Official Competitive Character Impressions 2.0

[bc1910]

The lack of perspective on balance never ceases to amaze. It's like people complaining about how small their 4 TB hard drive is.

There has been a steady and consistent increase in the quality of game balance over the last 20 years, in spite of games becoming wildly more complex and packed with much more content. Patches are a large part of this but not the whole story--you'd find this trend to still be true even if you looked at Day 0 versions, in which the existence of patches should hurt balance due to making it less urgent.

Smash Ultimate and SFV have very similar online win-rate and usage spreads, at deltas that would have been unheard of 10 years ago in SFIV or Brawl. Just as those games ellipsed the matchup ratios of Melee and 3rd Strike, to say nothing of MvC2.

Smash 4 and fighting games of its era impressively caught up to the impressive character win-rate spreads of the most rigously tuned MOBAs, who employ large live balance teams and update biweekly. And now the current crop of fighting games has surpassed it. Previously, this level of balance was only reported in games targeting intimate communities like Guilty Gear.

Psychology and anecdotes suggest that people will always complain, especially new faces. But by the numbers, we are living in a golden age of game balance.

Slightly off topic, but was Brawl really more balanced than Melee?

The entire competitive meta revolved around Meta Knight and how good other characters’ MUs against him were. He displayed complete dominance in a huge proportion of top 8s, had no losing and arguably no even matchups and remains the only character in Smash history to have an actual ban implemented under the Unity ruleset, not to mention the years of stagelist tinkering and implementation of ledge grab limits mainly to keep MK legal. Even if the rest of the game was well balanced (which it wasn’t) the MK issue makes Brawl’s balance objectively worse.

Outside of MK, the other top tiers were decently well matched with each other but you still had 5-6 characters curbstomping the rest of the roster.

Meanwhile Captain Falcon just won a Melee Supermajor, the best player in the world uses Jigglypuff and a good half of the roster has a legitimate chance to make top 8 in big tournaments. Melee’s character diversity has improved a lot as the game has been explored, contrary to what many probably expected.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some stats showing Fox was more dominant in Melee than MK was in Brawl in terms of overall lifespan, but the character variety nowadays wildly exceeds anything Brawl ever managed. Maybe it’s not fair to compare Melee’s 20 year old meta with Brawl’s 5 years, but still.

 

[Lacrimosa]

Out of curiosity, does anyone happen to know how badly Pichu’s f tilt was nerfed? How much kill power exactly was taken away from the move?

Can't kill Zelda at 125% (without DI!) on BF ledge.
That's a HUGE nerf.

 

[The_Bookworm]

Slightly off topic, but was Brawl really more balanced than Melee?

The entire competitive meta revolved around Meta Knight and how good other characters’ MUs against him were. He displayed complete dominance in a huge proportion of top 8s, had no losing and arguably no even matchups and remains the only character in Smash history to have an actual ban implemented under the Unity ruleset, not to mention the years of stagelist tinkering and implementation of ledge grab limits mainly to keep MK legal. Even if the rest of the game was well balanced (which it wasn’t) the MK issue makes Brawl’s balance objectively worse.

Outside of MK, the other top tiers were decently well matched with each other but you still had 5-6 characters curbstomping the rest of the roster.

Meanwhile Captain Falcon just won a Melee Supermajor, the best player in the world uses Jigglypuff and a good half of the roster has a legitimate chance to make top 8 in big tournaments. Melee’s character diversity has improved a lot as the game has been explored, contrary to what many probably expected.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some stats showing Fox was more dominant in Melee than MK was in Brawl in terms of overall lifespan, but the character variety nowadays wildly exceeds anything Brawl ever managed. Maybe it’s not fair to compare Melee’s 20 year old meta with Brawl’s 5 years, but still.

Brawl balancing vs Melee balancing when comparing the two is weird. Brawl has a considerably stronger mid tier and (arguably) high tier than in Melee, but at the same time, has an even more dominant line of top tiered characters.
I would argue that Brawl lower tiers are better to use in lower levels of play than Melee lower tiered characters, but slightly worse than Melee lower tiered characters in higher levels of play (particularly Brawl's F tier).

Comparing the two game's balancing is weird. Both are imbalanced in their own weird ways.

 

[Lacrimosa]

Slightly off topic, but was Brawl really more balanced than Melee?

The entire competitive meta revolved around Meta Knight and how good other characters’ MUs against him were. He displayed complete dominance in a huge proportion of top 8s, had no losing and arguably no even matchups and remains the only character in Smash history to have an actual ban implemented under the Unity ruleset, not to mention the years of stagelist tinkering and implementation of ledge grab limits mainly to keep MK legal. Even if the rest of the game was well balanced (which it wasn’t) the MK issue makes Brawl’s balance objectively worse.

Outside of MK, the other top tiers were decently well matched with each other but you still had 5-6 characters curbstomping the rest of the roster.

Meanwhile Captain Falcon just won a Melee Supermajor, the best player in the world uses Jigglypuff and a good half of the roster has a legitimate chance to make top 8 in big tournaments. Melee’s character diversity has improved a lot as the game has been explored, contrary to what many probably expected.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some stats showing Fox was more dominant in Melee than MK was in Brawl in terms of overall lifespan, but the character variety nowadays wildly exceeds anything Brawl ever managed. Maybe it’s not fair to compare Melee’s 20 year old meta with Brawl’s 5 years, but still.

