Project M Social Thread

[BadGuy]

I just kinda wish you guys didn't take the light/heavy armor route for bowser instead of improving some of his established characteristics. His upb was already a great tool in melee in terms of an offensive defense.

I think my biggest concern is the crouch armor, I can just think of a million ways to abuse this. I don't really mind it as much on his nair and bair, I'm kind of iffy on dsmash. Not sure what other attacks have armor.

We actually nerfed his up b drastically. Melee bowser had very few options to work with other then edgeguarding, and up b was his ace defense attack/finisher, koing at around 90-120 depending on the weight of the character. It was nerfed because bowser doesnt need to rely on this single move anymore. It only does 11 damage and cannot ko til 140-150.

Tank crawl was created in brawl+ and merely carried over, nobody even gave it a second thought until i decided to start showing how to use it properly. Funny how that works.

Tank crawl can only tank 7 damage at max, making it ideal for multi hit attacks and get up attack. Bowser now has an immediate punishment for players who cant tech consistently. The player doesnt always have to use the attack, roll to the side, or tech in another direction. This is a great buff for bowser's pressure game. The tank crawl's armor is only in effect while he's crouching, attacking deactivates it. Lure bowser to attack, make him miss, and you'll have your opening. Or grab.

To answer your question about bowser's current armor. Bowser has armor on the following attacks:

first 3 frames of the down smash(planning to change the timing at the beginning to avoid standing armor frame)

Dash attack has light armor, grounded koopa claw has heavy armor at the beginning of the attack to compensate for it short reach and slow swing, whirling fortress has light armor, nair has heavy armor at the first 2 frames of the attack, back air has one frame of heavy armor, down air has heavy armor while in mid air, and ends when bowser hits the ground.

 

[[TSON]]

TWO FRAMES OF HEAVY ARMOR?
**** ***** that ***** aint olimar.

oh wait thats super armor
the % limit
ofc

but its doing the same thing for the characters from a design standpoint

no but really, troll behavior aside, 2 frames of heavy armor requires strict timing, and you can't abuse it, especially not for those attacks that dont have it at the beginning, because it's a fullfledged move and has lag. its nothing more than a glorified dragon punch. it doesnt overpolarize him in any way. you can space around it remember? note how none of these moves with super armor have considerable reach

 

[Sterowent]

wait, so only one or two frames at any given time?

a little worried about nair. he can gimp with that thing, right? isn't it a bit dangerous to give it heavy armor?

i don't know how this will turn out, but i do remember how bad his DA is. that's sensible to me. the fact that it can be beaten no prob by basically all strong moves, and so easily punished in general, reassures me it won't be a problem still, unless bowser's really ballsy about actually using the thing.

 

[iLink]

Does bowser still have invincibility on fortress? It kind of seems like overkill to give it light armor. Also Nair kind of seems to serve the general purpose of Dair so having both with heavy armor doesn't seem necessary.

I would do away with the armor on fortress, dair, and dash attack.

I think just speeding up dash attack slightly would benefit him enough. I'm on the fence with dsmash and the claw. I didn't get to see the claw's armor in action so I can't really judge that on and I'm still on the fence about dsmash.

At what percents are the armors broken?

 

[94teen]

I think the heavy/light armor is an interesting idea. The heavy armor worries me a little, since I can imagine it being abusive, but not having played with it, I don't want to make much of a judgment. Based on the vids, I'm concerned that bowser might just be a hard counter to spacies. It just seemed like Fox/Falco didn't have any approach options. Camping lasers just means bowser uses light armor crouch. Your shffled aerials just get spaced with ^B and Ftilt, for superarmored. None of your typical combo moves do more than 4-6%. I'm not trying to say it's too good, just that it seems like spacies have very few options.

It could be that the bowser is just a better player than the fox/falco, or hasn't adapted to playing against P:M Bowser, I don't really know. It could also just be that I'm bad at this game - it just seems like Fox/Falco have to wait for the bowser to make a mistake, and punish it HARD, but they don't really have much of a way to pressure bowser - the only option that really does much is baiting ftilt/dsmash/whatever and grabbing, but that doesn't really set up anything, and depending on % bowser can still tech/dsmash/Fortress the followup (not sure on this, I haven't played against bowser in forever).

Basically, I can see how some characters can deal with bowser, and I think it's an interesting idea, but I'd appreciate someone who's more familiar with the build giving me an idea of what faster, combo oriented characters can do to him. It could just mean that bowser requires you to play completely differently in order to beat him, which is fine, it just makes him seem a lot better until people figure out how to do it.

/heavy armor concerns.

Have all of bowser's hitboxes scaled with the new size? He seems like he'll be a monster at spacing against a lot of characters, especially since he can crouch-tank a lot of projectiles.

