Intro:
So unlike most older characters; especially those that have actually seen so much screen time already, we got a lot of information from @Zipzo 's two day demo attendance about what is the final "build" for Marth, which short of DLC or other updates will not change.
However I would be wary of feeling he'll be completely the same in the WiiU version, we shouldn't overly speculate but we can be keen. Given just general development methods, by the time we had reached E3 demos the 3DS version of the game would've had to be almost complete or coming close to being ready to print. It would not be an underestimate to say that the game would not have seen any changes in the past three+ months whatsoever. All along I felt this meant that Marth would likely maintain these "nerfs" we saw originally at E3 and otherwise, and from what I've seen we're right. Characters like Zero Suit Samus and Bowser don't seem to have had any alterations, and neither has Marth (Zipzo's information seemed more like confirmations of what we knew rather than new insight).
Anyone who's been around here for a while, or that sees me commenting on Marth in Smash 4 would've seen a pessimistic or critical view. I'm still in that pile, but it shouldn't be something that slows us down in any true capacity, great minds and thinking can achieve many things. My goals here right now is to think outside the box, try to understand Sakurai's design choices and decisions throughout the whole game, not just Marth and see what we can muster.
Fallacy Check / Notion Promotion:
If you keep all these things in mind we can save ourselves time. On hindsight I burbled here a lot, but the first three points are most concerning and the rest is kinda background info/opinions.
Points of Interest:
From Zipzo's AMA recently.
Noticeable changes between Melee to Brawl:
Nerfs: Down Air, Forward Tilt, Up Tilt, Jab, Shield Breaker, Forward Smash, Grab Range. "comparative range"
Buffs: Dolphin Slash, Counter, Dancing Blade (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), Down Smash, Up Smash, Down Tilt, Neutral Air, Back Air, Up Air (it does kill)
Variable: Forward air tipper "killing" rather than upwards/combo starter, down tilt pushing you forward on repeats.
What I think we're seeing in Smash 4
Nerfs: Forward Air, Dancing Blade, Range [again, hard and a comparator thing]
Buffs: Rolls (at least back roll), Dash speed, Weight?, Dolphin Slash having less landing lag?, counter buffed (in hopefully ways that make it usable, not just zomg it can kill people who throw out a 30% move at you), shieldbreaker apparently buffed (with shields nerfed to boot?), Down air landing lag?, Back Air?, Kill Throws? (although %damage on throws seems the same... which seems disingenuous)
Prayers: Dolphin Slash is still invincible, our dash to shield animation is shorter/fairer (THIS IS HUGE ACTUALLY AND MEANS A LOT MORE THAN OTHER THINGS. WE HAD THE WORST ONE IN BRAWL), we still have a good grab range, walk and aerial mobility. Triple jump glitch or the carry-on lag of dolphin slash doesn't hamper our ability to get off the ledge.
Intuitions
I guess this is where I say we "all" start to talk, but here we go...
Marth will be able to compete off stage/against enemy recoveries even better than in Brawl. A single forward air, back air ("easy") could be stocks in ways similar to Melee that we didn't have before in Brawl. People aiming for the ledge may be able to get hit by our on-stage moves such as down tilt and forward smash also likely equating to stocks.
Marth has always found grabs. His inability to capitalise on them at higher percent really sucked. The ability to kill with them may help us out in a lot of ways. However, opponent's having to respect us less in the air when close to the ground means one of our near sure-fire ways of getting grabs (landing and grabbing rather than using an aerial) could be gone.
If shields are weaker and shieldbreaker is buffed, we may find fantastic ground and aerial approach mix ups that could get us stocks, straight up.
Rolls being better in general hurts us by any previous game's standards. But if the prevalence of the option is so apparent that it's chosen over taking hits on shield, then our apparently buffed dash speed could really mean a lot for us. Furthermore our backroll being very very good (we know this) could be a huge save for us in a lot of ways too.
Our range being hit again is a bit of a pisser, especially when we have some speed nerfs. As we've seen, some characters have exceptional range in this game still (Zero Suit Samus - I'm looking at you) and their ability to keep us out could be insurmountable for us; especially if resetting to neutral with rolls is that powerful.
Getting through projectiles via the air may be outright impossible. If we cannot get a punishment or positional advantage from reacting to a projectile and ff fair it to clash and rush down we could be in a lot of trouble. It seems most characters don't have auto cancels on projectile specials and projectiles are laggier/weaker it seems from some of the veterans but that means absolutely nothing about everyone else we're yet to learn more of.
Dancing Blade nerfs means our ground game versatility from Brawl is cut (where the fact that most character's dash options were weak and the weakness of our huge dash to shield animation seems justified) in ways we won't yet understand. It's primary purpose in brawl was our bread and butter punishment option, if it maintains its start up and near improbability of getting out of it with DI it'll still be great but require more skill. It's weakness to being rolled into on reaction/whiff will be more prevalent for sure.