The Brawl tier-list is pretty much a Meta-Knight match-up chart.
You can't really say that about Melee. Character diversity is important. And Brawl only had Meta-Knight and characters that did somewhat well against MK: Ice Climbers, Falco, Olimar, apparently Fox)...

 

[Thinkaman]

So basically you have to go to tournaments to be relevant is what I'm understanding. But I definitely think he would do really well if he takes the time

Zero can make more money streaming for a weekend than he could make placing 1st at most tournaments. This is the primary motivating factor for most e-sports tournament retirements, including MOBAs. (Riot's entire LCS structure exists in part to mitigate the negative implications of this situation.)

Slightly off topic, but was Brawl really more balanced than Melee?

The entire competitive meta revolved around Meta Knight and how good other characters’ MUs against him were. He displayed complete dominance in a huge proportion of top 8s, had no losing and arguably no even matchups and remains the only character in Smash history to have an actual ban implemented under the Unity ruleset, not to mention the years of stagelist tinkering and implementation of ledge grab limits mainly to keep MK legal. Even if the rest of the game was well balanced (which it wasn’t) the MK issue makes Brawl’s balance objectively worse.

Outside of MK, the other top tiers were decently well matched with each other but you still had 5-6 characters curbstomping the rest of the roster.

Meanwhile Captain Falcon just won a Melee Supermajor, the best player in the world uses Jigglypuff and a good half of the roster has a legitimate chance to make top 8 in big tournaments. Melee’s character diversity has improved a lot as the game has been explored, contrary to what many probably expected.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some stats showing Fox was more dominant in Melee than MK was in Brawl in terms of overall lifespan, but the character variety nowadays wildly exceeds anything Brawl ever managed. Maybe it’s not fair to compare Melee’s 20 year old meta with Brawl’s 5 years, but still.

There's numerous problems flattening balance to a single comparable stat. So I'll throw out some various data points:

Fox's usage at very high level (say, top 64 of supermajors) has converged to a somewhat steady ~33%. Meta Knight, at his peak, was around 25% if you look at his most dominant levels. Pre-patch Diddy and Bayonetta were significantly lower, and no one in Smash Ultimate is currently on a trajectory to match even that level.

Matchup data is very hairy, unscientific, and hard to compare for multiple reasons, but nonetheless when I last ran the numbers, the stddev of matchup ratios reported in Brawl was about half of that in Melee. (Brawl was a little bit higher than vanilla SF IV, and Melee was a bit higher than 3rd Strike and SF2.) Most of this stems from Brawl's much richer mid-tier, and less atrocious bottom tiers. Of note: neither game's stddev improved if Fox or MK was removed. In fact, this surprisingly was true for all characters in each game, including more polarizing ones.

I played a lot of Brawl Ganon, who was certainly the worst character in that game and far worse than any character in 4. I can tell you with absolute certainty that Brawl Ganon was better along almost any competitive metric you could apply to the bottom 7 characters of Melee.


This is not a Melee vs. X post, that's not the message. This is: Almost all perception of balance, in all games, is social phenomenon. This idea was first explained to me by Tom Cadwell (design director at Riot, did balance at Blizzard after being a pro SC player), describing how Starcraft's default balance was actually quite poor but a variety of social factors led the community to accept it as some sort of master race game with unquestionable, perfect balance. Even today, SC1 is held up by countless people as the shining example of game balance, when they don't know the half of it.

The data set is too large to fit in the RAM of your mind. 99% of our game balance opinions are just personal anecdotes and the darwinian evolution of what statements yield the most social capital when repeated--no matter how much we'd like to think otherwise.

The Brawl tier-list is pretty much a Meta-Knight match-up chart.
You can't really say that about Melee. Character diversity is important. And Brawl only had Meta-Knight and characters that did somewhat well against MK: Ice Climbers, Falco, Olimar, apparently Fox)...

This is simply not accurate. Pikachu is probably the best against MK, but is much lower down any accurate tier list. King DDD is pretty awful against MK, but is still pretty high and was considered VERY high for a good bit of the game's life. ICs is definitely #2, but imo is worse against MK than a good number of characters. Jiggs could do surprisng stuff to MK (and Diddy), but was definitely a bottom tier character.

You can find identical examples for Fox in Melee's matchups/tiers as well.

MK's impact on Brawl has become vastly overstated.

 

[Baby_Sneak]

The Brawl tier-list is pretty much a Meta-Knight match-up chart.
You can't really say that about Melee. Character diversity is important. And Brawl only had Meta-Knight and characters that did somewhat well against MK: Ice Climbers, Falco, Olimar, apparently Fox)...

ice climbers, olimar, snake, falco, marth, diddy kong, ZSS, with arguable mentions of wario, pika, and fox/falco/peach?

 

[Emblem Lord]

But if that results in poor balance (like it already did in 4), complexity is not the way to go. Complexity does not automatically equal "awesome." Was Bayonetta absolutely destroying the meta "awesome?" Was Cloud being one of the most broken characters "awesome?" Is Joker being able to get Arsene like it's nobody's business "awesome?" Besides, awesome is subjective. I haven't been much of a fan of the DLC post Roy and Lucas save for Plant.

Ehhhhhh.

In my experience complex characters are almost always pretty flippin awesome.

 

[Thinkaman]

I like to say that freshman game design students think complexity is an absolute good, and sophmore game design students think complexity is an absolute evil.

