument is often if you are aware that a G&W can use judgement, you will actively play around it. If you are concerned peach will pull a bomb, don't give her time to pull them and even if she does, you can react to the pull, and predict the throw. With hero though, you can be at 30% and playing neutral fairly aggressively, then you die to an uncharged critical upsmash. Is it fair that you have to be playing with the fear of losing your stock for any % greater than 30? Ganondorf says hi. Once again, the fact that your fear of losing your stock at 30% is entirely RNG is 2 separate issues, the two do not combine to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. It is fair that you can be afraid of losing your stock at 30%. It is fair that you can lose your stock at 30% to RNG. If you seek to ban the unique combination of those 2 you are engaging in an incredibly subjective argument where you are drawing the line of whats bannable and what is not exactly where Hero lies currently because you don't like it, and not based on any objective measure of an acceptable % of it happening vs an acceptable % for you to lose a stock at. If that is your argument, fine. Just admit it. But if you can't draw an exact line of the acceptable %'s of both, then you are admitting you are engaging in a subjective ban that you only invented to apply to Hero. Its ok to come up with new criteria, but it must be defined, that's extremely important in case Banjo comes out and also features RNG elements, we need a measure of what is acceptable and what isn't.

Mashing downb is called 'top decking' which ironically is the phrase used in card games and how a truly random pull can sometimes put one player in an unstoppable position, or completely lose the set for them. This is not uncommon. Go back a bit though, lets consider the pokemon TCG. Its entirely possible that in the first turn to start the game, one player can win and one can lose if the player going first did not draw more than 1 pokemon. This is considered a perfectly acceptable level of RNG, one which the losing player has absolutely no counterplay. They are at the mercy of RNG on the other players deck. Obviously the idea here is that there is significant skill involved in maximising your chances of getting good RNG.

There are decks which deliberately discard and 'KO' as many cards as possible so the cards they do want are more likely to appear in a 'thinner' deck. It has ceased to be RNG, and is now almost entirely skill based. So if this is acceptable, lets look at hero. Clearly there is actually nothing hero can do in order to improve the RNG of him getting a good spell, so that's not considered. We aren't talking about hero here though, we are talking about the counterplay as I've already explained, the RNG on heros side is absolutely not banworthy.

So what can the opponent do to minimise the likelihood that Hero gets 'good' RNG against them, to which they have no counterplay? Truly if the answer to this question was 'nothing' then this would be the strongest argument to ban hero. But it isn't. In card games for example there are always 'disruptor' cards if you suspect the enemy is setting up something. Lets consider hero recovering. If you stand on the edge and do exactly nothing to pressure Heros bad recovery, you are going to give hero multiple chances to cycle through downb and find zoom. If you actually charge after him offstage, you have reduced the likelihood of him getting 'good' RNG. It is irrelevant how slow your character is, that's a matchup problem. The fact is characters do have abilities to limit Hero getting good RNG. Similarly if you are a character with a slow recovery, hero can sit on the ledge and just press downb until he gets magic burst and you have no counterplay. Except you did, at the character select screen. Yoshi for example doesn't care one single bit about magic burst. For as long as Snake exists, the argument of there being no counterplay to Heros edgeguarding is weak. There are characters who completely nullify his edgeguarding, and can go after him before he can zoom. There is a counterplay to limit his ability to get good RNG, this is absolutely not a banworthy case.

So the only argument really left is whether or not playing against hero breaks the game by virtue of upsets happening at a drastically higher level than normal. If you have player A and B who go 80:20 in 100 matches, but when both players use hero, it goes 50:50, then you have a point. If player B uses hero while player A does not and it goes to 50:50 that doesn't matter, perhaps he is just top tier, not banworthy since the other player can use him too. If Hero's RNG is actually busted good, then theoretically the good player should benefit from it just as much, and the ratio will stay at 80:20. If his RNG is incredibly random, but not actually breaking the game in the results screen, then hes fine. This is one of the weakest possible arguments one could take to ban Hero as it requires a huge burden of proof that even if reached, would require some sort of precedent on banning characters that allow new players to win more easily yet top players can't. Its almost impossible to imagine such a scenario.

