Official Competitive Character Impressions 2.0

[toonito]

Sheik wasn't even too bad in Brawl, she just got chain grabbed by too many characters I recall.

But she's looking promising, that's for sure. Not sure she's gonna be good in every Smash game, we said that about Marth too, and well... Look how that turned out.

Fox and Pikachu seem to be the only 2 characters that are good in every Smash game

 

[The_Bookworm]

I feel like Sheik will just always be good in every Smash game except Brawl. Thoughts on Sheik?

Sheik wasn't even too bad in Brawl, she just got chain grabbed by too many characters I recall.

But she's looking promising, that's for sure. Not sure she's gonna be good in every Smash game, we said that about Marth too, and well... Look how that turned out.

's main issues were indeed chaingrabbing vulnerability, but most importantly, hilariously weak KO power and mediocre endurance.
Outside of that, she still possesses the typical Sheik things: amazing frame data, good projectile, and potent edgeguarding. She was also one of the very few characters in Brawl that had reliable true combos.
She was overall average at best, but some professionals do have a slightly higher opinion on her.

Pre-patch was a pretty bad character, and definitely the lowest she has ever been in a Smash game.
Her neutral game was nowhere near good enough to compensate for her poor damage, KO power, and endurance.
Patches would greatly improve that and grant her more consistent KO'ing abilities, leading to the current version of Ultimate Sheik were she is a very solid character.

Fox and Pikachu seem to be the only 2 characters that are good in every Smash game

That and also ZSS. However, those two have been around since Smash 64, so that resume is more impressive.

 

[Diddy Kong]

Fox and Pikachu seem to be the only 2 characters that are good in every Smash game

Yeah, because their character archetype just works really well, and them being veterans means it's less likely their play style will change drastically over games.

Diddy is a 3rd character I'd mention. He had some struggles in Ultimate sure, but he definitely has potential of being a Top Tier yet again, same as in Brawl and Smash 4.

EDIT: ZSS is another character that has always been good indeed, as I realized by above poster.

So we can see a definite type of character that always works well in Smash; gotta be fast, have great frame data, a great grab game, fast aerials, combo heavy, and have a good or at least reliable projectile.

 

[Thinkaman]

Sheik wasn't even too bad in Brawl, she just got chain grabbed by too many characters I recall.

didn't actually have much of a chaingrab issue; she was exempt from DDD's d-throw due to weight and didn't suffer the unique problems Fox or Ness/Lucas had. That said, generalized chaingrabs (that largely worked on everyone) like Pika f-throw or Falco d-throw were better than average against her fall speed.

Her real issue was lack of killing. In the context of Brawl's hitstun canceling and movement, she wasn't achieving those true strings you see here. No Bouncing Fish, no kill options, just f-tilt strings for days. She was consistently ranked in the 26-23 range, a weaker mid-tier on par with Ike or Yoshi.

Fox and Pikachu seem to be the only 2 characters that are good in every Smash game

ranged from 24-16, a very polarizing character. Pikachu had a psuedo-infinite on him with d-throw that gave him a super strong, relatively easy counter. He was also a finky, technical character who didn't like many of the top tier matchups.

slowly climbed from 12 to 8, mostly on the virtue of QAC and strong chaingrabs. Very hard to play (beyond the chaingrabs), lots of room for messing up,brought surprisingly little to the table for the cost. Still, a character with a high performance ceiling and a handful of auto-win matchups.

consistently climbs in tiers over the game's lifespan. She ended up consided #8 behind Pika, and frankly was probably then still underrated. The obvious thing holding her back was having a Brawl tether recovery; Boost Kick and Smash 4 ledge behavior not only addressed that, but also gave her her signature kill move. Smash 4/Ulti ZSS is a lot better than this character, who was already very good.

 

[The_Bookworm]

didn't actually have much of a chaingrab issue; she was exempt from DDD's d-throw due to weight and didn't suffer the unique problems Fox or Ness/Lucas had. That said, generalized chaingrabs (that largely worked on everyone) like Pika f-throw or Falco d-throw were better than average against her fall speed.

Her real issue was lack of killing. In the context of Brawl's hitstun canceling and movement, she wasn't achieving those true strings you see here. No Bouncing Fish, no kill options, just f-tilt strings for days. She was consistently ranked in the 26-23 range, a weaker mid-tier on par with Ike or Yoshi.

ranged from 24-16, a very polarizing character. Pikachu had a psuedo-infinite on him with d-throw that gave him a super strong, relatively easy counter. He was also a finky, technical character who didn't like many of the top tier matchups.

