Official BBR Tier List v7

[SFA Smiley]

Or vice versa. Gdubs for example does well against mk but gets stomped by all his bad match ups before he gets far enough to fight them. What's to say that can't happen to ZSS?

 

[Tesh]

when did gdubs start doing well vs mk? every time i see top gnw try to fight a good mk , its hilariously painful

 

[bubbaking]

How so...? Like what are you basing this on.

SPP already established that Melee wasn't exactly the paragon of balance, but it was a heck of lot more balanced than brawl in terms... of well everything, and SSB64 had more character balance than either of them (not that i'm implying SSB64>Melee)

Lolz, are you kidding me? Have you been looking at Melee results lately? Spacees hog up most of the top placements.

Yeah, you have your select good player for other chars (Armada for Peach, Hbox for Jiggs, KK for Sheik, nobody anymore for ICs, Hax for Falcon, M2K for Marth and Sheik although he goes a lot of Fox in tourney, Kage for Ganon, Shroomed for Doc, Plup for Samus, and Axe for Pika), but Brawl is no different in this regard. However, Melee has LESS characters, so to have two characters spreading the 'MK status' means that there is actually a larger imbalance. In Melee, the true competition lies with the spacees and then rest of the top 8. The next four chars knock out some contenders but they never get anywhere unless you're that ONE special godly user. In Brawl, the true competition lies with MK and the rest of the top 10. Then you have, like, 8 or 9 more chars who knock out a lot of contenders. What this means is that, if you removed MK from Brawl and the spacees from Melee, you'd have way more char representation in Brawl than in Melee. Don't you find it odd that mid tiers like ROB and Kirby are actually seen more than almost never in the brackets of large tourneys when the same can't be said of Melee equivalents (lower mid tiers)? Btw, Melee (8 tiers) has only one less tier than Brawl (9 tiers) despite having a lot less chars. That ALONE speaks to how imbalanced Melee is.

In short, to say "[Melee] was a heck of lot more balanced than brawl in terms... of well everything" is horribly misinformed. If you'd like, I can bring up results since I've already argued this topic before on Smashmods. The spacees' recent placements are just as dominant as MK's and only A and B (and maaaybe C) Tier are even reasonably viable whereas A, B, and C (and maaaybe D) Tier are all on that level of viability in Brawl.

 

[Luco]

Err, are kirby and ROB the equivalent of melee LMs? Just working this out in my head...

 

[Grim Tuesday]

SFA: ZSS doesn't suck as hard as G&W does

 

[Cassio]

iirc Vinnies taken games off Nairo M2K and maybe anti with GW. He thinks the MUs -1 GW last I recall.

 

[SFA Smiley]

^already knew the answer just wanted to see what the reply would be

@tesh, it's a decent match up for gw it's just not played often enough because there's not alotta gws in general. Also gw does particularly well against more aggressive Mks. It happens on occasion though Vinnie vs Nairo and m2k are good examples and okii recently beat sean in social. Zac beat dojo a few times back in the day and I think whenever he randomly enters rusty beats a few of the Texas ones. So it happens but a not too often. And its not bad either but I won't get into that match up for the millionth time because it pbviously isn't that relevant. Its -1.

 

[SFA Smiley]

Also I'm on my tablet and its being dumb so excuse the grammar and typos

 

[Cassio]

Oh, also you only need to lose one set to be tossed out of winners. Sure youre likely to run into several MKs, but having nothing but MUs that are tolerable is still fortunate.

 

[C.J.]

Out of curiosity, if people had to choose 3 things, and could only choose 3 things, to change in the tier list, what would they be?

 

[DeLux]

ICs down to one slot above Marth
ZSS to one slot above Pika
GW back to bottom of high tier

 

[bubbaking]

Err, are kirby and ROB the equivalent of melee LMs? Just working this out in my head...