Crouch light armor is awesome. I think the % it's at might end up being a little too high, but the idea is amazing. It gives bowser a way to deal with projectiles, and makes it a lot harder to camp him out. At the same time, it means that Bowser doesn't necessarily have to approach. He can just wait for the other player to approach and punish them for it with spaced ftilt and superarmor.



EDIT: Wow, that's a wall of text. Hopefully that got the point across without coming across as disrespectful or wanting to discard the idea, if not I can try to summarize to get the point across better. Consider this post a work in progress.


I guess my question to people who have played with the build is this: Does bowser's new play help him play more aggressively? Or does it just let him camp/force people to approach him, and punish them for it? I can see how grab-centric characters (marth, sheik, maybe falcon) can compete, but I'm having a hard time seeing what other characters can do. I'm just afraid that the ability to punish people for approaching means that Bowser's being pushed towards being a very defensive character. There really isn't a reward for him approaching since he can just wait until the other player does, and punish them appropriately.


I don't want to dismiss the idea out of hand, but I would like to hear from some people who have played with it. What can characters do once people have figured out how to abuse the heavy armor frames? How much reach does bowser actually have? Is it to easy to bait people into approaches, punish them with super armor, and gimp with huge ftilt and dtilt?

 

[shanus]

First off, Jiang's experimental bowser build has yet to be "approved" as the direction for bowser we are taking for PM.

now let me first ask something seemingly irrelevant: Who here likes how Project M Snake looks?

I think most players will come forward and say yes, he looks awesome. He is a great departure from his brawl self but now has that melee feel to him. It took a long time to isolate how to make him play and many changes that myself and other (more conservative PMBR members) criticized. Jiang and a few others pioneered these snake changes, and it truthfully took a large number of iterations to get the changes to feel "right." Jiang is a player who likes to change the boundaries of a character, so to say, and has done so splendidly with Snake, and now attempting to with Bowser. Does this mean this is the direction we are taking with Bowser? No. Does it mean we might use a build with flavors of jiangs build? If it plays well, probably.

With that said, we still have in no way "finalized" bowser. This build has been something still relatively new, but at the same time, is being significantly blown out of proportion by stingers et al as well. I think part of this was in jiangs delivery, where he didn't highlight how small the armor windows were making the moves seem to be grossly overcentralized on abusing their armor rather than tight timing windows. However, with that said, I do I think there are too many moves with armor making him more gimmick centric. I think if they took melee bowser and added it to a few shell moves start-up such as dsmash for 2-3 frames, usmash for 2-3 frames, nair and dair for 2-3 frames, it could go a long way. Powerful moves such as fortress and bair can be left as is.

Just my 2 cents on the issue. However, let me reiterate that we go through literally hundreds of builds on a character till we think its right, so hopping on the inflammatory bandwagon like stingers method is 1. incredibly frustrating to read, 2. results in walls of text that i don't want to read, and 3. is far less value-add than the legit conversation that he had with kaiser later on.


Stingers, if you have questions about it or additional comments, please hop on the irc and we'll chat. I hate going to bed and finding this forum to be a mess in the morning.

 

[Sterowent]

well said. do you think the crawl LA (post exclusive to full crouch) lends itself to creative play?

it seems like a glorified CC to me, a superior one for bowser alone.

 

[shanus]

I don't think he needs the crawl armor anymore. However, I think it could be interesting if the shell bones during crawl were made invuln.

 

[SymphonicSage12]

Assuming the armor is intended to stay:

I don't think he needs the crawl armor now that CC is back in.

I think the dsmash armor frames should be not until he's actually spinning, and should only last for 2 frames, not 3.
Don't give him armor on dair; that move is basically a worse version of nair, as someone already said.

Make the 2 frames of armor on his nair in the middle of the move, not the startup.

Don't give him armor on dash attack; just make it faster with less endlag.

His fortress should have heavy armor, but not invincibility IMO.

His koopa claw/claw hop (side b, whatever it is), should not have armor. It can grab people through shields....it's basically a better grab. It doesn't need armor.

 

[Sterowent]

invuln on shell? that'd make his crouch/crawl a lot less...uh, well. i like that, hah.

sage, i don't know how you can justify taking away the invuln on his upB. isn't it one of his mainstays in melee? along with bthrow, ledge attack, bair, koopa claw, and fsmash? edit: speaking of fsmash, are you guys going to give him more pullback on it, for grab avoidance and such? same question for ganon's sideB.

 

[iLink]

Another thing that is somewhat bothering me is if the armors are too strike of timing (1 frame from on bair and such) you might as well not have it because it just seems like luck plays a roll that you just happen to be hit on that exact frame the armor kicks in. Sure you could argue that you could practice on making sure you always absorb the hit on that frame or two but being realistic, it just seems like a swing and miss thing.