Complexity is just a cost. You have a contextual budget to how complex the rules (and board state) can be in a game. Budgets do not have a moral value.

Be smarter than those kids: Don't go to school for game design.


And now we return to our regularly scheduled Kenspeculation extravaganza.

 

[Bobert]

The Brawl tier-list is pretty much a Meta-Knight match-up chart.
You can't really say that about Melee. Character diversity is important. And Brawl only had Meta-Knight and characters that did somewhat well against MK: Ice Climbers, Falco, Olimar, apparently Fox)...

Toon Link, Wario, Lucario, and Dedede are ranked higher than Fox and Wolf. Fox and Wolf do decently against MK while the rest are -2 or worse against him. Pikachu should also be Top Tier if what you're saying was true, as he's the only character argued to have close to an even MU with him.

 

[Thinkaman]

Let's talk Joker matchups, to be constructive while bowing to the new hotness. What looks good, what looks bad?

Rebel's Guard against Snake greandes was brutal, and seemed greater in magnitude than any abuse Joker suffered recovering against Nikita. Joker up-b was also a clear danger to recovering high.

 

[Arthur97]

Well all it's specials (minus Up-B) are gimmicky in their own way.
You don't necessary need a mechanic built across in your moveset if your gameplan heavily functions out of the norm.
Just look at Megaman and Pac-Man.

Unique specials are not gimmicks. Completely changing your attributes after taking a little damage is. Special button inputs is. Belly armor is. Ink is. Bonus Fruit. Not so much.

 

[Ziodyne 21]

Let's talk Joker matchups, to be constructive while bowing to the new hotness. What looks good, what looks bad?

Rebel's Guard against Snake greandes was brutal, and seemed greater in magnitude than any abuse Joker suffered recovering against Nikita. Joker up-b was also a clear danger to recovering high.

I figured Rebel Guard would be a nightmare for Snake lol. Snakes general playstlye gives Joker ample opportunity to fill his Arsene meter and he does have the tools to deal with Snake

Well the only MU's MKleo does use Joker for is electric rats. So I assume they are bad for him. Then again with the Pichu nerfs that one may now be better.

 

[Idon]

Well the only MU's MKleo does use Joker for is electric rats. So I assume they are bad for him. Then again with the Pichu nerfs that one may now be better

Joker might be able to do more aerials on the grounded rats, but honestly don't see the MU getting much better for him.

 

[Jampman]

Fatality is solo-maining Falcon again and has nothing but optimism for the character, and it seems completely justified. He's made it clear on stream that Falcon has been pushed into the top of his personal high tier, with many of his previously even MUs going in Falcon's favor, or losing MUs being made more balanced. He's confident that he'll start appearing in top 8s again and even win a major.

Falcon's followup game has become a lot richer due to the patch, with low-percent bair now comboing into grab and side-b, the latter of which has real combos into aerials now. Side-b's armor increase also now allows it to power through a lot of SH aerials it couldn't before, and while it can still whiff, it whiffs far less. Fatality didn't explore up-tilt too much but landing up-air > up-tilt > ff dair at the ledge has made a return, and the move generally just has a real role in Falcon's followup game now. F-tilt's change allows it to set up for tech chases/jab resets earlier, and can be comboed into from nair 1 > bair at 0, among other things. The angle it launches at at that percent combined with the knockback speed is going to lead into a lot of missed techs in the heat of battle IMO; Fatality's already labbed out an 80% true sequence from it. Attack cancel bair death combos start working earlier, and while they may stop working earlier, it flat out kills at respectable percents now. The knee change means nair 1 > knee and up-air > knee are far more consistent to land and so Falcon is going to be closing stocks out sub-100% far more reliably. I think it's the sleeper biggest buff to Falcon.

Everything Falcon hated in the previous patch has been toned down: Wolf and Peach can't zone him as well, Olimar can't punish OOS as easily, Olimar and Pichu's hurtbox changes mean nair 1 setups have become a lot more reliable on them. He's a big winner.

In Leo's interview at SNS he mentioned how losing neutral once in this game can be a death sentence, and I wouldn't be surprised if the new Falcon becomes the poster boy of that idea.

Speaking of Leo, the boy just makes the correct decisions over and over and presses his advantage amazingly well, not surprised Joker gels well with him.

 

[PK Bash]

Unique specials are not gimmicks. Completely changing your attributes after taking a little damage is. Special button inputs is. Belly armor is. Ink is. Bonus Fruit. Not so much.

I wouldn't be so quick to call unique mechanics "gimmicks". A gimmick in this sense is some novelty that doesn't offer any kind of real depth to the game. But these mechanics you list have a pretty important influence on the dynamic of the game and change how you play. Incineroar taunting after every move is a gimmick. Revenge is not.

Unique mechanics are no more "gimmicky" than unique specials providing they add depth to the gameplay - which all of these examples do.

I apologise for nitpicking but I really don't like the word gimmick, which seems these days to have been widely adopted to deride anything a given individual does not enjoy, regardless of how gimmicky it actually is.

P.S. Joker is nutty and has a lot of really subtle dumb stuff, e.g. his hurtbox shifting during many of his animations making him much safer than the situation would suggest (Ness FAir oos will totally whiff on Joker when he hits shield with certain aerials even unspaced or enters his dash animation). He ain't busted but some are downplaying just how good he truly is imo.