Not sure why, but this comment reminded me of something hilarious:
Despite being lower in the tier list, had a +3 matchup against . Why? Because she would be able to forward tilt lock Fox into 50%+, then KO him with up smash.

actually does surprisingly well against the top tiers. The only really bad matchups he had was across the cast. Outside of those three, he had the tools to take on pretty much the whole cast. He only goes -1 against Meta Knight, which is a matchup that got further developed heavily after the official matchup chart.
Fox's surprisingly good matchups against the top tiers, at least relative to everyone else ranked near him, got further developed towards the end of Brawl's lifespan. If competitive Brawl continued, I wouldn't be surprised if the character was developed even further.

Outside of the anomaly of the Fox vs Sheik matchup, Brawl Fox also had another matchup anomaly: he had no -2 matchups. He only had three -3 matchups, and the rest is -1 matchups at worst.

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To get off the reminiscing of Brawl's meta (it is admittedly fun to recollect old metagame history in any Smash game), I have a video to show:

Even after his first day of streaming in 9 months, Nairo's have demonstrated two pretty cool innovations of the character that others might utilize in the future.

1. One of which is the use of Megaflare at the edge of the stage. Sephiroth is able to charge in a short enough of time in a jump to use this. Megaflare is powerful and huge, both of which can cover a lot of recoveries, especially linear recoveries.
2. The other is usage of the forward air pin on the stage. For the longest time, we thought this technique is simply a fun gimmick to use. Nairo was able use this extend edgeguards. Since Sephiroth has very little recovery after using the pin jump, he can cover high recoveries very well with his huge back air. Even more important: pin jumping does not consume his double jump, and it doesn't consume either jumps when in One-Winged mode. This can allow Sephiroth to go deeper in edgeguards as a result.

 

[RonNewcomb]

he is still even or wins against a lot of meta relevant characters: even against joker, palu, zss, and winning against snake and wario!

That may be the money shot right there. If I consistently got top 8s and i found a character with good MUs vs nearly every character I will meet in top 8...

 

[Thinkaman]

A thought about OrionStats 2021 TTS that I keep meaning to post but forgetting...

Look at all the "surprising" things in this early sample:

Too many unexpected things to call out, and further down is just as crazy.
above !
above , who has a third the results of !
and only one step above the bottom!

is commonly put at the #1 character, as he's sitting here with 0.1% of overall results--a bottom 15 character.


The point isn't that Pikachu is actually bottom 15, nor is the point that these positions are so self-evidently wrong that the data is invalid.

This data sample is small, but it's not small. It's about 10% of 2019 Phase 1. Depending on how you define and calculate it, that makes our "margin of error" about 3 times as big--not 10 times as big.

It's a very biased sample, but it's not biased. It's almost 80% Japan, debatably the strongest region internationally. It's not like this is a bunch of events held in Argentina.

So it's a slice, and a strong slice, of our reality. It is biased but agenda-less; there's no artificial motivation for including or excluding data. (@DasKoopa and COVID aren't sitting around a table plotting how they can make Sheik look good and Pika look bad.) You could honestly just think of it as a "What if?" ("What if the Americas didn't play Smash?")


That's the real takeaway: how asymmetric and diverse the playerbase is, and how much individual players and specific regions and contribute to the overall big picture. Even "representative" subsections of the scene will look radically different, but are no less a true facet of our reality.

 

[SwagGuy99]

SNIP

's results are also fairly decent right now as a result of Tsumusuto's decent showings, only sitting 1.5 points below and 3.5 points above . This isn't something I potentially expect to stick around once US events eventually return (Most of and 's representation seems to be from US players) but it's interesting to see that 's results in Japan don't reflect his stereotypical bottom 3 placement in most tier lists at all.

 

[toonito]

even though its a smaller sample size and the western hemisphere is nonexistent joins as #1 on OrionStats

P O T E N T I A L = R E A L I T Y

 

[blackghost]

Relies on reads? Like Ganondorf? I don't think this is helping your case.

no not like Ganon. Ganon is playing a 50 50 game of side b or ftilt/jab at ledge. that plan isnt hurt by online that, it is actually helped by it. one of the reasons Ganon is such a better character online vs offline. Ganon jab hitbox is frame 7 and has a much more generous hitbox than sep jab 1 even if sep jab is frame 5. Ganon ftilt and jab are also significantly safer on whiff and shield than sepiroth.

sep most used buttons are not very active on fair and ftilt and uptilt. trapping at the ledge for him is dependent on being able to react accurately and make reads. he cannot do as snake or pacman and some other ledge trapping characters do and have multiple large hitboxes out at once. sepiroth wants to make one hard read that puts you offstage and then edge guard you to death.

With all this talk about zoners being worse offline. I would just like to mention a heavy projectile Zoner character won a offline tournament recently. Zoning of any type DOES work in ultimate. Even against the rushiest of rushdowm

pac man is a zoner with boxing frame data and a giant get-off- me move. pac man is a serious outlier.

