Ugh, there is alot of ignorance once again around bayo. The nerfs were totally fine imo, as the bayonetta player actually has to play neutral like the other characters in the cast instead of just fishing for DAB kicks the entire game. DAB kick received a very hard nerf and rightfully so. Its essentially a worthless move offensively, but still provides a safe way for her to land, which many characters would love to have. Her neutral game is very good, and people only argue differently because it is so underdeveloped. She has insane shield pressure in neutral through multi jabs, dtilt, fair, bair and nair. Bullet climax absolutely annihilates bigger characters making any matchup with bigger characters heavily in her favor. Also on top of all of this it is still possible to get kills from witch twist to side b to witch twist to up air. Just because they increased the DI multiplier doesn't immediately make it obsolete. In fact if you b reverse her up b you can catch them DI'ing the wrong way and make the combos even more guaranteed. She actually takes a brain to use now and I'm loving it. All the true bayo mains will stay with her and continue to develop her meta and all frauds will leave to an even more stupid character (cloud). Overall the nerfs hurt her, but in the long run, they were necessary to making her actually have to develop a neutral instead of just rinse repeating the same ****ing combo till it got the kill.
Edit: I forgot to even mention witch time, which is still completely insane and can net kills as early as 60 percent on some of the cast. Also I personally think bayo has top 3 offstage gameplay and her ease of edgeguarding is as simple as holding the a button and gimping with nair. She may not be top 5 anymore but I still think shes definitely top 10.
I can't help but strongly agree with this.
Once I started understanding why Bayonetta was so overpowering, I stopped playing her for awhile so that I didn't get accustomed to her knowing that there was no way that she would stay as she was.
This character, in her previous iteration, reduced the actual complexity of smash as a game. Smash has a deep and rewarding complexity in 1v1, which is composed of abstract ideas such as approach, punishment and followup, reading, zoning and spacing, and deception. As Bayonetta, in her 1.1.5 design, you supersede some of these things (namely followup game), or are at least overly facilitated for them by Sakurai in all his good intentions.
Most other characters have guaranteed combos in early percents, and some of them have guaranteed kill confirms in late percents (Bowser, DK, ROB maybe, others). Bayo, in her previous iteration, had guaranteed combos and kill confirms for all percents, no exaggeration, until over 100 or so, complex as they were and they required a reaction to DI. Bayo does have a lot of potential 50/50's and "safe" versions of her combos, but due to her landing lag it always just makes more sense to go for the biggest combo and rely on the fact that the other character can't punish you as hard (which is probably what Sakurai thought would happen). Other characters have to rely on these 50/50's and mixups in their chasing, which creates a string of interactions consisting of reads, option coverage, fake-outs, call-outs, and things that people consider fun and hype. You know, a certain line of thought might say that Bayonetta is great in this respect because her BatWithin forces other characters with guaranteed combos to do this even though their combos are supposed to be guaranteed, creating more fun and hype for the other side, right? Well maybe in a ****ed up sort of way, but most people consider this dynamic to be unfair.
Now if getting these kinds of guaranteed combos were difficult and rare, it would be one thing. But the fact of the matter is that it isn't. Yes, Heel Slide and ABK and even dABK are punishable, technically. But the burst nature and extreme disjoint of these moves (like fair, Side-B) give Bayonetta players a large time and distance window to react to an opponents defensive option and get the confirm, while there is a very small window for opponents to get any sort of punish if the Bayonetta hits shield. What this means is that a competitive and non-Sakurai ideal player of Bayonetta can always create the situation, using her great pressure tools, to get the high reward combo started at low risk. The only time her neutral ever appears to be bad is when the Bayo has put herself in the air over the opponent, which is easy to do because of what a tempting option dABK is and plus you can mis-space nair. I will say though that Bayo always suffers being put above someone who is waiting for them to land, which isn't so much her neutral as it is this weird built in punish window that Sakurai added artificially into the game.
My point is that if you feel like her neutral is bad then you just suck at playing neutral with her. I know that sounds really testy and mean, but the truth of the matter is that because Bayo had such safe and guaranteed damage, you could suck at the core fundamentals of this game and still go far with this character by only practicing punishment and setups with safety, and ignoring everything else. Bayo doesn't have to approach, usually. Her dtilt is frame 7 and her aerials seem to outspace almost everything. Her specials in the air have transcendent hitboxes, which used to obnoxiously outspace almost everything. Even though her attacks have startup, they have low cooldown. She's a slightly slower ZSS in the air (juggling) when you don't give her landing lag with B moves. Even without her guaranteed punish game, this character is still amazing.
The fact of the matter is that you never see a lot of this in competitive play because it's sub-optimal compared to going for death combos all the time. The reason for the sudden spike in Bayonetta results followed by the drop is because top players adjusted to her and then it was over. Bayonetta's meta beyond her punish game is basically non existent, because it was just that good. But there is more to this character.
If you feel like dropping this character after the patch, good. As she was, it hurt the game. Even though it feels good to fly with your opponent into the ceiling blast zone, it was not fun for anybody else. When I played as her, the fear and the intensity that I love in this game disappeared, as I knew that I had nothing to really fear from my opponent, and that once I hit him once, he was eating more damage than he could possibly give. I don't necessarily agree with the way that the developers changed her combo game, but it's not as completely devastating as people make it out to be. You don't need all that to be guaranteed, and don't get all stuffy because you actually have to interact with your opponent when you're hitting them now.
Once again, if you don't like this character anymore, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Me and whoever else is left to play her will gladly play her, because she's awesome and now she's fair.
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