Our ability to frame trap / cover options against grounded opponents may be weaker, but what we do against opponents in the air from the ground I foresee as changing little. Forward Air and Back Air should still be near impossible to beat vertically and mostly horizontally from above for everyone. Our juggling should still be quite dominant.
I will come into Smash4 thinking of our moveset in this type of way:
Worrying characters/match ups:
Bowser: Weight and range. His punishments on us could be very potent. Could be huge shieldbreaker fodder though! A horizontal primed recovery could get us gimps/stocks. Ditto to Donkey Kong
Zero Suit: Her moveset is way too safe/long range and we may not have any reliable punishment options on her because of it, getting through all of her moves and projectiles and she still has a great roll/jump to reset after all the hard work. Vertical recoveries will be harder for us to deal with IMO.
Kirby: Close range speed and great grab game. Maybe not bad at all, perhaps his bair will be harder for us to punish from the ground than it was in Brawl, which would hurt us a lot.
Sonic: Kinda buffed from Brawl? We're kinda nerfed? ughh. It's so easy for him to rush us down in Brawl and boosted kill power for him will only make it worse. But certain mechanical changes may not serve him well. Will likely still have the best mobility options overall in the game though.
Megaman: A zoning character with apparently good weight, range and recovery. Falco was always complicated for us, although ultimately even-ish. Something similar with better weight/recovery doesn't sound nice.
Dedede, Zard, Palutena, Shulk, Yoshi are looking dangerous for various reasons, but who knows.
@C.J.
So unlike most older characters; especially those that have actually seen so much screen time already, we got a lot of information from @Zipzo 's two day demo attendance about what is the final "build" for Marth, which short of DLC or other updates will not change.
However I would be wary of feeling he'll be completely the same in the WiiU version, we shouldn't overly speculate but we can be keen. Given just general development methods, by the time we had reached E3 demos the 3DS version of the game would've had to be almost complete or coming close to being ready to print. It would not be an underestimate to say that the game would not have seen any changes in the past three+ months whatsoever. All along I felt this meant that Marth would likely maintain these "nerfs" we saw originally at E3 and otherwise, and from what I've seen we're right. Characters like Zero Suit Samus and Bowser don't seem to have had any alterations, and neither has Marth (Zipzo's information seemed more like confirmations of what we knew rather than new insight).
Anyone who's been around here for a while, or that sees me commenting on Marth in Smash 4 would've seen a pessimistic or critical view. I'm still in that pile, but it shouldn't be something that slows us down in any true capacity, great minds and thinking can achieve many things. My goals here right now is to think outside the box, try to understand Sakurai's design choices and decisions throughout the whole game, not just Marth and see what we can muster.
Fallacy Check / Notion Promotion:
If you keep all these things in mind we can save ourselves time. On hindsight I burbled here a lot, but the first three points are most concerning and the rest is kinda background info/opinions.
- Balance is relative. Literal changes that are objectively weakening the character does not mean "Low Tier" or otherwise. Marth may be worse than in Brawl/Melee, but so could the general power level of everyone else.
- Better or worse in comparison to other games. Not something you can conclude now or anytime soon. I'm pretty vehement in saying Marth is a "better" character in Brawl than he is in Melee, but it took me many many years to draw that conclusion.
- In every game thus far, character viability has stemmed primarily from game mechanic "abuse", at base level most characters seem to be on a similar plain with a relatively wide middle tier. What most heavily impacts characters are invalidations, [often only] single shortfalls that cripple them; or (for lack of a better term) monopolising options such as chain grabs or nonspecific "bull ****".
- Marth is high/top tier in two games and is touted as a character with no weaknesses. For being dominant in two games it all but seemed inevitable "large" changes would come in to normalise him. A jack of all trades / no weakness character isn't objectively fair nor should be expected to exist in any game let alone a fighting one.
- Sakurai has made comments in the past about purposely designing characters in relation to others (so thinking X should probably lose to Y); there are character traits that Marth loses to by virtue of design, and he just somehow plowed through them in both games by virtue of luck or stubbornness (he does not lose to any character in Brawl, although many are very hard for him).
- Marth's design was supplemented by luck in both games, viability is match ups, and by fluke Marth really couldn't be said to lose any match up in any game. While having a ton of free stuff on other characters. His primary weakness is getting kills and being camped.
Spacey chain grabs christened him as forever relevant in Melee and other character types that would subvert him were invalidated by Sheik or the aforementioned gods. With ledges and recoveres being much weaker, his ability to edge guard a majority with ease also gave him a lot of relevance.