 

[Tri Knight]

pic.twitter.com/kpEW3knxNg

— Void (@gsmVoiD) April 11, 2021

So much for " can't kill"

I feel like Sheik will just always be good in every Smash game except Brawl. Thoughts on Sheik?

It's like many of the low-killpower characters in Smash. As long as you got the set ups and ability to gimp recoveries well, it more than makes up for that "low KO power." You're gonna be killing just as good, if not better than other characters even.

 

[Ziodyne 21]

Well the Smash World Tour has a pretty unexpected GF with Bloom4Evah vs Sisqui the latter eliminated Gluttony to get to losers side.

It could of partially been online but the nerfs do look to have hurt him. There were many instances where Gluttony could clutch sets with easy-bake pre patched waft confirms that are not possible now

Ehh Wario is going to be fine regardless. Tweek is the only character out of his massive playerbase that is dropping him


Also blackghost . What to you think of Bayo possibly winning a technically official tournament recorded resutls and all

 

[Wunderwaft]

This has to be the most memetic grand finals I've seen in a while lol

Bloom and Sisqui were both just ****ing around with meme picks like DK and K Rool since they got qualified anyways.

 

[Thinkaman]

It's always a little unfortunate, but this sort of behavior is hardly unexpected for qualifiers; it would seem a little silly to insist that top players not blow off steam and take every game as serious as possible.

This is the "price we pay" for events that exist to enable an even bigger event to exist. Seeing top players pull out unusual, oddball characters, oh no, please not that.

 

[Frihetsanka]

Saber is ranked #6 in Australia, and there was talk about how Australia, a region with offline, viewed Sephiroth, so here's her Sephiroth MU chart:

My current thoughts on Seph's MU spread pic.twitter.com/DvzBlT2wW6

— Saber (@HopeisDopexoxo) March 23, 2021

It doesn't strike me as particularly unrealistic (although Inkling should probably be in "Even or lose"). I don't agree with it 100% but it seems fairly plausible to me (if we mostly disregard "Big win", many of those seem incorrect to me). And with a MU chart like that, Sephiroth could very well be top tier, and at least high tier.

I honestly don't know exactly how good he is. He's better offline almost certainly, and the lack of offline is an issue for his results. It might take a while before we'll see his true potential. Top tier? Or high tier? I really don't see mid tier for Sephiroth.

 

[KirbySquad101]

The big highlight for me is that two of Europe's best offline - Supashemmie and Mr. R - weren't even able to qualify in the end, failing to place in the Top 12 for the standard bracket and in the Top 4 for the LCQ.

 

[blackghost]

Ziodyne 21 he's the closest thing to lima i've seen. his fundemental are good and his offstage game and combo game are aggressive.
but also keep in mind some of his matches were vs Spanish players and that region did have bayo banned so IDK how common she is or what their matchup knowledge is. I also haven't seen his other matches but drawing a dark samus and a ROB is a really good pull for a bayonetta player.
lastly, I wish he got to play gluttony.
overall his Bayonetta is good look forward to seeing more of him moving forward. I dont know how strong europe is i need someone else to share opinions on that.

also to add on the fact he went random and beat his grand finals opponent so idk he might be just a lot better than his opponents in general.

 

[blackghost]

ignore this

 

[duxx]

hbox MU chart. I'll be honest, this looks like the spread of a bottom 5-10 character if he really think puff only beats 4 of the worst characters in the game. even in the even/meh section, what top/high tiers are there? maybe falcon? min min? inkling (a character with barely any results/representatives afaik)?

edit: imo villy/isabelle are annoying for puff/meh respectively

 

[Frihetsanka]

Hungrybox has always been pessimistic about Smash 4 and Ultimate Jigglypuff, nothing new there. Players like BassMage are much more optimistic in comparison.

hbox's chat told me to make a matchup chart (offline) pic.twitter.com/hGJdC4FCsN

— BassMage (@BassMage) April 6, 2021

Posted less than a week ago.

 

[The_Bookworm]

Hungrybox has always been pessimistic about Smash 4 and Ultimate Jigglypuff, nothing new there. Players like BassMage are much more optimistic in comparison.

hbox's chat told me to make a matchup chart (offline) pic.twitter.com/hGJdC4FCsN

— BassMage (@BassMage) April 6, 2021

Posted less than a week ago.

BassMage, ever since the start of Ultimate, have been very optimistic on Puff. I do find it interesting that outside of Lucina and Yoshi, he thinks that Puff doesn't win nor lose harder than 55:45.

View attachment 310916
hbox MU chart. I'll be honest, this looks like the spread of a bottom 5-10 character if he really think puff only beats 4 of the worst characters in the game. even in the even/meh section, what top/high tiers are there? maybe falcon? min min? inkling (a character with barely any results/representatives afaik)?

edit: imo villy/isabelle are annoying for puff/meh respectively

While I think he exaggerates some of these matchups, it doesn't seem too far off the mark.
Then again, I also think the character is bottom 5-10 so idk. \(ツ)/

The big highlight for me is that two of Europe's best offline - Supashemmie and Mr. R - weren't even able to qualify in the end, failing to place in the Top 12 for the standard bracket and in the Top 4 for the LCQ.