Yes, they are, going by both results and relative placings on the tier list, respective to the number of chars in each game. Fox and Falco are MK. Jiggs and Sheik are the rest of Brawl's A Tier. Melee's A and B Tiers are Brawl's B Tier. (This just shows how imbalanced Melee is. It's perfectly reasonable to see a Brawl B Tier win a large tourney. When was the last time you saw Marth, Falcon, or Peach [not Armada] even place in the top 3 of any for Melee? Don't try to cite PP, because he only went Marth as a counter to Armada. The dude went primarily Falco.) Melee's C Tier is Brawl's C and D Tiers. Melee's D Tier is Brawl's E Tier, etc. It just so happens that Melee's metagame is a LOT older, so more Melee players have 'figured out' (yeah, right) how to deal with 'their MK', (Brawl is reaching that point [ADHD, DEHF, Salem, etc.]), but even after so long, spacees STILL hog up up most of the top placements at tourneys, and so many top players are dropping their old mains for Fox (and Falco).

Out of curiosity, if people had to choose 3 things, and could only choose 3 things, to change in the tier list, what would they be?

ICs to #2. Wario and ZSS switch spots without changing tier limits/barriers. Ganon to not dead last. There, that's technically three changes.

 

[BlueXenon]

I think Ness should be higher on the list. Every time I watch a top Ness play, he does not look like a low tier/bottom of mid tier character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuXxXycPbo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yOu_X8hPHU

 

[bubbaking]

Yeah, I think rest might have been nerfed during the melee/brawl transition.

Well, I knew it was made a lot weaker (like most of Puff's moves) while being given the 'flower effect', but I didn't know that they actually slowed the frame data down. On that note, now that G&W's upB, the spacees' shines, and Puff's rest have ALL been slowed down, what moves hit on frame 1 anymore? As far as I know, it's just the frame 1 jabs (ZSS and Squirt) and possibly a manipulation of Luke's FP.

 

[bubbaking]

SWF is failing and making me double post again with those weird "ERROR" signs.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

To give you an idea of how important MK is compared to other characters, of all the characters above mid tiers (the ones considered remotely viable), Salem only had to fight Metaknight and Marth to win Apex. Having a good MK matchup is so much more important than the other high tier characters that he ran into zero A tier characters, 1 B tier, and no C tiers.

When it really comes down to it, can we really measure viability oh whether or not Olimar stomps you, or Snake, or Ice Climbers if its possible to win the biggest event of the year without running into them?

Viability is almost entirely about MK.

Didn't Salem fight Wolf too? Pretty sure I remember that he played Kain, did Kain not go Wolf?

 

[infiniteV115]

Salem beat FAE, Kain, Mr.R, Otori, Dojo, Mikeneko, M2K (x2) in Apex bracket
Mikehaze and 2 others in pools

 

[bubbaking]

So he fought a top Wolf, a top Lucas, three top Marths, and at least 4 top MKs in bracket.
That's actually a pretty unlucky bracket, as far as they go.

I heard he fought and beat Tyrant as well. Confirmation?

 

[infiniteV115]

Yeah, but not at Apex. It was at Phoenix Saga 5.

 

[ぱみゅ]

To answer CJ's question,
I'd Switch ZSS with Wario, maybe even above Pikachu, but Wario definetly on C Tier.
I'd put Lucas on Mid. idk if surpassing Luigi or not (I have no idea how Luigi works), but definetly up there.
And would change the third one for something else

 

[bubbaking]

Even though the position is most likely based from hundrend/thousands of similar matchups, why do many use the result of one or few successful matches to debate the position of the matchup?

If anyone is doing this when he actually has a sizable amount of top-level data pertaining to the MU, then he is arguing wrongly, very wrongly. As V115 said, for some MUs, there just aren't enough top players for a certain char or enough instances of the top players of two specific chars playing each other in tournament or a MM for us to have an adequate number of test results.