 

[williamsga555]

While I don't want to jump aboard the Maybe Joker's too good though? train, I do have one complaint about his design in Ultimate:

His design.

Like, literally his visual design when Arsene is out. Arsene is this giant, smoky, particle-laden thing that completely envelops Joker's character model while active. I'm gonna be honest, I have a miserable time discerning where Joker's hurtboxes are while Arsene is active, and find myself mis-spacing things much more than usual. I would really love to have some of his visual artifacts toned down before I would make any direct balance changes, but that might be because my eyes are terrible.

 

[DunnoBro]

I could have sworn there was a change that primarily affected dragdown uair spikes. I could just be conflating jab-lock changes with the initial Sheik nerf, which was definitely to uair's knockback/damage.

There was a universal change just as the wii u version came out. But it was really hard to ff uair on 3ds controls so we never really got to see the potential.

 

[Ziodyne 21]

I dunno. There is an argument that Joker's suceess is mostly due to MKleo, and I can see that argument. The guy is just a umfamthomably phemomal player who can take any character he wants to play and go beyond the distance with them. Once he thinks he has peaked or stagnated with one character. He picks up antother one and starts dominating all over again.

However as of 3.1.0 it looks like other pro players intrested in trying him. Void possibly now he no longer wants to main Pichu. (I can see as a former Sheik man) plus we possibly have Tweek and Zackray too. I am saying Joker has potential, true even if the best player in the world now uses him or not.

 

[Shaya]

Joker was subtle.
There was no instant "press this button half a stage away and kill someone" that was easily replicable after 5 minutes in training mode.
People observe FF Fair1 or Dair kill confirms and go "that's not that new, heaps of chars can do this". And they're not wrong. Anyone with smash experience would go "that's cool, but you'll get punched in the **** for going for this one confirm over and over and over and over and over again; wait, that's too many overs, you're already dead".
Top level Joker seems free to do it over and over and over again.
Let me make this clear: THIS ISN'T "EASY" TO ACHIEVE, but done "well" it has close to nil counterplay. It's kinda like watching smart neutral Meta Knight in Brawl - only 1/100 MK mains were that good (ZeRo's MK vs Larry/DEHF Falco and somehow avoiding basically every laser, side-b/other cqc tools while still getting pressuring attacks out is what visually comes to mind right now).
This is unlike Bayo, who could fall back on Witch Time, and shut down most of the cast with just full hop and doing held-nair. This is a heaven's send in contrast, but he's still a demon/arguably worse in other ways.


Joker has many privileges and these usually difficult things for most characters to get without being telegraphed or easily punished is negligible for Joker. Sheik is compared to often, remember how Sheik lost the grab confirm strength? Yet Joker gets to loop you for 60-80% and can kill you at these percents with 50/50 attempts with Arsene. Not once, like Cloud could, but over and over and over again for a LARGE AMOUNT OF GAME TIME.

Why can they get away with this? Because the character's animations are busted/were not done with enough (at this stage, with their track record, I feel "any" might be accurate) forethought in mind.
Joker does a SH FF aerial from an extremely thin/skinny neutral position, throws out those legs, lands, and then is back into a thin/small hurtbox position. He is more obnoxious to hit when he's right in front of your face than Pichu - and you might cringe thinking I'm exaggerating hard here - Pichu sneaks right in at point blank range and avoids something at point blank - your character likely has a move that'll hit them (the entirety of my logic that ZSS does fine/more than OK in this match up is by virtue of Pichu needing to be a god to not get boost kicked for trying to abuse this character quirk), while Joker sneaks in the same way but ends up at sword's range+ distance safety afterwards. Specific zoning/projectile tools will have an easier time hitting Joker than Pichu, to be fair.

It's incredibly disingenuous "power" for a character to be given, but the modern dev team/BandaiNamco seem incapable of not giving characters this obnoxious strain of power that is extremely difficult to balance without neutering them of a lot of fun/options/capabilities they had (Cloud and Bayo in a nutshell).

It's something that I find quite detestable - "sole Sakurai" characters all had natural holes or blind spots in their attacks. A neutral game can be amassed to focus on the particular moves that are vulnerable if other ones are not. Zero Suit can't just fair1 attempt over and over on anyone, even with better mobility, her hurtbox and air time leave her significantly more vulnerable. But Joker: over and over and over and over again, and then you die.

I like the dynamic of Arsene, personally, I think it's overtuned, but having such a potent quirk is very cool. It's not that far different from Wario having a waft (any stray hit can be death, you need to be passive for as long as they're wiling to hold onto it). Barring the fact Wario tries once and if he fails it's over, while Joker gets to keep trying the same thing, effectively over and over and over and over again.

I think at this point you'll be getting annoyed by my motif.

If Joker's Arsene time was halved (or even more) he'd still be insanely good - but it would incentivise (or allow) the intended counter-game play of being passive and waiting out the timer.
Regular Joker would still be stupidly capable of playing passive and safe himself - but it might result in real match up issues or seeing Joker remain on the back-foot rather than doing 3-stock comebacks in 20 seconds. Something only remotely comparable to Bayo at 100%+ rage on Town and City in Smash4.

Great design.
Disgusting implementation.
Privileges he doesn't need to be great but has them anyway.

It feels unlikely they're going to re-do his animations so he can actually be whiff punished; but as they did so for Pichu and Ganon for varying reasons, maybe they will.
Landing lag animations, neutral stances "widened", hurtboxes for legs and torso should be in line with other human characters even if he's "smaller".