According to SmashBoard's main article on this, out of the 38 players from the European Smash Rankings and OrionRank Europe that attended, only 11 made it to top 32.
While this tournament had plenty of upsets, this tournament also had a lengthy DQ list. Players like quiK, Space, Rage, and more DQ'ed from the tournament. I am not quite sure why so many players DQ'ed from this tournament, but this is a rather iffy showing for Europe's top talent overall in my opinion.

 

[TennisBall]

Hungrybox has always been pessimistic about Smash 4 and Ultimate Jigglypuff, nothing new there. Players like BassMage are much more optimistic in comparison.

hbox's chat told me to make a matchup chart (offline) pic.twitter.com/hGJdC4FCsN

— BassMage (@BassMage) April 6, 2021

Posted less than a week ago.

This is a lot more accurate to the character's real viability.

Hbox is a great player with great fundies but he is notorious in the Puff community for not abusing the character's strengths, combine that with his lacking mentality and it explains why sometimes he upsets truly great players and than he'll get 2-0'd by a Piranha Plant cause he lost the first stock to something cheesy.
I love watching Hbox's runs and do admire how strong his fundies really are which lets him get so far sometimes but if he sat down and learned some dair loops like he did for that short brief period of time that one stream it would help him a ton.

 

[StrangeKitten]

Hbox is probably too pessimistic, though I do agree with him that Puff is bottom tier. Bassmage probably too optimistic, though he's a far better Puff than Hbox, imo. In both lists, Puff doesn't beat too many relevant characters, though, and loses to most of high and top tier.

Also, was that bad? Because if not, we could count Sonic in our list of characters who have been good in every game.

 

[Thinkaman]

Speaking as a Brawl Puff main with far less experience in Ultimate Puff, BassMage's seems correct (better than random stuff HBox says), but I'm a bit less optimistic and have some matchups, especially featuring disjoint, that I'm skeptical on.

I though Puff would beat , and I played it a decent amount (more than most Puff matchups) because my other characters dislike Min Min so much. But, I really struggled! Nair and u-smash are just too potent of a defense, and I wasn't able to pressure her into a gimp anywhere near as much as I expected. Maybe it's just me, but as much as I'd like to buy my initial intuition I'm just not. My other characters domuch better against Min Min, even though it feels like a bad matchup, than my Puff does in random other matchups comapred to them.

also seems suspect. too. Puff just hates disjoints so much, and these characters qualify. I am unconvinced that Puff can effectively camp either of them, as well.

is super gimpable, but urrrg that disjoint. Doesn't help that Pyra's kills are vertical. Slight skepticism on along the same lines.

has historically been able to play Puff's game and kill her earlier, winning the matchup by raw virtue of being a superior character. Hard time buying this as even.

I would expect and to have a bit more of an advantage than a small one. Their speed + coverage is Puff's bane, to a greater extent than she could gimp them. (contrast with say Chrom)

But really, that's only ~10% of the cast I disagree with off the cuff.

 

[StrangeKitten]

Speaking as a Brawl Puff main with far less experience in Ultimate Puff, BassMage's seems correct (better than random stuff HBox says), but I'm a bit less optimistic and have some matchups, especially featuring disjoint, that I'm skeptical on.

I though Puff would beat , and I played it a decent amount (more than most Puff matchups) because my other characters dislike Min Min so much. But, I really struggled! Nair and u-smash are just too potent of a defense, and I wasn't able to pressure her into a gimp anywhere near as much as I expected. Maybe it's just me, but as much as I'd like to buy my initial intuition I'm just not. My other characters domuch better against Min Min, even though it feels like a bad matchup, than my Puff does in random other matchups comapred to them.

also seems suspect. too. Puff just hates disjoints so much, and these characters qualify. I am unconvinced that Puff can effectively camp either of them, as well.

is super gimpable, but urrrg that disjoint. Doesn't help that Pyra's kills are vertical. Slight skepticism on along the same lines.

has historically been able to play Puff's game and kill her earlier, winning the matchup by raw virtue of being a superior character. Hard time buying this as even.

I would expect and to have a bit more of an advantage than a small one. Their speed + coverage is Puff's bane, to a greater extent than she could gimp them. (contrast with say Chrom)

But really, that's only ~10% of the cast I disagree with off the cuff.

I'd say Puff also hates projectiles, which most of these characters also have. They may not be a huge bane for her, but she still doesn't have many ways of dealing with them, and even landing a couple per stock is gonna get you far on such a light character.