For all other MUs however, there should always be a good number of matches cited, and if the results don't match the theory, then it means we SHOULD go back to the drawing board and check our thoughts again, because perhaps the theory is incorrect/'too perfect'/ahead of the current metagame. For instance, with the pivot grab infinite, DDD probably has at least a +1 on Snake, but the pivot infinite is too hard to perform for all current DDDs. Perhaps at a time in the future, we will be able to do it consistently, but as of now, it is either 'too perfect' to be considered or is ahead of our metagame. The (numerous) results indicate that the MU is actually even, the applicable theory (NOT incorrect/'too perfect'/ahead of the current metagame) now matches the results (and makes sense), and even is what the MU will probably become in the next MU chart.

A good example is Pikachu, where ESAM is significantly better than all other Pikachu players in NA.

(read: in the world)

Nice try, but you're way off base with that assertion. Low/Bottom tiers are beyond terrible in Brawl, the gap between them and the "good" characters is huge. Way too big for my liking, and a far cry from SSF4, which has like... what every character bar Dan being viable?

Brawl is some of the worst character balance in the history of fighting games. 9~ characters out of a potential 41 characters being balanced is unacceptable.

Actually, you got that wrong. Dan is not the worst character in SSF IV, even though he is the joke char. The worst char would probably be T.Hawk. He just lacks ways to get in at all without trading, and even though he has the most life in the game, being forced to trade while also taking free hits 'cause he sucks is terrible. The gap between Bottom Tiers and higher tiers in Melee and the gap between them in Brawl is actually about the same, I'd say. For instance, Fox has a 100-0 on Pichu (not opinionated, factual unavoidable things for Pichu), which one of our players proved a little while ago. Likewise, Sheik possibly has a 100-0 on Bowser.

A more accurate statement would be to say that Smash in general has "some of the worst character balance in the history of fighting games." That "9~ characters out of a potential 41 characters" you mention as "being balanced" is about the same, proportionally, as the number of such chars in Melee, which only has about 7 chars 'balanced'. You can hate on Brawl (I hate on it too, even though I still play it 'cause I find it somewhat fun), but you can't try to single it out because of its balance. Brawl is outstandingly bad because of the mechanics it has (random tripping, input delay, etc).

Edit: Oh, title of worst char in SSF IV might actually go to Hakan. They're both really bad grapplers (the fighter class that gets nutted on the most in fighting games with the extremely balanced exception of GG), so meh...

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Frame 1 is still invincible so it's not a big deal, but yeah, it was nerfed.

Next Smash should have a slightly stronger, frame-1 Rest with no invincibility. That'd be sexy.

 

[Seagull Joe]

So he fought a top Wolf, a top Lucas, three top Marths, and at least 4 top MKs in bracket.
That's actually a pretty unlucky bracket, as far as they go.

I heard he fought and beat Tyrant as well. Confirmation?

Fighting (An even matchup for ) is considered unlucky? I thought I have heard of everything. Guess I was quite wrong.

 

[Grim Tuesday]

Marth/ZSS is surely close to even as well, and she'd have the advantage over Lucas. I'm not seeing how this is unlucky.

Unlucky would be a bracket of all Falcos lol

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Unlucky to me would have been like, ESAM, a good Olimar, and Anti.

I don't think any of those are un-doable, but it would have been significantly more difficult than the bracket Salem had, if we're talking about specific ZSS killers and weak match-ups. Anti is very very good at a lot of match-ups other MK players aren't because he respects non-top match-ups enough to learn them; as good as Salem does against MK, it is important to remember that it is still a losing match-up and a MK that knows it and plays as well as Salem is playing "should" win. Olimar is probably ZSS' worst match-up (worst -1 she has imo) and because ZSS is particularly weak to Olimar's standard flowchart, Olimar doesn't even really have to learn the character to do halfway decently, plus Salem I don't think has ever taken out a good Olimar in bracket. As for ESAM, that's pretty self-explanatory: ESAM has infinitely more ZSS experience than Salem has with Pikachu, that's almost certain. It would suck hard to walk into a match-up knowing they know your character almost as well as you do, and you know comparatively little about theirs.