In conclusion, a hero ban is totally unwarranted by historical measures. The combination of RNG and the effectiveness of RNG is not, and never will be a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. Anti-competitive arguments fly in the face of countless other competitive games which feature similar issues with limited counterplay. Hero might have extremely good options that dominate all of a characters options, but he doesn't have them all the time and you absolutely do have counterplay options at the character select screen. Certain characters will have an absolutely terrible time dealing with his offstage game, that is a matchup issue. MK vs the entire brawl cast. Hero may prove over time to routinely be a problem and causing too many upsets, but that implies that only 'bad' players will benefit from his RNG while good players will lose to it. Unless proof of that is obtained, any ban made is purely an emotional argument that features no objective standards.

As it seems we haven't properly put the pro-ban siders to bed and they're still trying. I don't like their intellectually dishonest arguments where their line of what is banworthy and what isn't lies exactly where Hero is in their mind, as if that is some sort of objective standard.

 

[Big O]

Suggestion: Don't.

I'm leaning towards making it infractable to complain about buffs/nerfs, and to complain about people complaining about buffs/nerfs. The horse is dead.

Join me on the superior bigger brain level of complaining about people who complain about people who... Or go biggest brain and actually talk about the game.

----------

So my wife is talking about going to Genesis, and spending money on a national means I probably need to be responsible and actually pick a main; I invite you to indulge the narcissism of my story.

I mained Jigglypuff in melee, because I liked aggression and melee Jigglypuff was a very aggressive character in 2007. My timing was bad and my spacing was good, so Jigglypuff fit well.

My focus on spacing made me thrive in Brawl, where I continued playing puff and was the top player in St. Louis for a few years. Brawl Jigglypuff sucked, but had a surprisingly workable matchup against MK and actually countered Diddy pretty hard. I found that I could rely on matchup inexperience against many of her counters. Over time, I started using Ness or Squirtle in her very worst matchups, and twice I used Ganon as a successful personality cp.

When me and Amazing Ampharos made BBrawl, the process required learning a lot of additional characters at a level close to my puff. My Ganon got better, I had to learn Lucas, and I got proficient with people ranging from Bowser to Sheik. (I even had a good ICs by the end, but that character doesn't translate across games well.)

I ended Brawl being about equally good with 6-8 characters, and Smash 4 only made things worse. I broke top 100 at EVO with a mix of Ness and Mac, but also was playing WFT/Palu and picking up DH. DH might have been my best by the end? I stopped attending nationals and spent most of my smash time playing people who were worse than me, and started playing Doc as a slight handicap. Eventually, Doc ended up being roughly as good as my others--way better than my Mario at least. I gradually picked up Robin, Mewtwo, and Corrin in the same way.

Then Ultimate came out and things have devolved into sort of a mess. I focused mostly on the true newcomers, and ended up getting good with random people like Samus too. We're to the point where I play about half the roster at the same level, very unfocused.

(My wife: "GEE, IT'S TOO BAD THERE'S NOT A TOP TIER CHARACTER WHO REWARDS PLAYING DIVERSE PLAYSTYLES. C'MON, HOW IS THIS HARD???")

Yeah yeah, I should probably be primarily playing PT. I do really enjoy the character!

So now I'm focusing on who I want to perserve as secondaries, for specific matchups.

is Ness, with all the good and bad matchups that implies. He'd be nice to train up as a response to Pikachu and PT, and I might prefer him for Wolf?
is fine against Ness and Snake, and A+ vs. Lucas/Plant/Belmonts/KRool/WFT/Ridley in case anyone ever decides those characters exist. Nice against Link and ROB too. She is also supposedly good against Peach??? (In 3.1 Samsora listed Villager as a counter and Isabelle even) I pick her in Squad Strike a lot and she is almost always the unexpected MVP. I have put zero time into this character and am baffled at my performance with her.
is a good character who seems to generally have opposite matchup affinities as PT--he likes fighting slower characters and usually doesn't care what they are trying to do to him from a distance. Certain opponents really have trouble dealing with the unusual cognative load of fighting DH.
is my best overall doubles character. I actually like the Pikachu matchup, even though the 0% part is rough. Wolf, Palu, Chrom too. He generally has the same worst matchups as PT though, so he doesn't bring much to the table as a secondary.

I don't see a place for. He's underrated but the characters he is solid against are rare, maybe I'd use him vs. Palutena? (But PT does fine against Palu, without such extreme stage preferences.) I might keep him around as a personality cp against players who are too greedy with their punishes.
Similar case. How many ICs, Samus, Isabelle, and Mac players are out there?
I'm not sure I could commit to fully. But he does have very attractive matchup spreads that perfectly compliment Ness.