 

[SwagGuy99]

Hbox is probably too pessimistic, though I do agree with him that Puff is bottom tier. Bassmage probably too optimistic, though he's a far better Puff than Hbox, imo. In both lists, Puff doesn't beat too many relevant characters, though, and loses to most of high and top tier.

Also, was that bad? Because if not, we could count Sonic in our list of characters who have been good in every game.

I didn't play Brawl but from my understanding, the character started to gain more popularity later into Brawl's lifespan and opinions of him seem to have risen a bit? The character's kill power is abysmally bad, but he still has solid boxing tools, a passable recovery, and still can timeout other characters extremely well.

Player -1's and Mew2King's tier lists both have Brawl Sonic towards the middle of their lists from last year which is a bit higher than the last 2014 Brawl Tier list had him (22/38 in the middle of mid tier). Seems like people consider him to be an alright character now.

I personally think the contenders for the best characters in Smash across every game are

assuming I'm not counting anyone exclusive to Ultimate. Of these I would lean towards or being the best overall. But if we limit this discussion to characters who have only been in all games, then it's probably followed by

 

[SKX31]

A thought about OrionStats 2021 TTS that I keep meaning to post but forgetting...

Look at all the "surprising" things in this early sample:

Too many unexpected things to call out, and further down is just as crazy.
above !
above , who has a third the results of !
and only one step above the bottom!

is commonly put at the #1 character, as he's sitting here with 0.1% of overall results--a bottom 15 character.


The point isn't that Pikachu is actually bottom 15, nor is the point that these positions are so self-evidently wrong that the data is invalid.

This data sample is small, but it's not small. It's about 10% of 2019 Phase 1. Depending on how you define and calculate it, that makes our "margin of error" about 3 times as big--not 10 times as big.

It's a very biased sample, but it's not biased. It's almost 80% Japan, debatably the strongest region internationally. It's not like this is a bunch of events held in Argentina.

So it's a slice, and a strong slice, of our reality. It is biased but agenda-less; there's no artificial motivation for including or excluding data. (@DasKoopa and COVID aren't sitting around a table plotting how they can make Sheik look good and Pika look bad.) You could honestly just think of it as a "What if?" ("What if the Americas didn't play Smash?")


That's the real takeaway: how asymmetric and diverse the playerbase is, and how much individual players and specific regions and contribute to the overall big picture. Even "representative" subsections of the scene will look radically different, but are no less a true facet of our reality.

Honestly, I'm kinda surprised that isn't higher on there (I'd expect her to be at least 10 if not 15 points given all the hubbub surrounding her), but OTOH she hasn't had that many players getting high tournament results with her outside of like Protobanham. It's still too early to tell where she is honestly (she looks promising, although I hesitate with calling her top tier because she could wind up having some problematic matchups that haven't been fully developed yet.).

It's always a little unfortunate, but this sort of behavior is hardly unexpected for qualifiers; it would seem a little silly to insist that top players not blow off steam and take every game as serious as possible.

This is the "price we pay" for events that exist to enable an even bigger event to exist. Seeing top players pull out unusual, oddball characters, oh no, please not that.

A key reason is that there's no money in the online qualifiers, only seeding. The money starts to come in at the Regionals, and there they might have more of a reason to stay the course.

While this tournament had plenty of upsets, this tournament also had a lengthy DQ list. Players like quiK, Space, Rage, and more DQ'ed from the tournament. I am not quite sure why so many players DQ'ed from this tournament, but this is a rather iffy showing for Europe's top talent overall in my opinion.

It was iffy, but I honestly think that getting people exposed to less-known players may help a lot too.

That's honestly what most of the 16 qualified players are (with more well-known people like iStudying, CurryGovernor and Peli failing to qualify):

1. Bloom4Eva
2. Sisqui
3. Gluttony
4. Freetox
5. Sillintor
6. Vidad
7. Raflow
8. Tomberry
9. Homika
10. Tarik
11. iRefuse
12. PurpleDebo
(LCQ 1st) 13. SuperStriker
(LCQ 2nd)14. Lucretio
(LCQ 3rd) 15. Snormanda
(LCQ 4th) 16. Noxumbra

Characters that presumably (assuming no main switching) get their first player maining them in the Regional stage (112 players total): , , , , , , , . The EU Regional will take place July 17th-18th, and the Top 6 will advance to the Global Finals. Considering that this Online Qualifier was extremely wild and unpredictable, it's going to be extremely difficult to say if there are any concrete favorites to secure Global spots beyond Gluttony really.

The 64 players qualified so far represent 40 different characters (this number is a bit flexible: for example, it's 40 whether MKLeo's counted as a Joker or Byleth main - 39 if one counts Pyra as his main). is the most common main so far - she's mained by 6 different people and each Online Qualifier so far has seen at least a Palu main qualify for the Regional stage. Second most common is a tie between and at 4 each.