After his neutral game stops having so many "free passes", other questionable aspects like Rebel Guard/Arsene's Power Level/Arsene up-time would be a lot more "sane" to evaluate. Instead atm I feel it's the subtle-**** that is actually infuriating people BEFORE they let themselves get arsene kill confirmed at 50%.
... Even with the aforementioned, doubling the speed at which Arsene drains (+stray weak hits like ZSS 6% zair not filling half their gauge too, perhaps) is probably necessary. I believe that's better than making Arsene a wet noodle like Cloud limit.

</biasedkneejerkrantover>

 

[Baby_Sneak]

Maybe we should see it as this:

Characters are like pencils, pens or whatevers used to make marks. Instruments and tools.

You may write your name, draw a circle, stick figure, etc.

In the hands of a draftsman, they draw a first-person perspective of walking through Times Square in New York.

"The draftsman is amazing, the pencil is just a pencil."

"Mkleo is incredibly elite, joker is just another character"

These people are taking the same tools we have and just showing their capabilities. With a pencil (provided your skill and experience), you can draw an incredibly detailed scenery too. With Joker (provided your skill and experience), you can perform nearly as equal as mkleo.

They're not pulling out hacks and have tools we don't have.

If mkleo can repeat his success with another character, that means there's more characters that have high capabilities.

 

[KakuCP9]

I personally find it humorous that people want Joker to be thiccer as means to balance him (at least the people who don't play him).

 

[Y2Kay]

It definitely seems like Greninja is built much better than most to deal with Joker. I'd be hesistant to say Greninja wins or anything, but I have been seeing so many Jokers struggle with him in this first month. Greninja's mid range dominance seems like its too much for Joker to handle most of the time, his Projectiles are not the greatest at forcing approaches, at least for Greninja. Greninja's better mobility and small size makes Joker more prone to whiff, and that's the last thing you need when fighting Greninja.

 

[Rizen]

Someone mentioned 's MUs. I can talk about 2 of them.

I don't have as much experience with Link as YL but I got the impression Joker wins this. Joker's quick enough to slip through Link's defenses and knock him around. Link has the advantage in sword length but a lot of blind spots. Joker's advantage, especially with Arsene is reminiscent of Sheik's were he can quickly adapt to your movement. In many ways it is like a watered down SSB4 Sheik MU, which Link hated.
Link is forced to make reads and he has a nice big sword for it. Nair is always a great gtfo tool. Link definitely can win if he outplays Joker but he has to be the smarter player. Both characters are nasty to recover vs offstage.

IMO YL has a slight advantage. Why? Because he can wall joker better than almost every other character. Rebel's guard is as much of a liability as it is a tool. YL's spam is extremely noncommittal and I've gotten multiple KOs by Fsmashing RG's endlag. Joker gets some meter but at the price of being KOed or at least comboed. The counter attack only hits if you're near him. Joker with Arsene is obviously harder and he gets a reflector but is always on a ticking clock. YL doesn't really care if his projectiles are reflected; at worst he takes some chip damage but he often is moving around throwing more stuff out. Joker gets great reward of arsene hits but still has to weave through a storm of projectiles.

YL is vulnerable when going in for kills. There's no reason to do this however when Arsene's out. YL has the luxury of playing defensively until Joker's alone again. Still, anytime you're not killing Joker you're fueling another Arsene and YL struggles to kill. Joker can kill much earlier off smart plays so the match is only slightly in YL's favor.

 

[Ziodyne 21]

Btw Its surpisded But Joker has became one of / worst MU's?. At both Momocon and Smash and Splash MKleo went though a gautnlet of Peach players to win them both and he convincingly wrecked every, single, one. Before I could not even comprehend that Peach could be edgegaurded and gimped that effortlessly never mind at all. But that is seemingly the gift of Rebel Guard, and that Joker can go surpisingly deep down for it.
The MU is likely more of a struggle now in 3.1.0 now with their nerfs

 

[Shaya]

I personally find it humorous that people want Joker to be thiccer as means to balance him (at least the people who don't play him).

There is a long list of really good things Joker has that people will enjoy becoming good with / figuring out how to use efficiently. In the same way an opponent will learn to mitigate the strength of those tools as a skillset. Developing counter play and learning match ups on these merits is cool and fun.

I've long stopped thinking about Smash Bros balance purely in terms of just number strength. Animations and motions from/during actions are significantly more impactful when all the cast are generally within the same small subset of numbers. ZSS' match ups vs Bayo and Cloud in S4 being extra stupid purely because both of them had a tumble animation that shifted them out of boost kick; completely unique to them. No number change fixes that, but we'd all agree it was incredibly asinine and there was nothing a ZSS could do but pray (and risk it) anyway.

This type of power is oft given for "free" without an intention from a player (most of the time). And thus, it likely shouldn't exist.
(Of course what I'm describing with Joker is a situation the animation/model-power creep that allows it to becomes an abusive aspect of their neutral; without the drawback of having nil range like Pichu, nor lacking top tier mobility like Luigi, nor having extreme deficiencies in start up or landings like [s4] Sonic).