I'm currently leaning towards +. I think they cover... pretty much everyone? Not sure how much value there is in maintaining for what would be primarily personality-based counter-picking.

If you really are trying to focus on maximizing your chances of winning, just pick a top tier (NSFW language), even for secondaries. Even though it seems like you've settled on PT as a main (which is a good call), I don't see much point in having Isabelle as a secondary based on actual potency against the meta. She could be a sleeper anti-meta pick, but if she were there'd probably be some kind of data to support it. Even if she were, I doubt you wouldn't get equal or better results with any top tier you happen to mesh with. I'm not sure PT really needs a secondary, but I'd suggest easy to use powerhouses like Wolf or Lucina instead. Maybe Peach or Snake if you mesh with their quirks well enough.

 

[ZephyrZ]

Doesn’t sound like a good reason to me still.

“Whenever Arsene comes out, it equals an instant KO” sounds like one. Yours doesn’t.

Good, and broken to the point of game breaking, are different things. People keep confusing the two.

If people had their way, everyone would be nerfed into mediocrity.

If it's not completely and utterly game breaking then it's not overtuned? You don't have to be completely OP to fall outside of the game's main balance curve.

Look I really don't like nerf culture either. It's not healthy for the community to just cry for nerfs when they could be focusing on improving their counterplay.

But I think in a word where patches exist and balance will never be 100% perfect, some nerfs are sometimes going to be an inevitability, and it's unhealthy to stress too much over them. If Joker ends up with a light slap on the wrist that barely hurts his viability I hope you don't freak out over it.

And to make things clear, I'm not crying for Joker nerfs. They could leave the game as is without ever introducing a balance patch again and I'll be 100% okay with that. But I do think you should probably prepare yourself for the reality that he's probably going to get some adjustments eventually.

 

[Kokiden]

If it's not completely and utterly game breaking then it's not overtuned? You don't have to be completely OP to fall outside of the game's main balance curve.

Look I really don't like nerf culture either. It's not healthy for the community to just cry for nerfs when they could be focusing on improving their counterplay.

But I think in a word where patches exist and balance will never be 100% perfect, some nerfs are sometimes going to be an inevitability, and it's unhealthy to stress too much over them. If Joker ends up with a light slap on the wrist that barely hurts his viability I hope you don't freak out over it.

And to make things clear, I'm not crying for Joker nerfs. They could leave the game as is without ever introducing a balance patch again and I'll be 100% okay with that. But I do think you should probably prepare yourself for the reality that he's probably going to get some adjustments eventually.

Joker’s getting nerfed. I know.

That much is inevitable with how eager people are crying out loudly to make it happen.

That group of people don’t even care about balance. They just want to see a character they don’t like nerfed so they can laugh. If they did care, they wouldn’t have been overjoyed when Olimar and Pichu got hit. There’s another user on another site who I saw post this, and I agree with them.

I just hate how the balance team happily oblige that group of people.

People would rather nerfs dumb down good characters so they don’t have to learn MU’s, and getting good at the game properly, and that, I think, hurts the game more than anything.

Rewarding spiteful behaviour and breaking down a good character at the same time... It’s destructive.

It fosters a trained behaviour of people actively seeking out things to nerf.

 

[Nekoo]

People thinking that Joker need a nerf truly don't realized that more and more players seems to figure out how to beat him when you see that MkLeo pull more and more clutches and drop more and more games.

Also, let's not compare Arsene to Olimar's Pikmin Smash that had and almost still have virtually no lag. Or Pichu's old F-tilt being spammable while killing at 70% casually almost always 2-framing.
Or Ivysaur's Down-air killing anyone past 20% before who's not called Arsene? (And I believe what they nerfed isn't enough. A Hitbox size reduction should have been the answer not just a sweetspot reduction)

Arsene is... sliiiightly overturned. Perhaps slap on the wrist with a tiny knockback change on the B-air could happens or his Tetrakarn. But I don't see him getting touched much.

If Joker truly needed a nerf, he would be VERY much more prominent at top level. That's how a meta work and how it always worked. When in smash 4, Diddy and Sheik were unstoppable, we saw them spawn everywhere. When Bayo and Cloud were out? Same deal.
But Joker? Not at all.

