First off, thanks for posting Boiko. Always nice to actually build with Ness mains about the character and challenge some of my notions.
I'll start by saying pivot PK fire is neither a new thing nor a godlike thing. Most of my ground pkfires are pivoted, and I've been using them for a long time. I don't think they are as good as you think they are.
They control some space, but have a lot of end lag. You gain less than a wavedash of distance to keep yourself safe while being stuck in enough lag to lose to someone who guesses and jumps over with an aerial. That fact alone doesn't make it bad--nearly everything in the game has a response and a counter, and having a counter doesn't make it bad.
What makes it bad for Ness is that the responses to PKfire are nearly the same as the responses to anythign else Ness does from that distance, and requires Ness to guess in neutral when his opponent will let their guard up to beat it.
Consider we are in the situation where you are in max range and Ness can pivot pk fire. What are Ness's options?
A. pivot pkfire
b. dash attack
c. DJC fair
Those are the only quick options Ness can do to invade his opponents space. He's too slow to just dash in and mixup a la Falcon/Sonic/Pika/the rest, and he doesn't have a projectile he can run with to get real positional advantage off of pkfiring a shield.
So that means an opponent can just shield reactively to Ness at this range. Well, shielding a pkfire isn't going to win the game for Ness's opponent. Jumping will give them a free victory in neutral. The thing is, an opponent can shield every time to protect themselves and make an appropriate guess when its going to be a dash attack or DJC fair. If they jump v. DJC fair, they get hit. If they jump v. dash attack, they get a free punish.
let's look at Ness's side of this equation now.
Ness can pkfire the shield which gives him no ground. OR Ness can dash attack or DJC fair which makes him extremely vulnerable if his opponent shields and gives his opponent a free punish. If the opponent is patient, at best for Ness it is a stale mate. At worst its a guessing game of hoping your opponent will try to get closer to you or jump, and you'll catch them with a DJC fair (but if you pkfired/dash attacked, you lose neutral), or they'll try to retreat/ run in and grab you and you'll respond with a dash attack with good timing and beat them out (djc fair loses to the retreat, but beats the dash grab in). It's a stilted game of RPS at that pivot pkfire range where Ness has two scissors and a paper, and his opponent has RPS.
Some opponents will stimply WD oos after the pkfire and just have frame advantage on you and positionally enter a stronger position, but to Ness's benefit, he likes his opponents being this close.
Conclusion, I really think if your pivot pkfire game is working, its either because your opponents are impatient or they are guessing worse than you. Which speaks to your competency in your read game, but honestly I can't think of many characters with this stilted options in neutral.
Ness can safely pressure a shield with spaced bairs and magnet>nairs>dtilts. Also, pivot PK fires are godlike against shields, since they poke so frequently, but almost nobody uses them besides me and stereo. Yes, he has a bad grab range, but he has no problem getting in.
I would argue Ness does have problems getting in. Because 3 or 4 character lengths away, he has like...3 options, and once he closes in his options open up.
Why are you spacing bair on the front of Marth's shield to begin with? It only loses to shield grab if you run away like you do to the rest of the cast. Try mixing up your options out of said bair to bait and punish the grab instead. Alternatively, if you're going to attack the front of Marth's shield, a full hop bair hitting at the head of his shield is a significantly better option, as you can DJC into different follow ups if he tries to fair you OoS (he will).
All of the options that you mentioned are good require Ness to already be extremely close to the opponent. I don't deny Ness has a plethora of options to open up an opponent once he's one character length away from them. I just think he has minimal options when he's anything further than that BESIDES reactively DJC fairing an overextending opponent. The benefit of playing against people who have no character experience against Ness is that they overextend CONSTANTLY, and they continuously underestimate just how far DJC fair can go. DJC fair is awesome when you know your opponent has overextended, but as his only tool in neutral to actually "get in", its a pretty dangerous guessing game. That doesn't mean its unservicable--but every other character in Smash can more safely threaten a shield either with disjoints/range, a spectacular dash dance, the threat of massive grabs, or a projectile to force responses in neutral.