In Brawl, grab releases gave him kill set ups on a slew of characters for free, including the most relevant: Meta Knight (being able to kill him at 40-50% being a god send). A lot of his moves are not safe on hit at early percent but he is supplemented with a free 30-40% from any grab at 0% on every character; this is extremely significant and cannot be overstated. In contrast he had nothing overwhelming on characters like Snake, Dedede, ROB, Wolf, Donkey Kong (hint: they're heavy) and had hard times dealing with all of them. Overtime Snake's slower grab (8 frames instead of 6) and no great response to vertical tools (like full hop fair) turned that in our favour but was considered a counter to us for a long time in the early days.
What I'm trying to say here is that if Marth had not had those abilities (like most characters in the game do not), he would've likely been a much weaker character. Still good, but the whole "jack of all trades" notion would've really meant "Upper Middle Tier" at best rather than "TOP TIER".
Points of Interest:
From Zipzo's AMA recently.
- Pivot cancel is still in
YOU CAN CANCEL RUN WITH SHIELD. Was shielding the only option of dash-cancelling? As far as I could tell, yes.you CANNOT cancel the dash ANIMATION. Only running with shield. [same as Brawl]
- shield rolling is extremely fast and there's a neat little sparkle star effect when you do it and acting out of shield is as well. I think of it like a mini-wave dash. No wave dashing or l-cancelling. Just rolling baby. I noticed that some characters have better rolls than others, and some also have interesting traits.
- Attacking Shields were a lot safer. It was a real street fighter feel in that you could pressure an opponents shield without it being really cheap, akin to pressuring an opponents block. Shields also break easier so you can't just sit there in shield.
- shields definitely break quicker. It APPEARED to me that I broke Mario's shield hitting it twice in a row with a sonic dtilt.
Implications
- Ledge snap SEVERELY nerfed. I feels like Melee ledge grab.
- Back Ledge Grabbing is back
- I could not re-grab the ledge directly after letting go and jumping back in to obvious grab range.
- Did you see/experience anybody exploiting the trump mechanic as an edgeguard, like popping somebody off right when they grab the ledge, then jumping off and attacking them? Hell yeah I did! [http://smashboards.com/posts/17488391]
Noticeable changes between Melee to Brawl:
Nerfs: Down Air, Forward Tilt, Up Tilt, Jab, Shield Breaker, Forward Smash, Grab Range. "comparative range"
Buffs: Dolphin Slash, Counter, Dancing Blade (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), Down Smash, Up Smash, Down Tilt, Neutral Air, Back Air, Up Air (it does kill)
Variable: Forward air tipper "killing" rather than upwards/combo starter, down tilt pushing you forward on repeats.
What I think we're seeing in Smash 4
- Safety on shield being a real thing again. Marth was one of the few characters to claim actual safety on shield in Brawl. Shields breaking a lot easier (2 down tilts from Sonic!?) could mean significant things for us.
- Ledge play being less forgiving; less sweetspot room hurting people without good vertical recoveries and opening us up for Forward Smashes or Down tilts for "gimps".
- ...while off stage play not being "nerfed" (if anything actually more robust). This likely favours us over all. We already were screwed on the ledge (like most characters should be), but we had the beautiful ability to harass and gimp off stage better than nearly everyone else in the cast. This trump mechanic likely favours us as our aerial start up and hitboxes are still good (it seems) and fast vertical recoveries will probably give you the most off stage variability.
- Larger stages/blastzones and this "Final Destination" focus. Vertical kill options may be most prized, and gimps/spikes may be the only other strong/reliable means of killing people in the game.
- Pivot tilting. Characters with good/fast tilts and dashes will likely have the most versatility on the ground.
- Combos may not be long hence option covering/frame traps (a more Brawl focused thing) will still be relevant, something a character with disjoints and fast mobility can most abuse. Air dodges being weaker makes frame trapping even easier and hopefully we can retain our ability to do so with stuff like grab/shield, fear of fair/nair, smash attacks or down tilt.
Nerfs: Forward Air, Dancing Blade, Range [again, hard and a comparator thing]
Buffs: Rolls (at least back roll), Dash speed, Weight?, Dolphin Slash having less landing lag?, counter buffed (in hopefully ways that make it usable, not just zomg it can kill people who throw out a 30% move at you), shieldbreaker apparently buffed (with shields nerfed to boot?), Down air landing lag?, Back Air?, Kill Throws? (although %damage on throws seems the same... which seems disingenuous)
Prayers: Dolphin Slash is still invincible, our dash to shield animation is shorter/fairer (THIS IS HUGE ACTUALLY AND MEANS A LOT MORE THAN OTHER THINGS. WE HAD THE WORST ONE IN BRAWL), we still have a good grab range, walk and aerial mobility. Triple jump glitch or the carry-on lag of dolphin slash doesn't hamper our ability to get off the ledge.
