Btw, there is a character I want talk about right now, which is
.
The character has recently fallen off quite a bit, especially since the release of the game. It seemed to be the mid tier, and easily the best of the three Miis. However as time goes on, the Swordfighter's results and reps have fallen down dramatically, and Mii Brawler is slowly stealing the mid tier spot Mii Sword once had (although that said character is still not quite there yet).
So I did some research, playtesting, and gathering to find out why this character has been falling off the map lately.
As I mentioned earlier when I mentioned Young Link, Mii Sword has one of the shortest reaches of a sword character. However, unlike Young Link, he lacks mobility or frame data to compensate.
Mii Swordfighter has the 64th fastest run speed, and one of the slowest initial dash (not as slow as Mii Gunner, but still slow). It's air acceleration is not too great either, being the 55th-62nd fastest (tied with Young Link interestingly). It's air speed is thankfully much better, being the 18th fastest in the game, which is much faster than Young Link's. However, you will soon learn later that this is overshadowed by numerous other issues in the air.
Its ground moves aren't really anything special, either plagued with laughably short/thin hitboxes, by being sluggish, or both. Down tilt and up tilt are the more interesting ones, but the former has a lot of endlag and comboing off the latter can be awkward sometimes. Up smash seems good, but it has issues hitting low-profile opponents, especially behind it.
Its air moves is where the character truly struggles. On one hand, they seem great! Neutral air covers all around him, forward and up air are two of the only moves that has good hitboxes, and back air seems alright overall as a move.
However, they are plagued by some fatal flaws. Here is one that plagues all of his aerials:
THEY ALL HAVE 10+ FRAMES OF STARTUP!
Neutral and back air is 10 frames. Up air is 11 frames. Forward air is 12 frames. Down air is 14 frames.
At least Shulk has range and Arts to help alleviate his own sluggish startup issues. Mii Swordfighter does not.
- Neutral air is also plagued by having the hitbox that properly covers on-front and below him appear so slow after the move comes out (which is already slow), combined with it's laughably short reach makes it rather unreliable, especially when compared to Mii Gunner's nair which is Swordfighter's but better.
- Forward air comes out very slow, has 12 frames of landing lag, and has the unfortunate quality of being a multi-hit aerial (aka it sometimes drops). So despite being one of the only sword buttons from this character that has decent range, it's issues still puts it in disadvantage.
- Back air is its only good aerial to throw out in the neutral, but it still has short reach and comes out slow.
- Down air is awful though. It's spike knockback got nerfed heavily from SSB4, and it is very slow as an attack. At least with Kirby's down air, it is fast enough to potentially be used again and is attached to a multi-jump character.
Up air, however, is pretty good, and one of Swordfighter's stand-out moves despite how slow it starts out. However, that is the main issue with Swordfighter: the character is similar to SSB4 Palutena in that the character is a bag of lackluster moves and only abusing a few really good moves. There is up air, and then there is Gale Strike and Chakram.
Speaking of which, there is only one custom set for Mii Swordfighter really worth using: Gale Strike, Chakram, Hero's Spin (sometimes Skyward Slash Dash if you want recovery), Reversal Slash.
All of other Swordfighter custom moves are either lackluster or not worth using in comparison to the ones mentioned above.
Each of these moves are good, but has their flaws.
- Gale Strike comes out at frame 20 and travels slowly. An easily reactable projectile. It is only threatening at the ledge, because it can hit most characters at the ledge, but with matchup experience can be overcome.
- Hero's Spin is most Swordfighter's preferred custom move, because it is a kill confirm off of Gale Strike. The issue is that it sometimes randomly fails to connect in the air. Grounded Hero's Spin isn't even that strong (at least in comparison to Link's and TLink's up B). Due to this, and Gale Strike being able to confirm into up air, more and more Swordfighter players (at least the little players I can find) is starting to switch to Skyward Slash Dash, which is a more consistent recovery move, as aerial Hero's Spin is not that good of a recovery move.
