These characters are real good. Samus/Diddy/Lucario/Tink were already really good, but only Diddy really got to shine publicly in 3.0 (other than lunchables and esam). Now they all either have more commitment attached to their design, or in the case of Samus, SDI changes to make certain things not free, and bug fixes to stop her from just ignoring shields all the time with bomb>aerials on shield (they ignored shields >.>). Falcon is still falcon, with less **** to wade through, so he gets to show off how stupid he is now more.
Samus is really good still. I thought at first when 3.5 dropped that she got hit too hard, but really all that changed were a few minor things that didn't detract from her core playstyle. She still has up-b OoS which is crazy good (gets out of all of Wolf's sheild pressure, blows up falco due to nerfs, fox still has to do frame perfect nair shines to cover it) and is important vs more than just spacies. Probably still loses to Fox in PM (tether changes make gimping her like, 3x less challenging than in melee) but I think she beats the other two spacies slightly, while being incredibly solid all around vs the rest of the cast. Great CC game, doesn't care too much about CCing against her, solid combo game, great projectile game, good on nearly every stage, great CP game. Crawl is also incredibly strong, shrinks hutboxes, has access to her full kit/cc near instantly.
Diddy. I could talk for days about Diddy (I do) but Diddy is still fantastic. All that got thrown onto him was commitment on a few tools, and he has marth syndrome now, worse than marth gets it. He has a decent number of even MU's, but beats most of the cast, losing to only Spacies, Samus, and Peach. Thats a damn good MU spread on a character who already has immense number of tools for nearly every situation. Arguably the best OoS option in PM (glide tossing, man), doesn't care about CC at all because he converts off grabs, side-bs, and trips+whiff punishes. Fast, flexible, best item in the game, one of the strongest neutrals. nearly broken good bair (although its one of his only good hitboxes), still fantastic character. His MU spread + his stupid flexible tool kit makes him an easy top 10 character.
Lucario is really good. Usable projectile, good burst movement (which he can spend resource on to convert off it faster), good general mobility, good throws at low%'s, option selects, and great combo game. His counterplay is there, but once he starts going in on you the counterplay changes from "abuse his lacking approach game" to "React better than Taj and SDI perfectly or eat 60+% and give him more meter." Lucario is silly. not broken, but silly and really good.
Falcon. "Shiek Dthrow>fairs, she gets booed. Falcon dthrow fairs and everyone loses their ****." Falcon's actually bad MU's are probably only Spacies + other lock down/rush down characters. everyone else he just takes to a bigger stage (because he can) and just DD around you, not approaching (because he can't/doesn't have to) and kill you with 1-2 conversions. Good character, top 10. Salt/hype inducing. I hate him.
Tink is really good too. Converts off projectiles he can spawn while running away, if you can't catch him whelp good luck. 19% boomerang too. exploitable recovery, but his neutral and punish game is very strong and simple to be effective with, with intricacies mixed in to optimize it and create traps to catch people doing smart things. He doesn't have many bad MU's. I'm not a tink expert, but I think he his strong enough to be top 10, and better than the characters below him.
Strong Badam .