He just went and took his place in the meta, with one player, arguably the best in the world, and already winning tournament left and right taking him and winning MORE tournament, but beside him? The top 8 is as diverse as ever, so is the top 128. You see more Ness or Wolf or Snake in top 128 than Joker's. But hey, if one Joker win it all, it means he's broken/s

But does that mean he's broken? No.
Does that mean MKLeo carry the Character? Not really.

It just happened that Joker fits MKLeo's mentality perfectly that he fits him like a glove and make his strong point shine.

Let the game and meta evolve before crying and complaining about nerfs and buffs.

 

[ZephyrZ]

Joker’s getting nerfed. I know.

That much is inevitable with how eager people are crying out loudly to make it happen.

That group of people don’t even care about balance. They just want to see a character they don’t like nerfed so they can laugh. If they did care, they wouldn’t have been overjoyed when Olimar and Pichu got hit. There’s another user on another site who I saw post this, and I agree with them.

I just hate how the balance team happily oblige that group of people.

People would rather nerfs dumb down good characters so they don’t have to learn MU’s, and getting good at the game properly, and that, I think, hurts the game more than anything.

Rewarding spiteful behaviour and breaking down a good character at the same time... It’s destructive.

It fosters a trained behaviour of people actively seeking out things to nerf.

You just brushed off my main points and just repeated yourself. I'm not entirely sure how I'm supposed to respond to that.

Are you okay? I get the impression you're really stressing out over this.
Not every nerfs happens just because of angry fans, and bringing them up constantly just adds to the drama. Let's put that aside for now.

But does that mean he's broken? No.
Does that mean MKLeo carry the Character? Not really.

Remind me: again, who in this thread is saying Joker is broken exactly? Is anyone here claiming he's carrying MKLeo at all?

There's a difference about speculating what type of nerfs are likely or reasonable and screaming for nerfs. No one here thinks that Joker is terribly broken.

 

[Nekoo]

Remind me: again, who in this thread is saying Joker is broken exactly? Is anyone here claiming he's carrying MKLeo at all?

There's a difference about speculating what type of nerfs are likely or reasonable and screaming for nerfs. No one here thinks that Joker is terribly broken.

I'm talking about the subject of Joker's nerf or if it's warranted in general, with the perception not only of this thread but the general "outcry" that can be seen everywhere else in the community (because surprisingly the community goes beyond this thread, even if this thread is the rare place where a civil discussion can be made.)

Taking a single point on my post isn't really doing good y'know.

 

[Minordeth]

Thinkaman -

+ seems to cover most of the meta relevant MUs I can think of with maybe being the exception.

Like I said earlier, I haven’t checked for updated impressions on the buffs in this regard.

Edit: you should use specifically for money matches. Come on, now. Very rare MU + stupid power = quick $$.

 

[ZephyrZ]

I'm talking about the subject of Joker's nerf or if it's warranted in general, with the perception not only of this thread but the general "outcry" that can be seen everywhere else in the community (because surprisingly the community goes beyond this thread, even if this thread is the rare place where a civil discussion can be made.)

Taking a single point on my post isn't really doing good y'know.

I quoted that one specific part because it seemed to be your main point. I figured there was no need to dissect your post if I wasn't disagreeing with it. I was just pointing out that the topic came out of no where and it's kind of beating a dead horse at this point. Who are you trying to convince?

But if I must address some of your other points,

Also, let's not compare Arsene to Olimar's Pikmin Smash that had and almost still have virtually no lag. Or Pichu's old F-tilt being spammable while killing at 70% casually almost always 2-framing.
Or Ivysaur's Down-air killing anyone past 20% before who's not called Arsene? (And I believe what they nerfed isn't enough. A Hitbox size reduction should have been the answer not just a sweetspot reduction)

This is funny to me because multiple Ivysaur players in one of the discords I used complained that Ivysaur's already laggy Dair got nerfed when characters like Olimar and Joker are out there. And while I wasn't in their discord when it happened, I'll bet that when Olimar got his Up Smash nerf, there were Olimar mains complaining that Ivy's Dair didn't get nerfed instead. Perspective sure is a funny thing.

That said, calling attention to potentially larger issues (if they're even worse at all, which is highly debatable) doesn't make the original presented issue any smaller. It's the old "appeal to worse problems" fallacy.

If Joker truly needed a nerf, he would be VERY much more prominent at top level. That's how a meta work and how it always worked. When in smash 4, Diddy and Sheik were unstoppable, we saw them spawn everywhere. When Bayo and Cloud were out? Same deal.
But Joker? Not at all.