Japan will be next weekend, and they have 8 spots for the East Asia Regional Finals (the other 8 being for the other East Asian countries competing in the East Asia South qualifier the week after Japan's). As with the other "split" regionals, Top 6 in Japan's qualifier + Top 2 in the LCQ will advance to the East Asia Regional.

The limited number of spots in the Regional for Japanese players + the sheer number of players there who have gotten top 16 / top 8 placings at majors recently makes me think that the Japanese qualifier might be a metaphorical bloodbath (if I may use that word). While registration has not closed yet it seems, I find it safe to say that quite a few top players will sign up.

 

[The_Bookworm]

Also, was that bad? Because if not, we could count Sonic in our list of characters who have been good in every game.

was considered bad to mediocre for pretty much the first half of Brawl's lifespan.

However, many Sonic mains such as Espy and X pushed the character super hard, proving that he is a very solid character. Part of it is demonstrating how effective of a strategy simply camping out and running away is, which is understandable considering how mediocre his moveset was in that game. But it worked, so they did it.
He ended Brawl as a solid mid tier character, who places fairly well in regionals/small majors.

However, I am not sure if Brawl Sonic is good enough to warrant to put Sonic under the "characters good in every game" award, but he is definitely up there.

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As for , while both HBox's and BassMage's matchup charts do have some warrant to them, the more I personally look at Puff vs the rest of the cast, the more bleak things seem.

The character is so light, floaty, lacking in ground game, and ridden with poor range that it makes it hard to get into the opponent's zone a lot of the time, on top of its approach being very predicable, and also makes it hard for the character to recover from being put in disadvantage. This doesn't apply to just disjoints, which is especially bad for Puff, but pretty much everyone in the cast can do this at a base level. Outside of abusing the character's own inherent air mobility, it also lacks much of any answers against projectiles.

That is not to say that Puff has no way of working around these weaknesses, otherwise it would have pretty much no winning matchups at all, but these are such serious flaws.

This is also shown in its results, as ever since the start of Ultimate, Puff has had one of the weakest results in the game, both statistically and in terms of impact. Patch 6.0.0 did very little to improve this.

 

[Thinkaman]

So there's a weird resilence to Puff's gameplan that keeps her viable. The increased potency of her hail mary options in Ultimate keep this candle lit a little brighter too.

Playing Puff is a really unique experience. It's all fundamentals, no "gimmicks", yet playing those fundamentals distinctly different from everyone else. She cares so much about diagonals, so much about this weird, particular type of aerial footsies, and this odd sort of Air-v-Air landing coverage that really only Wario and Yoshi can relate to.

Mistakes are harshly punished, but sort of hard to make? It's so easy to just, disengage and take a breath in most matchups. Puff doesn't care about giving up space--for a character who is all about spacing and all about gimps, the stage is all weirdly local, relative to the opponent, for her. Ledges are pretty safe, platforms are friendly, projectiles are whatever.

nair, fair, and bair are fantastic moves paired with the movement they need to work. Pound, dair, and f-throw synergize with those core moves in a really compelling way. It's a solid core, with no glaring flaws.

The problem is that well that's it. It's very good, but not good enough to counterbalance super light + vulnerable to floaty-catching uairs and usmashes.



I think Puff's 6.0.0 buffs were some of the most overlooked. I've said this over and over, but Pound true comboing into fair -> nair was a wild change. The raw damage reward of landing a low % Pound was ramped up 1.5x, and the horizontal displacement by 2.0x. On a character who lives for the gimp, and depends on Pound as a callout in bad matchups, that's a big door opened.

Dair SHAC was huge too. The Puff community, including BassMage, seem to preach how great dair is now, but few are listening and there's no Puff at the technical level to really force everyone to see it.


I think Puff is bottom 10 and would like to see more Puff buffs. She dislikes a lot of Ultimate's engine, and despises the air dodge duration. Disjoints are an issue, and it seems like every DLC adds more scary vertical kill moves. But despite all the threats to her, Jigglypuff's core gameplan just never goes out of style.

 

[Tri Knight]

With her extreme aerial-centric playstyle, requires a ton of patience from both the player and the opponent. You'll find Puff uncomfortably stalling in the air more times than not, attempting to trigger reactions from the opponent. Jumping the gun on a competent Puff can absolutely lead to a dead stock.

I do find Puff to be one of the easier MUs for but she also forces a much different playstyle as well. Her floatiness makes things tough for Link's projectiles but against his sword reach and godly Nair, there's just no getting in: forgoing most of the projectile use for retreating Nairs / Fairs / Ftilts, reactive Utilts, etc., and combined with his high KO power, it seems to be able to shut any approach down. However, one wrong move can end in a Rest setup or a barrage of aerials far into the blast zone.

I imagine most if not all sword characters give her a real bad time. Especially ones with good reach that hit in angles / arcs.