Being forced to swing at air (instead of 'where they are') not as a mix up or as a means of conditioning, but because you virtually cannot encroach the character's zone to pressure, even if they attack, because the difference between completely whiffing in front of their face while they're almost out of cooldown or being "lucky" and hitting is a near-single frame transition (and unlike 2framing gets up or ledge grabs, in neutral there's little telegraphing).
Very few seem to ever enjoy this aspect of Smash and it's a strong part of match up nuance, but again, should always come with draw backs.

 

[Nobie]

Complexity is a funny thing in game balance, because from what I've seen, many people only value a high-complexity character if mastering that complexity results in a dominant top tier character.

You'll get people who love Shulk purely for the sake of learning the fine nuances of Monado, or someone who really wants to know the ins and outs of Greninja's combos, but there's a prevailing sentiment of "Why choose a complex high tier when I can choose a simple top tier?" And it's not necessarily wrong to think that way, but I feel like a lot of people who complain about characters not being complex enough for them really only want a complex character if it nets them an outsized reward.

 

[Krysco]

Speaking of Joker's animations messing with his hurtbox, I just learned tonight that when Joker is charging his fsmash, Inkling's roller can't hit him. He moves forward and gets hit by it once the charge is done but it's still rather weird. Gets me wondering if there's other moves, namely grabs that could outright miss during the charge and get punished for it.

 

[Shaya]

Complexity is a funny thing in game balance, because from what I've seen, many people only value a high-complexity character if mastering that complexity results in a dominant top tier character.

You'll get people who love Shulk purely for the sake of learning the fine nuances of Monado, or someone who really wants to know the ins and outs of Greninja's combos, but there's a prevailing sentiment of "Why choose a complex high tier when I can choose a simple top tier?" And it's not necessarily wrong to think that way, but I feel like a lot of people who complain about characters not being complex enough for them really only want a complex character if it nets them an outsized reward.

I believe complexity should be rewarded.
But the complexity has to go both ways, not just for the user but for the opponent.

Good example (imo): Snake's grenades. Shulk's abnormally bad start-up frame data.
Bad: Joker getting to throw out a kill confirm attempt 2-3 times a second whilst hurtbox shifting comparable to shulk's range while doing it, but it's tied to "excellent execution" and "insane reactive ability" (historically the most-frequent "winner" deciding aspect of Smash; but Ultimate has otherwise been a game with intent of making at least the latter aspect less pronounced).

I want to understand what those drawbacks (even if complex) are to Joker, without it being one of "consistently outplaying your opponent significantly", "getting lucky" or having really silly expectations of somehow being able to handle an onslaught of shield-positive + shield-breaking capable aggression on one of the most mobile characters in the cast. Match up ones are likely to exist, and in the end as long as they exist everything will be fine. I can see what Greninja has to make things difficult; but the overtuned aspects of Arsene might be so skewed that it doesn't really matter (like bayo vs ness/swordies/diddy in S4).

I also really doubt this will persevere as a problem - we'll all get better at it, we'll learn the characters that are most suitable and we likely have at least another year of balance patches. I get upset seeing similar mistakes being made by the dev team with new/updated characters over and over again.

I hate being scared of DLC.

 

[|RK|]

Smash DLC being too complex really rubs up against the conceit of Smash, which is a simple and accessible core game with very easily understood characters for everyone involved. When I first played against Bayo (which was in Ultimate btw, I didn't even play Smash 4) I had no idea what was going on.

Does it though? Sakurai said in an interview that each character pretty much has a system designed for them, and I think that's really cool. I feel like people are just used to the base roster and don't acknowledge how unique the whole cast has been since like, the start.

Kirby obviously has copy abilities, which is so unique that he's one of the chars that took the longest to develop (and has to be adjusted with every new char).

Sheik/Zelda in Melee introduced a transformation mechanic. Relatively tame compared to what follows.

Lucario brought in aura, a whole system that makes him play differently at different percents.

Shulk in Smash 4 brought the Monado Arts, which has different attributes and different playstyles for each. Also, Pac Man and DH... what even are those?

They've always tried to make characters unique in some way. Joker, Bayo, etc. are nothing new. That's one of the coolest parts about Smash imo.

 

[KakuCP9]

There is a long list of really good things Joker has that people will enjoy becoming good with / figuring out how to use efficiently. In the same way an opponent will learn to mitigate the strength of those tools as a skillset. Developing counter play and learning match ups on these merits is cool and fun.

I've long stopped thinking about Smash Bros balance purely in terms of just number strength. Animations and motions from/during actions are significantly more impactful when all the cast are generally within the same small subset of numbers. ZSS' match ups vs Bayo and Cloud in S4 being extra stupid purely because both of them had a tumble animation that shifted them out of boost kick; completely unique to them. No number change fixes that, but we'd all agree it was incredibly asinine and there was nothing a ZSS could do but pray (and risk it) anyway.

This type of power is oft given for "free" without an intention from a player (most of the time). And thus, it likely shouldn't exist.
(Of course what I'm describing with Joker is a situation the animation/model-power creep that allows it to becomes an abusive aspect of their neutral; without the drawback of having nil range like Pichu, nor lacking top tier mobility like Luigi, nor having extreme deficiencies in start up or landings like Sonic).

Being forced to swing at air (instead of 'where they are') not as a mix up or as a means of conditioning, but because you virtually cannot encroach the character's zone to pressure, even if they attack, because the difference between completely whiffing in front of their face while they're almost out of cooldown or being "lucky" and hitting is a near-single frame transition (and unlike 2framing gets up or ledge grabs, in neutral there's little telegraphing).
No one enjoys this game play, except maybe the guy who's winning from it.