Same with this point. Also an appeal to worse problems.
Which is also funny because neither Ivysaur nor Olimar are as nearly as bad as Smash 4 Diddy/Shiek/Cloud/Bayo either, yet you still advocated for Ivysaur nerfs. Was Ivysaur truly in need of a nerf or not? (Note: I think the Ivy getting nerfed was fair).

(Also worth noting that the knockback on the sour spot on Dair got nerfed as well, so it is harder to kill early with that move. Just in case you weren't aware).

Arsene is... sliiiightly overturned. Perhaps slap on the wrist with a tiny knockback change on the B-air could happens or his Tetrakarn. But I don't see him getting touched much.

I could see him getting something slightly worse then that but I am in agreement that he probably won't get anything too bad. Whatever happens I don't see a character with a kit that good falling outside of "high tier" range any time soon though.

But that's mostly because light slaps on the wrist seems to have thankfully been their preferred method of nerfing so far, unless your name is Pichu. Which makes it sillier when people freak out over nerfs.

 

[Envoy of Chaos]

Joker’s getting nerfed. I know.

That much is inevitable with how eager people are crying out loudly to make it happen.

That group of people don’t even care about balance. They just want to see a character they don’t like nerfed so they can laugh. If they did care, they wouldn’t have been overjoyed when Olimar and Pichu got hit. There’s another user on another site who I saw post this, and I agree with them.

I just hate how the balance team happily oblige that group of people.

People would rather nerfs dumb down good characters so they don’t have to learn MU’s, and getting good at the game properly, and that, I think, hurts the game more than anything.

Rewarding spiteful behaviour and breaking down a good character at the same time... It’s destructive.

It fosters a trained behaviour of people actively seeking out things to nerf.

I can only imagine this is coming from Reddit and Twitch Chat two places where a large majority of the user base is low level/casual or non competitors/non players because no one else who can actually provide somewhat knowledgeable analysis of the character is whining for hard nerfs (some sort nerfs sure and personally I think a few are warranted but not absolutely needed.) A thing you need to realize is the development team and any competent developer at that don’t make major balance changes because of the rantings of people who don’t even understand what they are ranting about. I know that elite smash thing is out there but they look at more than just elite smash, hell the version they are playing on is likely 6.0 by this point, they aren’t making changes overnight because of what happens at this very moment.

This isn’t Sakurai’s first smash game nor many of the developers. They use top level Japanese talent to help play test the game, and so far they’ve done an overall stellar job with character adjustments with only a few questionable decisions (Olimar’s shield) and there is no reason to think they won’t make reasonable changes, if they even make any changes at all.

A character winning a tournament isn’t a signal to nerf the character and everyone should get this out of their head.

 

[Arthur97]

I can only imagine this is coming from Reddit and Twitch Chat two places where a large majority of the user base is low level/casual or non competitors/non players because no one else who can actually provide somewhat knowledgeable analysis of the character is whining for hard nerfs (some sort nerfs sure and personally I think a few are warranted but not absolutely needed.) A thing you need to realize is the development team and any competent developer at that don’t make major balance changes because of the rantings of people who don’t even understand what they are ranting about. I know that elite smash thing is out there but they look at more than just elite smash, hell the version they are playing on is likely 6.0 by this point, they aren’t making changes overnight because of what happens at this very moment.

This isn’t Sakurai’s first smash game nor many of the developers. They use top level Japanese talent to help play test the game, and so far they’ve done an overall stellar job with character adjustments with only a few questionable decisions (Olimar’s shield) and there is no reason to think they won’t make changes, if they even make any changes at all.

A character winning a tournament isn’t a signal to nerf the character and everyone should get this out of their head.

Olimar's shield seems like a bug. The only questionable part to me seems that it hasn't been fixed.

 

[Kokiden]

You just brushed off my main points and just repeated yourself. I'm not entirely sure how I'm supposed to respond to that.

Are you okay? I get the impression you're really stressing out over this.
Not every nerfs happens just because of angry fans, and bringing them up constantly just adds to the drama. Let's put that aside for now.

Bad day, on top of getting crap about this on other sites.

It’s not the game or the upcoming nerf that is getting to me, it’s the people.

It’s aggravating when swarms of people respond with stuff like “LOL keep crying Joker main he’s gonna get nerfed” or “You play Bayo too right? You don’t deserve an opinion.” Let’s not forget “You just want to keep on getting carried. **** off already.”