 

[Rizen]

The thing about Brawl was you had , who was indisputably the best with no losing MUs and only one even vs Pika, which was debatable and largely due to ESAM being unrelenting iirc. Then you had a handful of top tiers who could actually compete. Then gatekeepers like Dedede who destroyed half the cast due to how stupidly OP shield grabs were combined with chain grabs, but wouldn't win many tournaments. Everyone else was insignificant. I can't even remember Sonic.

On the topic of , I agree with HBox. She's easily a bottom 10 character.

 

[Ziodyne 21]

story in Ultimate is similar to where at first people were thinking (mostly praying) that the system changes and differnces in Ultimates engine and mechanics would improve ther general playstyles and gameplans al least more viable despite their built-in flaws. In Puffs case it was weaker sheilds, airdodge staling and icnrase potentacy of edgeguarding. In Macs case it was also weaker sheildsas well as improved landing safety overall.

Sadly in reality there were many universal changes ended up hindered as much as helped them, plus there were many Smash 4 characters that greatly thrive n Ultimaitesengine e but got significant buffs overall, much better improvements than Puff and Mac have seen

 

[KirbySquad101]

BassMage, ever since the start of Ultimate, have been very optimistic on Puff. I do find it interesting that outside of Lucina and Yoshi, he thinks that Puff doesn't win nor lose harder than 55:45.


While I think he exaggerates some of these matchups, it doesn't seem too far off the mark.
Then again, I also think the character is bottom 5-10 so idk. \(ツ)/


According to SmashBoard's main article on this, out of the 38 players from the European Smash Rankings and OrionRank Europe that attended, only 11 made it to top 32.
While this tournament had plenty of upsets, this tournament also had a lengthy DQ list. Players like quiK, Space, Rage, and more DQ'ed from the tournament. I am not quite sure why so many players DQ'ed from this tournament, but this is a rather iffy showing for Europe's top talent overall in my opinion.

Decidedly covering the entirety of Europe in one-go as opposed to setting up different brackets like how SWT did for the US to cover for the possibility of connection issues feels like a really bizarre move considering how much talent is in Europe on top of Europe's comparable size to the US. When you've got so many different countries distanced apart from each other, I really feel like connection issues are bound to pop up, ones even more drastic than the standard delay we're accustomed to.

Could be a potential reason for the lack of big names qualifying in addition to a bunch of no-shows. Ramin did mention his grievances about playing online after being eliminated.

 

[Nobie]

While Shields are weaker in Ultimate, one of Puff's big flaws is a poor grab game, and I think it holds the character back. The combination of short range, unmatched floatiness preventing effective empty hop grabs, and not much reward off of them stymies Puff's intended aerial offense Sure, Pound eats shields, but I rarely ever see a shield break from Puff. I really think the character should get just a mediocre kill throw at a very high percent (like 170%).

On another note, Kameme recently posted a video of his Sheik vs Zackray's Mewtwo. While Kameme's Sheik isn't a Void-style combo-optimized one (so a lot of damage against Mewtwo is left on the table potentially), I think this really highlights Mewtwo's strengths (and of course, weaknesses).

The thing that stands out to me is just how many tools Mewtwo has and how powerful they are in terms of space coverage and damage/KO potential, yet none of those tools are easy options to default to. Nair's lingering hitboxes are great for catching defensive options but can be swatted out of the sky easily. Shadow Ball is monstrous, but it's the mindgames around Shadow Ball where Zackray does particularly well.

And that "charge down smash as Kameme rolls in, KEEP HOLDING to read the spot dodge right after, and THEN release it for the KO" is simple yet absurd.

A lot of players have been making tier lists and putting Mewtwo in mid tier, which makes sense to me even if I don't agree. When you look at all the character can do when things are going its way, you think, "What isn't this character capable of?" When you look at how badly it gets punished off of mistakes, you think "There's no way this character can last." And so, mid-tier.

 

[StrangeKitten]

While Shields are weaker in Ultimate, one of Puff's big flaws is a poor grab game, and I think it holds the character back. The combination of short range, unmatched floatiness preventing effective empty hop grabs, and not much reward off of them stymies Puff's intended aerial offense Sure, Pound eats shields, but I rarely ever see a shield break from Puff. I really think the character should get just a mediocre kill throw at a very high percent (like 170%).

One of Puff's biggest flaws, in my opinion, is how easy it is to get away from her. Oh, Pound ate a lot of my shield? Time to run away, then throw out some well-placed moves and play without using my shield for a bit. If Puff is far away, which is likely with how far she flies and how slow she is, I might even run offstage and recover quickly. By the time I've done that, I've regained a lot of shield health. Pound doing a ton of shield damage isn't worth a hill of beans if Puff can't get another hit to break a shield, which is really easy to avoid. It would be a lot scarier if she could pressure in the way, say, Fox can. And as for taking prior shield damage and Pound breaking it that way, I rarely find myself in a situation where I've been holding shield for very long. If I do, it's usually to block Sing, which has a week's worth of endlag, after which I can punish with a combo starter or even a powerful stock taker, by which time, my shield is back to full.

