I don't know. I think
-Bowser is a good character. It seems like his hardest match ups are disjoint, long grab ranges, and fast projectile spammers (or ya know, Toon Link). Everything else seems completely doable for him. Having armor on command grab and crouch is kind of crazy IMO.
IDK how I missed this part of the post, but I'll never miss an opportunity to babble about Browser.
You're essentially right about the types of MUs that tend to be troublesome, though projectiles are
much less threatening overall than they were last patch due to dash attack's intangibility (as far as I know, the single biggest buff he's ever gotten). Toon Link is far from his worst in my experience, though. Ganondorf, ROB, and GnW, are IMO by far his worst MUs, and I typically switch off to other characters against any of those - but many others are still worse than Tink.
Armor on the Klaw is pretty silly - it just needlessly adds complexity to the opponent's mental model of how Bowser works. It's incredibly unintuitive, as the very core rock-paper-scissors model of basically all fighting games including Smash bros is Attack > Grab > Shield > Attack. Armor on a grab just confuses and frustrates uninformed opponents
without actually providing Bowser any benefit whatsoever at high level. I would vastly prefer if the armor were removed from the grounded Klaw entirely, the attack made substantially faster, and the decision between Klaw and standing grab be based on other factors (such as endlag, potential followups, sliding distance on the standing grab, etc) than startup speed.
Unintuitive mechanics like armor on the Klaw, and
too much armor on the nair and dash attack, are the types of things that alienate, frustrate, and confuse the hell out of new players looking to pick up PM, particularly if they come from Melee backgrounds. To my understanding, one of the most basic concepts of game design is that you want low complexity (ie. 'easy to learn') but high depth ('hard to master') at pretty much every level of the game - level design, controls, character balance, whatever. The PMDT has done amazing work in implementing this for most characters, so Bowser kinda sticks out like a sore thumb in that regard because he's incredibly
high complexity (hard to learn) and
low depth (easy to master) in terms of decision making (though his tech is still stupid hard). His matchup is incredibly hard to learn at low levels, but basically a complete joke at high levels, barring some of his attacks which are simply broken as hell and manage to sort of carry him.
At low level,
in addition to all the other stuff that you have to learn in
every matchup (spacing/move speed/combo DI/etc), you have to know/do all of the following:
- Yes, Bowser's dash attack goes through basically anything
- That there are 4 levels of armor
- The rough amount of kB that will break through each armor breakpoint
- Which moves have how much armor, see:
INVINCIBILITY FRAMES: up B
SUPER: n/a
HEAVY: FSmash, down B, USmash, Side B, Nair (!!!!!!),
MEDIUM: DSmash, Dash Attack
LIGHT: Crouch/Crawl, Dtilt1
I'm the best bowser but I'm not sure if I missed anything? That should really say something. :x
- Bowser's ledge jump is very safe (4 frames) and lets him do a lot of stuff that isn't available to any other character
- Bowser's ledge attack is ludicrously huge, covering more than half of a lot of stages
- Get used to the command grab from the air. While it basically never works at high level, getting used to this is near-impossible for low level players
- Get used to dealing with Flame Cancel
- Get used to having far fewer safe-on-shield options due to upB
- Get used to getting naired out of a lot of combos that work on basically every other character
- Learn to DI the Koopa Klaw
- Learn to edgeguard against upB's ridiculous aerial hitboxes (I
often get aerial upB -> grounded upb -> fortresshog -> ledge attack or fair or nair -> edgeguard to death combos from this)
- Learn to deal with Bowser's ridiculously strong/long ranged options from fullhop -> perfect waveland across platform -> fastfall
...And so forth. My point is that Bowser is well beyond OP at some levels of play - he's completely unintelligible. That doesn't really mean he's 'good' at high level play where his matchup is theoretically understood, but the above list is just not at all a reasonable burden of knowledge for most players. Pretty much all of this stuff is currently necessary for Bowser to compete at all at high level play, but, again, it's all bandaid stuff. I'd much prefer if the armor list looked more like this, and Bowser given appropriate buffs to compensate - and he were therefore made
simpler and
deeper.
EXAMPLE CHANGES TO ARMOR
INVINCIBILITY FRAMES: up B
SUPER: n/a
HEAVY: FSmash, down B, USmash, Side B, Nair (!!!!!!),
MEDIUM: DSmash, Dash Attack
LIGHT: Crouch/Crawl, Dtilt1
EXAMPLE POST-CHANGE ARMOR LIST BELOW (pls click to expand)
INVINCIBILITY FRAMES: n/a
SUPER: n/a
HEAVY: down B
MEDIUM: FSmash, DSmash, USmash, Nair
LIGHT: Crouch/Crawl, Dtilt1, Dash Attack, up-B
Notice how much easier/more intuitive the bottom list is to memorize. There's only one 'heavy' armored move, the smashes are all in the same category, nair is still a wrecking ball, but not
that much of an outlier, and
everything else is simply light, and therefore not a huge frustrating dealbreaker if the opponent manages to forget about it.
Not necessarily saying that's the exact changes I want to the armor system, but it's pretty close, and a huge step in the right direction imo.
Frost | Odds
Seagull played Bowser against Frozen in grand finals of Nova. He really just spaced fair almost the entire time and it worked so well because you pretty much need to respect Bowser's zone if you have a measly grab range or your approach can be CC'd.
at the end.