A few of the other match-ups people talk about here (Falco players, Vinnie, ADHD) are only potential problems. Salem can handle ADHD and Diddy, we know that now, and I'll say straight up that I don't think there's a Falco in NA capable of taking out Salem right now; Shadow's victory over Salem was a close match over a year ago, I don't think it's very relevant today. As for Vinnie, it's only a hunch but I'd say Salem has a good shot of taking him on nowadays.

Oh, Ally might have beaten him too. Actually, I don't know how I forgot Ally, that could have been really bad. lol

Out of curiosity, if people had to choose 3 things, and could only choose 3 things, to change in the tier list, what would they be?

ZSS above Marth, Wario to C tier, Lucas to mid tier.

It's 2013. If Lucas was low tier he wouldn't be making it out of pools like the rest of the low tiers. Lucas is a mid tier; not a great mid tier, but mid tier nonetheless.

 

[Luco]

I think Ness should be higher on the list. Every time I watch a top Ness play, he does not look like a low tier/bottom of mid tier character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsuXxXycPbo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yOu_X8hPHU

Wow, didn't even see that second one. For such a bad MU that's amazing. You can see the effects of the MU though: Very back and forth and random kills were gotten at random points, mostly by Leon. Still... it's pretty darn good.

Also, considering the events of rescue 2, I don't think Salem winning apex was some fluke or a bunch of lucky MUs. Apex is deliberately meant to stop that; and most top MK players are actually very different in playstyle, so citing the fact that Salem is just 'good against MK' seems like a gigantic oversimplification when you consider that ZSS' MU against MK is still meant to be a negative.

On the other hand, Salem didn't win Rescue 2 (but he was totally up there... was he 2nd or 3rd? I can't remember... ><), so it might be possible to say people adapted... still, i'd be waitig for a few more tournaments to say something definite but if I had to base my tier list on these past few tournaments, ZSS would be moving up in to top tier without a doubt.

So in answer to that question before?

1. Lucas to mid tier, oh my goodness you don't know how much I want this to happen!
2. ZSS to top tier, because I feel i've seen enough of Salem to justify this.
3. This one was tough. I'm picking between a few: Moving ICs up, Ness up, Oli down, Wario down or Luigi down (though of course by the virtue of 1 and 2 going up, some of these could very well happen naturally). Those first two are my biggest and I so, SOOOO want to go for Ness because I root for him always and, like Lucas, I feel he deserves to go up based on the consistent results he gets... but ICs... oh man this is hard... Since ICs don't quite yet have the results fully to go with what I believe their placement should be, i'm gonna say Ness.

Those 3 are mainly based on the characters I feel most strongly about, two of which i main, which isn't a co-incidence, i'm just gonna say that now.

HOWEVER there's also a few others that could move, such as Ike and DK up, Sheik down, Marth up and so on.

Then bottom tier I have absolutely no idea who to move where right now.

 

[bubbaking]

Fighting (An even matchup for ) is considered unlucky? I thought I have heard of everything. Guess I was quite wrong.

Fighting three top Marths (the three BEST ones, no less) is unlucky. I was summarizing what V115 said, lolz!

Marth/ZSS is surely close to even as well, and she'd have the advantage over Lucas. I'm not seeing how this is unlucky.

Unlucky would be a bracket of all Falcos lol

Anything other than a bracket full of MKs and a couple MUs you probably win by a large margin is unlucky. Everything Salem got was either even or a losing MU, except for Lucas, which was only a +1 for ZSS. If Salem hadn't won, M2K would have. Let's take a look at his bracket. Hmmm, a Snake, 4 MKs, an Olimar, a Falco, and 2 Salems. I'd say this bracket was easier than Salem's. Instead of the bunch of evens he could have had, more than half of his matches were in his advantage. Meanwhile, Salem got mostly disadvanted MUs, followed by even ones with only one (slightly) advantaged MU. Don't exactly know why people want to discredit his big win when the 'other choice' would have been MORE 'discreditable'.