I mostly meant it in jest, though with the rise Pichu and Olimar, I as well don't like how some characters can avoid/complicate certain neutral/pressure senarios just by virtue of their hurtbox since it obfuscates match ups without rhyme or reason. If Joker's bustedness is the result of too many subtle and kinda-sorta busted attributes rather than very clear broken ones, then a hurtbox fix might prevent him from being truly unhealthy for the game (at least barely).

 

[|RK|]

Also, since I see that we're talking about Joker balance...

People are really handwaving away the fact that Pichu and Pikachu do well/win the Joker MU. It's very easy to fall into the trap of listing a character's strengths as we talk about how busted they are, but it eventually becomes confirmation bias.

Hell, after seeing Blank's thoughts on future balance (saying Joker had the best MU spread in the top 10), I'm thinking that she and others are looking past a lot. For example, how Inkling (previously thought to be #1 in the game just earlier this year) can struggle vs characters like Bowser and King Dedede.

Anyways, I may as well give my perspective on Joker's weaknesses:

1) He really doesn't like small characters. A lot of his moves go too high and whiff, or they're really unsafe on shield. The exception being his aerials, and only really his aerials (or max-spaced moves on their last frames). This is why you'll generally see a lot of Joker in the air, since that's where his safest stuff is.

Oh, and at least as far as Kirby (I haven't played the rats vs Joker), fair 1 usmash doesn't appear to be true. At least, it doesn't kill when it is. Fair 1 uair is the go to vs some chars, and idk if it's true or if it's just the only other thing. Possibly the same for other small/light chars? (Kirby and Pika weigh the same, mind).

2) He really doesn't have a way to approach or force approaches. Leo plays around this super well, but his set vs Marss at GOML(?), this weakness was on full display. Basically, Leo wants to play as evasively as possible with Joker & punish overextensions. When Marss had the lead, he was able to keep playing to his tempo, staying really safe from Joker doing much of anything.

Spoiler: vs Marss analysis

Now, you watch Smash n' Splash - Leo takes the first stock in every single game. The number one strategy of chars that can be camped easily is to straight up take the lead and force the opponent to fight you from there. Cuz from there, you can take advantage of you character's strengths - godlike boxing, being hard to hit, etc. For Joker, it's being hard to hit.

Then from there, you take Rebel's Guard into account. I always said that Witch Time was the best move in Bayo's arsenal in S4 (though some said fair 1 or whatever) because it makes you second guess neutral interactions. Let's say you're down a stock vs the best player in the world and hitting him at the wrong time will give him a stronger version of his character. Also, this character happens to be one of the most slippery and hard to hit in the game. Now that's obnoxious - and in Marss's case, consider his description of his playstyle: extremely campy.

Now, you're forced to commit to hitting a character that you can't touch half the time, and the other half you may be making him stronger.

IMO Leo's smart style is also why you don't really see people who are nearly as good with Joker yet. Everyone else is going to approach, try to force neutral, make reads... and Joker's speed will make it seem possible, but it won't be close yet.

...

Oh, as for Peach/Daisy - Samsora and Myran were complaining on Twitter the other day about how a full combo from their characters gives Joker free Arsene. It's one of those things where their strong combo game becomes a double-edged sword. And then Peach/Daisy in particular are also really susceptible to counters due to their recoveries. Leo just takes advantage of that by forcing them to respect the counter and then hitting them in their patience.

(Plus OMG his usage of Gun is so smart. Every Joker I've given advice, I have to mention Gun now - it's crazy that people don't use it tbqh)

 

[TTTTTsd]

I'll say I don't disagree with most of the Joker analysis but I'll be that guy and say that reducing the time of Arsene's presence would by proxy improve his survival chances offstage assuming you hit him, its a particular deadzone nobody's really explored in his kit (the fact that his recovery is legitimately completely awful w/ Arsene out), but its also not one that comes up incredibly often, either? Hard to describe, but worth considering.

 

[KakuCP9]

But if his neutral and positive state are weakened considerably, then any gains in survivabilty would be moot. Plus Joker's recovery is still very exploitable even without Arsene since 9 times out of 10, he has to recover below the stage at a certain angle due to his tether and if a character has wide-coverage/long-lasting hitboxes to throw, they can intercept and even KO Joker. Its sightly less exploitable, but not enough to be considered a boon over Arsene's everything.

 

[TTTTTsd]

But if his neutral and positive state are weakened considerably, then any gains in survivabilty would be moot. Plus Joker's recovery is still very exploitable even without Arsene since 9 times out of 10, he has to recover below the stage at a certain angle due to his tether and if a character has wide-coverage/long-lasting hitboxes to throw, they can intercept and even KO Joker. Its sightly less exploitable, but not enough to be considered a boon over Arsene's everything.

While I do agree, I think "slightly less" is untrue, its significantly less. The ease of 2 framing Arsene is seriously insane, its so easy people even do it by accident trying to just cover the ledge or fill time.

Its a very, very weird Up+B

 

[KakuCP9]

While I do agree, I think "slightly less" is untrue, its significantly less. The ease of 2 framing Arsene is seriously insane, its so easy people even do it by accident trying to just cover the ledge or fill time.