Intuitions
I guess this is where I say we "all" start to talk, but here we go...
Marth will be able to compete off stage/against enemy recoveries even better than in Brawl. A single forward air, back air ("easy") could be stocks in ways similar to Melee that we didn't have before in Brawl. People aiming for the ledge may be able to get hit by our on-stage moves such as down tilt and forward smash also likely equating to stocks.
Marth has always found grabs. His inability to capitalise on them at higher percent really sucked. The ability to kill with them may help us out in a lot of ways. However, opponent's having to respect us less in the air when close to the ground means one of our near sure-fire ways of getting grabs (landing and grabbing rather than using an aerial) could be gone.
If shields are weaker and shieldbreaker is buffed, we may find fantastic ground and aerial approach mix ups that could get us stocks, straight up.
Rolls being better in general hurts us by any previous game's standards. But if the prevalence of the option is so apparent that it's chosen over taking hits on shield, then our apparently buffed dash speed could really mean a lot for us. Furthermore our backroll being very very good (we know this) could be a huge save for us in a lot of ways too.
Our range being hit again is a bit of a pisser, especially when we have some speed nerfs. As we've seen, some characters have exceptional range in this game still (Zero Suit Samus - I'm looking at you) and their ability to keep us out could be insurmountable for us; especially if resetting to neutral with rolls is that powerful.
Getting through projectiles via the air may be outright impossible. If we cannot get a punishment or positional advantage from reacting to a projectile and ff fair it to clash and rush down we could be in a lot of trouble. It seems most characters don't have auto cancels on projectile specials and projectiles are laggier/weaker it seems from some of the veterans but that means absolutely nothing about everyone else we're yet to learn more of.
Dancing Blade nerfs means our ground game versatility from Brawl is cut (where the fact that most character's dash options were weak and the weakness of our huge dash to shield animation seems justified) in ways we won't yet understand. It's primary purpose in brawl was our bread and butter punishment option, if it maintains its start up and near improbability of getting out of it with DI it'll still be great but require more skill. It's weakness to being rolled into on reaction/whiff will be more prevalent for sure.
Our ability to frame trap / cover options against grounded opponents may be weaker, but what we do against opponents in the air from the ground I foresee as changing little. Forward Air and Back Air should still be near impossible to beat vertically and mostly horizontally from above for everyone. Our juggling should still be quite dominant.
I will come into Smash4 thinking of our moveset in this type of way:
- Dancing blade will still be our amazingly versatile high damage punishment tool out of dash.
- We'll get people in the air through dancing blade or grabs, and keep them there with our auto cancelled aerials or jab/tilts.
- Our focus will be to get people out of centre stage at any and all times, hopefully having ability to capitalise on the trump mechanic and a weaker ledge. Stronger throws could mean us being able to control centre stage ourselves and always putting people in a position we're most in advantage (Diddy Kong was such an asshole with this, you have no idea).
- Pivot down tilt and forward tilt's power will vary on our dash animation length and their range/cool down. Down tilt maintaining a safety/pokey niche will be our main means of advancing our zoning capabilities onto others as it hampers their ground tools and coerces them into the air where we are more oppressive in punishing.
- If we can deal with rolls and spot dodges, we'll probably be very happy.
- Back air and nair may be our primary bread and butter aerials (bair on rising and nair as a fast fall), and fair will hopefully be a great chaining move.
- Dolphin Slash being a potent dragon punch like in Brawl may make our shield still scary to deal with.
- Open to shieldbreaker and counter being better. Aerial usages of it need to be heavily explored (same for dancing blade as it didn't have much reason to use in the air in Brawl)
Worrying characters/match ups:
Bowser: Weight and range. His punishments on us could be very potent. Could be huge shieldbreaker fodder though! A horizontal primed recovery could get us gimps/stocks. Ditto to Donkey KongZero Suit: Her moveset is way too safe/long range and we may not have any reliable punishment options on her because of it, getting through all of her moves and projectiles and she still has a great roll/jump to reset after all the hard work. Vertical recoveries will be harder for us to deal with IMO.Kirby: Close range speed and great grab game. Maybe not bad at all, perhaps his bair will be harder for us to punish from the ground than it was in Brawl, which would hurt us a lot.Sonic: Kinda buffed from Brawl? We're kinda nerfed? ughh. It's so easy for him to rush us down in Brawl and boosted kill power for him will only make it worse. But certain mechanical changes may not serve him well. Will likely still have the best mobility options overall in the game though.Megaman: A zoning character with apparently good weight, range and recovery. Falco was always complicated for us, although ultimately even-ish. Something similar with better weight/recovery doesn't sound nice.Dedede, Zard, Palutena, Shulk, Yoshi are looking dangerous for various reasons, but who knows.@C.J.
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