@SFP: You don't have to run into ESAM or a good Oli (there were only 2 or 3, I think) for your bracket to be unlucky, let alone ALL of them. That's just extremely unlucky, lolz! There are definitely more kinds of unlucky brackets. Running into one of the guys you listed is just really unlucky when you factor in how few they are, how large the tourney was, and who THEY would have lost to. Seriously, if you end up having to face one of them, you're just a very, very unlucky guy. More than one of them? Forget it; I would think Providence was out to get me or had something against me, lolz.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Marth/ZSS is surely close to even as well, and she'd have the advantage over Lucas. I'm not seeing how this is unlucky.

Unlucky would be a bracket of all Falcos lol

Don't you think MK has a +3 advantage on ZSS? lol

 

[Grim Tuesday]

+2, and also consider that I think all of MKs MUs are worse for the other character than is usually accepted.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

+2, and also consider that I think all of MKs MUs are worse for the other character than is usually accepted.

Still, it's a little disingenuous to say "the bracket is lucky because the match-up is even-ish" when in reality you think the match-up is +2, which is for all intents and purposes, a bad enough match-up that at top levels someone with that kind of advantage should be winning with only a little bit of experience.

So either you think it's an unlucky bracket or you think MK is an easier match-up, you can't have both. :/

 

[Grim Tuesday]

I never said the MU was evenish, I said Marth/ZSS is.

I think MK/ZSS is -2 in theory, but -1 in practice because of how much MU experience a ZSS will have compared to an MK.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Actually, I'll apologize: I read your post twice and still misread it. LOL

 

[Grim Tuesday]

No worries haha
And that isn't to say I think his bracket was easy, fortunate perhaps (because of M2K performing worse than he ever has before against Salem + no character diversity) but it's still ****ing amazing haha. You don't win a worldwide tournament unless you're incredibly skilled.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Implying there is character diversity in Brawl >_>

 

[Luco]

Implying there is character diversity in Brawl >_>

Actually, an interesting point I read a moment ago because as a LT main, i've become so jaded to this stuff that -1 or -2 MUs feel like even and it's only the -3 that really gets me.

Back to the TL, if ZSS got moved up, how many spots do you think it would be and do you think it would mostly be dictated by a few of those bad MUs?

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Back to the TL, if ZSS got moved up, how many spots do you think it would be and do you think it would mostly be dictated by a few of those bad MUs?

I dunno about ZSS' match-ups anymore. Her big problem is that almost all of top tier is -1. MK, Olimar, Snake, Falco, and Pikachu are -1. Diddy and Wario are -1 or even, and Marth is even, ICs is +1 or even. ZSS is unusual in that although she slightly loses a bunch of match-ups, she also doesn't suffer from a single match-up that is absolutely not winnable. That means that although she'll be at a disadvantage much of the time, it is always going to be something that is reasonably overcome. Compared to Falco, for example, her match-up spread is fairly worry-free. ZSS can do everything without the need of a secondary, which is pretty unique across the cast, a quality shared only by a few top tiers, and has.


For that reason I think she's better than Pikachu, and I'd go a step further and say she's better than Marth. I place her squarely between Falco -- who is viable but has a few troublesome match-ups -- and Marth -- who is like ZSS, good, but doesn't quite have the real results she does, and I think that's completely appropriate. Marth is fine, whatever, but we're talking about a good character (Marth) vs. a good character that has won a major.