 

[Firox]

ACKTUALLY current Mario canon is that the Koopalings are not in fact Bowser's children, just other young Koopas that he takes care of sometimes--despite being a single dad! (To a single child, mind you)

The fact that you would jump to such an assumption speaks to the depth of structual bias that the Mario Media Machine has instilled in us.

I dunno. I still contend that Wendy Koopa bears a striking resemblance to Peach.....

I have a friend that still finds it strangely suspicious that the monarch of Mushroom Kingdom, with her veritable army of shroom folk and her big elaborate castle seems to constantly end up "kidnapped" and in need of extraction from her platonic male friend with whom she has seldom if ever reciprocated his affections. I sense a Romeo-Juliet situation going on. She's too embarrassed to admit her love for big long horns and kinky studded chokers....

 

[Thinkaman]

I mean Puff's "Plan A" is never, ever to just Pound a shield. It's not her Plan B either, of even C or D.

I already said that's Puff's Plan A is just using her great core aerial normals (made great by her mobility) and getting in at diagonals that way.

The primary function of Pound is to break around diagonal tools people would put in the way of that. It's higher risk, but also higher reward. Generally speaking, at least in Brawl, the worse a matchup was for Jigglypuff (and her core aerials) the more I'd have to fall back on Pound. In a perfect matchup, Puff would never use Pound and the higher risk it imposes.

Pound's behavior on shield is risk mitigation first and foremost, not an offensive tool. Pound does 15 frames of shield stun. If Puff lands Pound on the first active frame (13), that's -11 on block. That's far worse than her aerials, enough to get u-smashed by many people. But no one hits Pound on the first active frame, that's crazy talk. Pound lasts 16 frames, longer than almost every fresh spot dodge. If you hit with the end of Pound, as the intended use would imply, it's positive. Puff can't do anything with that frame advantage, but she gets away with doing a risky move free and you just took ~38% shield damage.

It takes over 7 seconds to recover that shield damage. Jigglypuff's goal isn't to Pound you again and break your shield. (Though that's cool with her if you let it happen.) At that point she is just enjoying a safer aerial Plan A, and specifically dair.

Properly used, Pound hits spot dodge, beats shield, and is safe against most rolls and air dodges. It trades favorable (by Puff's bottom-tier standards) and offers limited projectile protection. What it loses to is simple aerial spacing, which Jigglypuff's Plan A has covered.


Bottom line: Jigglypuff's ground moveset is actually quite good, it's just that her best tilt is mapped to side-b and performed in the air.

 

[Game7a1]

Bottom line: Jigglypuff's ground moveset is actually quite good, it's just that her best tilt is mapped to side-b and performed in the air.

Reading this made me wish her F-Tilt dealt more of shield damage so it could have more utility. Oh well.

You covered pretty much everything I could about Puff's gameplan in your past few posts. It's always good to see deeper insight on lower-ranked characters to better understand their strengths and weaknesses.

 

[Diddy Kong]

The thing about Brawl was you had , who was indisputably the best with no losing MUs and only one even vs Pika, which was debatable and largely due to ESAM being unrelenting iirc. Then you had a handful of top tiers who could actually compete. Then gatekeepers like Dedede who destroyed half the cast due to how stupidly OP shield grabs were combined with chain grabs, but wouldn't win many tournaments. Everyone else was insignificant. I can't even remember Sonic.

On the topic of , I agree with HBox. She's easily a bottom 10 character.

You forgot the Ice Climbers and their shenanigans. They where so maddening, I was actually glad to see them removed for Smash 4.

Then there was the tier of ultimate stage control, dominated by Diddy, Snake, Falco and Olimar. You couldn't do **** against them, if you where not broken yourself. Snake lived forever, and traps where OP, DACUS and U Tilt where crazy, Diddy had double bananas and a sort of wavedash mechanic with them, also actually good recovery, Falco spams lasers and chain grabs, Olimar just throws Pikmin and you died.

Then there was ZSS who basically gets a free stock with the armor parts... And who else was actually a little good? I don't remember outside of DDD. I do remember Hyrule Tier, and I don't think any other Smash characters ever where as hilariously bad as them.

Brawl was horrendously broken.

 

[toonito]

PGStats posted an article about what characters are used deep in online brackets

PGstats | Who is picked and winning deep in brackets?

Continuing our analysis of character trends in Smash Ultimate since the Steve patch dropped in October, we shift our focus to later bracket matches, looking at over 5,000 games in the top 12.5% of brackets.

www.pgstats.com

Image of chart below