Its a very, very weird Up+B

Fair enough, Arsene Up-b is really,really bad. Though I joke that it is a 500IQ design choice to make Arsene recovery terrible in an attempt to offset everything else that's busted about him (it clearly doesn't else we wouldn't be talking about Joker like this).

 

[Anomika]

It's almost as if Joker with Arsene pops up before grabbing the ledge. 2-framing (if it is) is almost too consistent to pull off. But I'm actually OK with that. It makes Joker go offstage or get comboed from some moves and lose his gauge a bit while getting damaged.

 

[bc1910]

ZSS has an annoyingly narrow hurtbox as well to be fair, particularly in certain hitstun states. Try hitting her with a multi hit move on a platform or locking her with a non-stubby character’s jab.

Her landing hurtboxes are easier to hit than Joker’s, which admittedly is a big deal. She’s also a bit taller and much lighter which hurts her survivability. Why is Joker so heavy, come to think of it?

It’d be fair to make his model 10-20% bigger given his weight and beneficial animations. It might make his proportions look less weird compared to the other human characters as well. That tiny head makes me uneasy.

It definitely seems like Greninja is built much better than most to deal with Joker. I'd be hesistant to say Greninja wins or anything, but I have been seeing so many Jokers struggle with him in this first month. Greninja's mid range dominance seems like its too much for Joker to handle most of the time, his Projectiles are not the greatest at forcing approaches, at least for Greninja. Greninja's better mobility and small size makes Joker more prone to whiff, and that's the last thing you need when fighting Greninja.

I’d go one further and say Gren should win it, if only slightly.

Joker’s mobility stats outside his incredible fast fall speed boil down to “good run speed, actually pretty average everything else”. His initial dash is particularly disappointing, I remember noting that as soon as he came out. Gren outdoes him in every area except fast fall speed, where he’s one of the few characters who at least can compete with Joker’s 90% multiplier since his regular fall speed is high. I don’t have the stats to hand but Gren has fall speeds around 1.9/2.9 regular/fast vs Joker’s 1.6/3.06. The mobility advantage allows Gren to press advantage effectively, approach Joker, run away from Arsene etc etc. It also gives Gren the ability to abuse Joker’s poor OoS options (a weakness they share) more easily than vice versa since he is better at chasing Joker down while also being better at running away. Gren is one of the few characters who can actually punish Joker for countering projectiles from long range, without having to commit to full hop forward drift ie Thunder Jolt (still a good tactic and a big part of why Pika and Pichu do well too). Greninja’s run speed is good enough and shurikens have low enough ending lag for him to punish the counterattack’s ending lag from a fair distance away regardless of the shuriken charge level.

Greninja has precise hitboxes in terms of frame data but they have significantly buffed range and functionality from S4. His ground moves sweep low to the ground and hit Joker during his landing animations. Nair hits all around, is intuitive to use and safe on Joker’s shield. Smashes are massive, Fair is massive, Bair hurtbox shifts while lingering. These factors help Gren mitigate the issue of Joker’s small character model.

Greninja also has some useful gimmicks in the MU such as Substitute to hit downward gun or Hydro Pump to mess up Arsene recovery pre-invincibility startup. Having a good advantage state and generally strong edge guarding helps as well.

I haven’t gone into Joker’s advantages much since there’s been plenty of discussion on those, suffice to say they’re enough to bring the MU close to even though Greninja should hold a slight advantage overall. I’d like to see this MU play out more at high level.

 

[ShadowTheHedgehogZ]

I don't know if this is the right spot to do it but who cares. How do I beat Joker and Shulk? I often find myself losing against them most of the time even with a lead. And it doesn't really help that I don't have much experience fighting them. Any tips or tricks to help me out?

 

[DelugeFGC]

I don't know if this is the right spot to do it but who cares. How do I beat Joker and Shulk? I often find myself losing against them most of the time even with a lead. And it doesn't really help that I don't have much experience fighting them. Any tips or tricks to help me out?

I will DM you on the matter to keep it out of the thread, but I don't mind helping you out as I use both characters quite a lot. Joker is actually my secondary main at this moment due to Olimar's nerfs + shield problems making him not competitively viable to solo main across all MU's, prior to him that slot belonged to Shulk (who is now one of my secondaries / CP's) so I do have a fair bit of experience with them. Though I won't derail the thread going into detail here as it's not the place for it I don't think.

DM'd.

 

[PK Gaming]

Like I said before, Joker is undoubtedly the best character in the game, but I haven't seen enough people talk about his disadvantage. No, not Arsene Up B (which is obvious) but the fact he takes a considerable amount of damage due to his attributes. His disadvantage state is bad enough to the point where even P.T (who isn't exactly that meta) can reasonably pressure him. I'm not trying to downplay the character (again, best character), but rather, I think we'll see people optimize their punishes versus Joker as time goes on. Posts like this might have been completely wrong, but the underlying idea was right. Things will let up, a bit.

Joker has many privileges and these usually difficult things for most characters to get without being telegraphed or easily punished is negligible for Joker. Sheik is compared to often, remember how Sheik lost the grab confirm strength? Yet Joker gets to loop you for 60-80% and can kill you at these percents with 50/50 attempts with Arsene. Not once, like Cloud could, but over and over and over again for a LARGE AMOUNT OF GAME TIME.

His throw loops should go. I feel like they weren't confident his character could stand on his own in the metagame so gave him a "reasonably popular tool" that past Smash characters had without really thinking about the consequences.