 

[PK Gaming]

Actually, you got that wrong. Dan is not the worst character in SSF IV, even though he is the joke char. The worst char would probably be T.Hawk. He just lacks ways to get in at all without trading, and even though he has the most life in the game, being forced to trade while also taking free hits 'cause he sucks is terrible. The gap between Bottom Tiers and higher tiers in Melee and the gap between them in Brawl is actually about the same, I'd say. For instance, Fox has a 100-0 on Pichu (not opinionated, factual unavoidable things for Pichu), which one of our players proved a little while ago. Likewise, Sheik possibly has a 100-0 on Bowser.

A more accurate statement would be to say that Smash in general has "some of the worst character balance in the history of fighting games." That "9~ characters out of a potential 41 characters" you mention as "being balanced" is about the same, proportionally, as the number of such chars in Melee, which only has about 7 chars 'balanced'. You can hate on Brawl (I hate on it too, even though I still play it 'cause I find it somewhat fun), but you can't try to single it out because of its balance. Brawl is outstandingly bad because of the mechanics it has (random tripping, input delay, etc).

Edit: Oh, title of worst char in SSF IV might actually go to Hakan. They're both really bad grapplers (the fighter class that gets nutted on the most in fighting games with the extremely balanced exception of GG), so meh...

You didn't have to respond to my post you know!

 

[bubbaking]

You know I respond to everything, lolz! I speak my mind on what I read, which leads to some crazy outbursts sometimes.

Bubba for most adamant (read: annoying) poster ever...

 

[bubbaking]

Even the worst non-Dan, non-Oni/Evil, and non-Hakan characters (who AFAIK are all really bad, someone feel free to correct me though) have only a handful of 7-3 match-ups in SSF4:AE. Again, feel free to correct me here.

I'm bored now so I will indeed correct you. The two best characters in the game are the main villain of the game (Seth) and one of the most primary 'antagonists' of the entire series (Akuma), unless by 'Evil' you meant solely Evil Ryu, in which case, you are correct in THAT regard. However, your bolded statement is completely wrong. Take a look at this MU Chart/Tier list (that's right, characters are ranked by MU spreads, which is totally non-opinionated but only reasonably possible for traditional FGs). Dan's entire MU spread is dominated by 3:7's and 4:6's. His best MUs are even ones, and there are only two of those. Likewise, take a look at T.Hawk. He is considered by some to actually be worse than Dan because he's the only char in the game to have a 2:8 MU in addition to just as many 3:7's as Dan. In other words, he potentially gets shut down even harder than Dan is by random crap. I believe that SSF IV: AE 2012 is more balanced than Smash, but I laugh inside when people say that it's even close to balanced overall. The game still has 8 or 9 tiers, which is actually more than Brawl. However, tier differences in that game are smaller than they are in Brawl.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

I'm bored now so I will indeed correct you. The two best characters in the game are the main villain of the game (Seth) and one of the most primary 'antagonists' of the entire series (Akuma), unless by 'Evil' you meant solely Evil Ryu, in which case, you are correct in THAT regard. However, your bolded statement is completely wrong. Take a look at this MU Chart/Tier list (that's right, characters are ranked by MU spreads, which is totally non-opinionated but only reasonably possible for traditional FGs). Dan's entire MU spread is dominated by 3:7's and 4:6's. His best MUs are even ones, and there are only two of those. Likewise, take a look at T.Hawk. He is considered by some to actually be worse than Dan because he's the only char in the game to have a 2:8 MU in addition to just as many 3:7's as Dan. In other words, he potentially gets shut down even harder than Dan is by random crap. I believe that SSF IV: AE 2012 is more balanced than Smash, but I laugh inside when people say that it's even close to balanced overall. The game still has 8 or 9 tiers, which is actually more than Brawl. However, tier differences in that game are smaller than they are in Brawl.

What I was saying is that:

Evil Ryu
Oni (Akuma)
Hakan
Dan

Are among the worst in the game, and that no other characters really have many match-ups worse than 6/4. I knew about T. Hawk but forgot to mention him.

Am I still wrong?