I just don't think H/L armor was the way to go with him. You don't see any other character with it on their attacks except maybe wario's fsmash, although I don't recall if that was super armor or H/L armor.

 

[Sterowent]

i think that's super armor. yoshi has HA on his jump, if you recall. snake has it while using his upB. ike has SA at the beginning of his neutral B and during some of his upB. DK has it on a fullcharge neutral B. kirby has some sort of armor on his downB. MK has invuln on his upB. DDD has some armor on his upB, or did at least i think...Olimar has SA on his whistle. fox has invuln on his shine. falco too. wolf has armor, but i don't think it's invuln. charizard has some, i think, on his rocksmash. marth has invuln on his upB. sonic has invuln frames scattered in his specials. i probably missed some, or i'm incorrect on a few of these.

it's rare to find SA/HA, but ironically many characters have the superior invulnerability somewhere, mostly on specials. still, it's pretty funny.

 

[Shadic]

i've always been saying I'm not a troll, but you guys are just a little too jumpy.

We're too jumpy? You're the one that freaks out and causes 4 pages of tldr; posts every time there's something wrong with a beta version of a character in a game that still has at least a month or five before a public release.

 

[shanus]

It doesn't matter, the build information shouldn't have been released because its not in any way agreed upon, nor should those matches have been made public.

Overall, bowser is a work-in-progress and something that is completely unfinalized.

 

[Supreme Dirt]

Is Ganon keeping Flame Choke, or are you going to revert it to Gerudo?

 

[Revven]

It's flame choke because flame choke is infinitely superior than the Gerudo was.

Anyway, you can expect something hypeM next week, maybe ... something that's more official? It's character related but I'm not gonna spoil anything!

 

[Shadic]

It doesn't matter, the build information shouldn't have been released because its not in any way agreed upon, nor should those matches have been made public.

That is true as well.

Overall, bowser is a work-in-progress and something that is completely unfinalized.

I hope everybody realizes that by now.

Also yes. There will be something new for people to salivate over in the next.. Ten days? My contribution to it is amazing.

 

[Sneak8288]

lol all this bowser build bashing nonsense -_- made me skip like 5 pages. I'm guessing you guys never thought of BAITING armored attacks with a lil something called mind games and then butt ****** bowser? Super armor ain't broken.. If I were playing i would just think before i approached, god forbid.

 

[Eternal Yoshi]

now let me first ask something seemingly irrelevant: Who here likes how Project M Snake looks?

He looks mid tier to me. I think he needs moves that are less situational or a few moves that need to be retooled to be less situational.

 

[hotdogturtle]

The main thing I don't like about the armor is that it largely changes his gameplay. You guys said that you want to keep characters as close to Melee as possible, and buff bad characters so they're better without changing how they play. Giving armor on moves will definitely change how Bowser plays, and I think you've acknowledged that. Certain matchups against quick weak characters will now be played completely differently, with some former weaknesses not only removed, but actually turning into strengths for Bowser. So doesn't this go against your design philosophy?

 

[Valdo_MEX]

I Love This, Go To the Project M !!!

I am A Mexican :D

The Brawl Sucks!!

 

[Revven]

Like shanus said, this Bowser was something not everyone in the PMBR approved of and jiang just decided to do on his own. I'll let you in a secret, when jiang first proposed this Bowser (before ANYTHING was actually made) everyone that was in the PMBR at the time of him proposing it was against the idea completely. Rejecting it and not really giving it much chance at all. So, I told jiang to go and make it and prove to us it's a good idea. For me, he's still yet to prove that, but I do like some of his changes (the koopa claw and the bite pummel for instance).

I can't stress it enough that we, as the PMBR, don't just throw an idea out and always agree on it the first time it's thrown out there. This is like the shotgun Snake had for awhile as a Utilt, remember that? So, no it's not really going against our design philosophy in that we still (most of us) do not 100% agree on the Bowser jiang has made however he is free to experiment and allow people to try it and if he gets enough supporters behind it (both pro players like Gimpyfish and some other non-Bowser Melee pro and PMBR members like me or someone else) then likely, it will make it into the final build. But right now, as it stands, it's not 100% agreed upon by all of us and it's only in the current build for people to try out (it's better than leaving Bowser without anything at all changed aside from physics) and there's some obvious supporters of it but that doesn't guarantee it will make the final cut.

You just have to wait and see.

Now, I think that's enough of this Bowser discussion as it clearly was not a decision of the PMBR to show this Bowser at all (jiang just did it because he thought you guys probably would be hyped about it, clearly not) and you should all focus on what the actual official hypeM thing will be next week that I hinted at a page back.

 

[humble]

Guys, Shanus already banned wall of texts in this thread awhile ago. Respect that.