- Chakram is probably Swordfighter's best move, as it can zone with the faraway version and can combo with the close up version. The issue is that shielding the faraway version makes the Chakram stick to the ground for a long time, becoming unavailable until it despawns. The close-up version, after launching forward and returning, stays active for a long time as it moves back, which prevents Swordfighter from being able to use it again until it despawns. Doesn't entirely help that both Chakram and Gale Strike got their range greatly nerfed at patch 1.1.0 (they both used to cover all of Final Destination, but now both only travels half of it) and shield damage nerfed at 3.0.0.
- Reversal Slash is simply Mario's Cape assigned to a down special. Nothing more, nothing less, which is fine.
This brings up the main issue with Swordfighter once again: it focuses on using a small selection of great moves, which as a result makes the character predictable. The Gale Strike into Hero's Spin combo, once feared in the early days, is now passed on even by some Swordfighter players themselves as a gimmick.
I also found Swordfighter players to be very rare nowadays. Tsu barely plays the character anymore, Anonymous Moniker isn't very active and doesn't too well outside of locals, Pokecheese is even more rare in terms of attendance, and Ntarps dropped him for Simon and Young Link (on top of not being very active). The best Swordfighter has done as far as I can tell is Pokecheese getting 25th at GOML 2019, but that was almost a year ago.
In comparison, Brawler, while being rare itself, has more reps and more results, while Gunner is even more rare but has at least achieved more niche results than Swordfighter. This is reflected in OrionStats right now, as Swordfighter currently has the 3rd worst results out of the entire cast, only having 1 point.
So yeah, today's metagame is not kind to Swordfighter whatsoever, and has joined the Dedede and Belmont school of mid tiers falling off the map.
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Btw, I still have no idea why the ICs continue to be this glitchy, especially considering that Brawl ICs doesn't have that many notable glitches with them.
This is 2020 for crying out loud!
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Unofficial scrubby user tier lists?
In this topic?
Well, why not, I think most tier-lists looks fairly similar at this point.
Making such things is actually really though, especially in the ordered parts. Not so much in the upper tiers but the lower-tiers are really hard to do because there is still a "random" placement that comes to mind but these are really limited. So I just discarded the "ordered" part for the majority and only did it for the highest and lowest tier.
Anyway, I think we have more decent to good characters than bad characters (starting at D-tier).
And yeah, S+ may sound odd but I think it's even more odd to call someone like Wario an A-tier character then.
Something less fun, so back to "serious" business:
SmashResultsEU made a list of its 50th best players in Europe (Europe Smash Ranking):
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Top 10 in more details as some secondaries aren't shown but every player's card can be seen at the Twitter account above:
1. Glutonny
2. quiK
3. Space
4. Mr. R
5. Meru
6. S1
7. Oryon
8. Flow
9. Light
10. Homika
You forgot
in your tier list.
Anyways, it is cool to see the European scene get their PR rankings much earlier in the metagame than they did in SSB4.
It is also kind of amusing that the three top
players are also ranked directly next to eachother.
Maister's new tier list. I reckon we'll see a lot more matchup charts and tier lists now considering there's not going to be tourney's for a while.
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He did say that he ranks them off of what he believes is the character's potential instead of results, so there are some odd placements.
The biggest ones being
in high tier and
in low tier.
He and ESAM seems to be big believers in Puff's viability despite the character's obvious shortcomings and lack of results.
I actually sort of agree with the ranking of
. I think it's partially influenced by Maister being a
main, but I feel like most characters can abuse Falcon really badly in disadvantage and offstage, something G&W is great at, which is why Maister probably put him that low. That being said, I feel like he probably shouldn't be below characters like
and
who share a lot of Falcon's weaknesses (predictable recovery, easy to abuse in disadvantage, combo food) while being slower and having less options overall than him.
Except Falcon being very abusable in disadvantage has been a character trait of his since his introduction in 64, and his disadvantage was even worse back then. Despite that, Falcon managed to be viable high tiered characters in 64, Melee, and SSB4 despite these shortcomings.
While I don't think Falcon is high tier in this game, having a poor disadvantage alone isn't going to make the character low tier, especially since he still has the mobility, the combo game, and the KO power to help compensate for it.
Definitely not low tier imo, especially since he has some capable results to his credit.