Normally I brush off this stuff but today was just one of those days.

Smash community has a lot of assholes. What can I say?

Of course there’s good people too, but the amount of assholes is kinda overwhelming at times. Sometimes it makes me just wanna step away from the game itself.

I know Lima had to step away for awhile because he got mass hate. Can’t say I blame the guy and I understand his feeling on the matter too.

I’ve seen how Myran is treated too, and although I’m not a fan of Olimar or some of his opinions, he’s still a great player (and guy too going by fan accounts after meeting him), but some of the fanbase just absolutely **** on the guy just because of the character he uses.

Kinda ranting so maybe I’ll stop. Sorry.

I can only imagine this is coming from Reddit and Twitch Chat two places where a large majority of the user base is low level/casual or non competitors/non players because no one else who can actually provide somewhat knowledgeable analysis of the character is whining for hard nerfs (some sort nerfs sure and personally I think a few are warranted but not absolutely needed.)

One thing I don’t like about reddit is the downvoting and upvoting system.

That more than anything reinforces that hivemind mentality I find.

 

[Envoy of Chaos]

Bad day, on top of getting crap about this on other sites.

It’s not the game or the upcoming nerf that is getting to me, it’s the people.

It’s aggravating when swarms of people respond with stuff like “LOL keep crying Joker main he’s gonna get nerfed” and “You play Bayo too right? You don’t deserve an opinion.”

Smash community has a lot of ********. What can I say?

Of course there’s good people too, but the amount of ******** is kinda overwhelming at times. Sometimes it makes me just wanna step away from the game itself.

I know Lima had to step away for awhile because he got mass hate. Can’t say I blame the guy and I understand his feeling on the matter too.




One thing I don’t like about reddit is the downvoting and upvoting system.

That more than anything reinforces that hivemind mentality I find.

Like I said before, the opinions of stream monsters, trolls and quite frankly idiots don’t matter because they don’t come from a place of logic and reason and only exist to annoying and anger and you really shouldn’t be paying them any attention. If your goal is to be widely liked then sure maybe using a good character isn’t the best way to go about that but if your actually trying to be competitive then no, who cares, use what you think gives you the best chance. Also consider not using or frequenting places your going to see this stuff occurring if your not able to laugh it off or ignore it.

 

[Deathcarter]

Funnily enough, the biggest worry for me over potential Joker nerfs has less to due with a fear of Joker getting straight gutted in a kneejerk response to online negativity or thinking that Arsene doesn't deserve nerfs at all and more a nerf targeted specifically to fair 1/drag down uair as kill confirms (which from what I read even the hate mob doesn't really complain about that much) which could potentially gut base Joker who I actually like. I'm definitely of the belief that those confirms weren't anticipated by the dev team and the dev team might very well do to Joker what they did to ZSS/Meta Knight after Sakurai witnessed that one match between Nairo and Abadango back in the Smash 4 days.

My dislike for Joker stems entirely from Arsene which I think its a BS mechanic in general ala Lucario's Aura and I would think it was BS even if was on a bad character like Kirby.

 

[Kokiden]

Like I said before, the opinions of stream monsters, trolls and quite frankly idiots don’t matter because they don’t come from a place of logic and reason and only exist to annoying and anger and you really shouldn’t be paying them any attention. If your goal is to be widely liked then sure maybe using a good character isn’t the best way to go about that but if your actually trying to be competitive then no, who cares, use what you think gives you the best chance. Also consider not using or frequenting places your going to see this stuff occurring if your not able to laugh it off or ignore it.

I’m still going to use Bayonetta and Joker because I really like those characters and can’t see myself using anyone else, so I won’t be winning popularity contests anytime soon lol.

You’re right. Just one of those off days. I’ll avoid frequenting those places too in general even after I’m fine again.

Just disappointing people can be like that is all.

 

[Frihetsanka]

I wrote this (its long)

Interesting read, though there are some flaws in your argumentation.

Spoiler

Hero is, as far as I know, by far the most RNG-reliant fighting game character ever. It's fairly obvious that RNG can be a ground for banning a character. Hypothetical example: Let's assume a new character, Gambler, is released as DLC. All Gambler's specials are RNG, you will randomly get one out of fifteen neutral-specials, up-specials, side-specials, and down-specials. All of his normal attacks have a 20% chance to do double damage and kill much earlier (aside from his jab, which only has increased damage, not knockback). His up-throw has a 30% chance to kill at 120%, otherwise it kills at 150%. Gambler ends up being a top 10 character, not overpowered but still strong enough to be worthwhile. RNG often plays a significant role in how his games end up, though. Is this character banworthy? Obviously so, I would argue. As such, it would seem that RNG can be a reason to ban a character. Whether Hero's RNG is bad enough to warrant a ban can be argued, but RNG can warrant a band.