Also, this build is just a test, alot of things are tried in an effort to make the final build the best possible, respect that as well. Give feedback please, but make it constructive on how it could be changed for the better.

 

[Sterowent]

sheik vs any low tier is different now. some things have to change. i don't know what they have in mind, but if some rather one-sided matchups stray from forcing one player to outplay his opponent as much as (edit) BLANK vs spacie, it'll be difficult to miss them.

 

[Deleted member]

You guys gotta recreate Bowser's Melee get up attack from 1-99%.

Also, will the claw hitbox on Bowser's side-b have a favorable angle for combos as a consolation for missing the grab hitbox?

And what are the plans for the throws from Bowser's Koopa Klaw?

Thx in advance.

 

[I R MarF]

A good way to balance the armor is maybe its effectiveness slowly wears down at higher perecentages.

For instance, at 65%-100% it drops from 7 and 20 to 6 and 16

Then, at 101%-150% it drops from 6 and 16 to 4 and 12

and finally, at 151%+ it drops from 4 and 12 to 0 and 8

Idk if this would be the way to do it, but it would definitely make the armor less "game changing" (as some people proposed) while still giving Bowser good defensive options to dodge combos he is vulnerable to at lower percentages.

 

[Deleted member]

A good way to balance the armor is maybe its effectiveness slowly wears down at higher perecentages.

For instance, at 65%-100% it drops from 7 and 20 to 6 and 16

Then, at 101%-150% it drops from 6 and 16 to 4 and 12

and finally, at 151%+ it drops from 4 and 12 to 0 and 8

Idk if this would be the way to do it, but it would definitely make the armor less "game changing" (as some people proposed) while still giving Bowser good defensive options to dodge combos he is vulnerable to at lower percentages.

The crouch armor is balanced enough. It was tested at least somewhat extensively in B+ where it garnished good success from playtesters.


And another idea for Bowser.

Give his shield 2 frames for powershielding instead of only 1. This would allow him to cope with shield pressure effectively as well as projectiles.

 

[Sterowent]

global systems like that are best left standardized, man. the real diversity in shields is the size of a character in shield, for the sake of pokes, and OOS options, or lack thereof.

 

[Archangel]

I am almost sorry I brought up bowser... >_>. Things seemed to have calmed down though. I was wondering (Aside from things still not moved over from melee and Landing detection etc.) are their any characters that have basically been deemed finished?

 

[genkaku]

I see no problem with the armor. It's a very interesting addition that I hope develops.
Yes, it could be abused, but so can nearly every single decent move in the game. For some reason, we all still play, and play well. How do you beat a tech like this? You anticipate and react intelligently. The only way that this armor could get overpowered is if the Bowser metagame develops isolated, that is without the vs. Bowser metagame following up. Or if everyone that plays against him is miraculously stupid. That's clearly not going to happen.
If the devs end up using this or a similar build after extensive testing with top, intelligent-minded, competitive players, then there's no way it's not appropriate.
I mean, I know the idea of Bowser actually fighting back is a shock, but think this through, please.

 

[Gindler]

Sooooooo, does yoshi's Fsmash and dash attack give him invulnerability on his head like back in the day?

 

[I R MarF]

are their any characters that have basically been deemed finished?

I second this question.

It seems like Fox, Falcon, and Marth would be the closest to done but not much has been said about their progress.

 

[shanus]

almost all upper tier characters aside from marth.

 

[GameWatching]

50%

 

[Deleted member]

50%

*two pictures of FD Melee*

Yeah! Awesome! How're you making this? The same "reshape several boxes" way others use? This seems too complex...

 

[Revven]

50%

I hope in the final version you have the camera angled like it was in Melee (kind of like how you have it in the first picture).

 

[GP&B]

I'd ask where Yoshi's Story is, but I haven't seen a sign of you in about a week or two so it's nice to see you back period.

 

[grim mouser]

50%

Sweet. Great to see you have time to do FD along with all your character hacks and stuff!

Question- Does Squirtle's hydroplaning still work with the new friction, or is his WD better? I wonder because someone mentioned Squirtle's turnaround action when DACUS was discussed.

 

[I R MarF]

almost all upper tier characters aside from marth.

Cool, so dojo post wise the highest possibility would be Fox, Falcon, or Shiek?

50%

*Melee FD Awesomeness*

Excellent stuff Game Watching! But what about Yoshi's Story?

Then again, I mainly want Yoshi's Story because it's Marth's best map. Haha.

I hope in the final version you have the camera angled like it was in Melee (kind of like how you have it in the first picture).

I agree with this. And speaking of which, how are you guys at P:M coming along with the camera for melee maps and brawl neutrals like Smashville?

 

[GameWatching]

i m almost done with YS !
no pic till release !

it's a surprise