Regarding "If Hero doesn't use Hocus Pocus Peach has more RNG", I believe this to be factually false. Hero's down-B introduced more RNG, in general, than Peach's down-B, and his Smashes add to it. In general, Peach's down-B has a small chance to allow RNG to affect the course of the match, while Hero's down-B has a significant chance, and Smashes increase it even further. Hero's level of RNG is generally far higher than Peach's. There are reasons you've probably never heard anyone asking for a Peach ban, while you've heard plenty of people asking for a Hero ban.

As far as RNG being unacceptable in the past, randomly spawned items and certain stages come to mind. Also, if it were possible to toggle tripping off in Brawl it's almost guaranteed that it would have been turned off. I imagine if there were a mechanic that randomly gave you a power-up it would've also been turned off. You even admit as much yourself: The issue with items is that the spawn of them is random, not that the items themselves are inherently broken.

How powerful the RNG is certainly relevant to the discussion, since it matters practically whether RNG is likely to affect the outcome of the matches or not. If Hero's down-B was mostly bad then he'd be less likely to use it and thus RNG would be less likely to affect the outcome of matches. If crits did 5% more damage they'd matter much less too.

Your definition of "competitive" is interesting. You're certainly free to stipulate your own definition, but it's mostly a matter of semantics. People who argue that Hero is anti-competitive don't use your definition of competitive, and trying to re-define the word probably won't convince anyway. I imagine most people would agree that Chess is more competitive than Monopoly or Rock-Paper-Scissors, yet it's certainly possible to play competitive Monopoly and competitive Rock-Paper-Scissors. Ultimately, how much RNG is acceptable in each game varies from game to game. A card game will have a much higher tolerance for RNG than a fighting game, for instance, which is my issue with your comparison with Magic the Gathering and poker: Smash isn't and shouldn't be MtG or poker. People might disagree but many believe fighting games should be between two people's skill, where stage RNG and character RNG and random item drop RNG are non-existent or limited. Different games have different levels of acceptance for RNG though, competitive Mario Kart certainly accepts more than competitive Gran Turismo.

You've mentioned several times that we need to draw an exact line, but this is false: The question isn't "Where do we draw the line" but "Has Hero passed it?". Many proponents of a Hero-ban think he isn't very close to the line at all, so even if we can't draw an exact line we can see that he's passed it by quite a bit. Can you draw an exact line where a character is too strong and should be banned? Probably not, yet it's easy to imagine characters that clearly fit this criteria.

Pokémon Trading Card Game is atrocious (in my opinion) as a competitive game and relies far too much on luck. It's fun to play casually but I don't think I could ever get into it competitively. If Smash ever turned to Pokémon Trading Card Game I would quit tournaments for sure. Anyway, obviously people have different levels of what degree of RNG they consider acceptable (there are Rock-Paper-Scissor tournaments, after all). Our question is: What's acceptable for Smash Ultimate, and has Hero passed it?

Regarding the Zoom argument, it's flawed because you make a significant risk by going off-stage, since he could get Zoom and then ledgetrap you. The counter-play to Zoom is to edgeguard safely, I suppose, preferably with projectiles if you can. Or you risk it and hope he doesn't get Zoom, in which case it's RNG-reliant if you win or not (in many cases, at least).

As for the RNG argument ("the other player could use him too"), the argument is that skill should be the deciding factor, not RNG. If games are decided by whoever gets lucky/unlucky then that violates the spirit of competitive Smash, doesn't it? We don't accept games being decided by RNG item spawns, and Hero's RNG can certainly change the outcome of games.

Hero is a new case, a character whose RNG level is arguably more similar to item spawns than to other character (and random items are banned). Anti-competitive arguments are relevant because we're talking about it in the context of Smash Ultimate, adding RNG effects to Chess would also be anti-competitive in the context of Chess.

As for Hero being exactly on the line, I don't think that's the pro-side's argument, most seem to think he passes it by quite some margin. Some other DLC character might be more of a borderline case, but Hero does not seem to be.