These are just facts, not much to say about them. Slow characters can be successful though. Especially those with a form of burst movement.
I listed all of those "facts" to compare the paradigm I established versus the reality of Ness. The fact is every character in this game has either good speed, good attack range, good grab range, or a projectile that forces reactions. Great characters have some combination of this. Ness has NONE of these, and it is a critical reason why safe intelligent play will always beat him out. Non semifast fallers/fast fallers have the luxury of being allowed to make more mistakes against Ness in Neutral and still win (in neutral and punish game). Semi fast fallers/fast fallers get punished hard when they overextend in neutral, which is why in tournaments we will often see good Ness players beat reputable Fast faller/semi fast faller users who don't understand the character they are playign against.
T
his isn't even true because lagless PK Fire takes just as much time as a pivot pk fire but with less cool down. You're goal after hitting a grounded PK Fire, which frequently pokes, shouldn't be to run up and grab. That's amateur 3.02 Ness habits. We already know Ness is too slow to get over there. Instead, your goal should be to read and punish the option they take to get out of the fire. If you can't get over in time because say, they rolled away, you now have corner pressure and a positional advantage.
lagless pkfire has the same startup as pivot pkfire, but where it dffers is that the time between the pkfire releasing and you acting after it is 4 frames of landing lag. That's pretty damn good for a lot of reasons.
1. It obstructs the predictability of "pk fire, pkfire, pkfire, here's a bunch of new options now". With pivot pkfires, you face enough end lag that they can pretty much prepare with ease if you decide to rush down after a couple pk fires and enter that space where Ness's options open up. With EX fire, they don't have nearly enough time to respond.
2. Because you can pkfire horizontally while still being air borne (and not needing to be way up 45 degrees), its less clear to the opponent when you might go for the DJC fair v. the pkfire, making the guessing game work far more in Ness's favor. Again, it obfuscates the RPS game in Ness's favor so that while he's pelting you with pkfires, you really don't know when he might just DJC fair into your face.
3. It makes pkfire less punishable. With 4 frames of lag, you can dash away or respond with a counterhit even if your opponent reads that you were going to be doing a grounded pkfire and tries to commit to a short hop aerial. It's also means WD OOS v. pkfire offers no frame advantage and might even be frame disadvantaged. Indeed, EXfire makes Ness's neutral at those mid and far ranges significantly stronger.
You're just making everything sound so amateur and that's not the way it is. If it were that easy, top players would be adapting and Ness players would have zero results in tournaments. Stereo was DQ'd R1 of a Florida tournament just yesterday for being late and he came through loser's bracket and beat Ghatzu in GF 3-2 and 3-0. You're telling me that in 8 games one of the best Falcon players around, who beat M2K, failed to adapt completely? No.
Yeah actually I kind of do feel that way. StereoKIDD beating strong falcons/foxes/whatever isn't new. Ness has always been extremely good at punishing spacies and in the powerful hands of someone like StereoKIDD, you, Myself, or Akhi, I have no doubts we could beat any spacie or falcon that over commits enough times and doesn't play patient enough. Stereo also beat Hax at GUTS 3 when Stereo was half the player he is now. I've beaten Zero's Fox in the only friendly set we played. I used to have a 3-1 record in friendlies with Darc's Falcon. Good Ness players are largely playing on an even battlefield against many of the fast fallers, and if they have inexperience, it definitely moves in Ness's favor.
Ness can just punish overextensions so well, so its not really surprising to me. This is obviously not to say I think any less of Stereo, you, me, or any Ness player. I just don't think beating fast fallers/semi fast fallers is evidence of the reasons why Ness is at the bottom of the tier list.
You need to learn to short hop and late DJC nair next to the ground. You also need to learn to waveland out of your DJ since it goes stupid far and can bait a reaction. It just sounds like your play is super linear. "Space fair and bair until something connects" is never going to work. Read your opponents option, use grounded PK fires to punish their landing, bait an OoS option. Ness is a bait and punish character, not an aggressor. If you play hyper aggressive with Ness against any character other than IC's, you'll probably lose, and hyper aggressive seems to be your style. Stereo literally will not approach unless he has a read or hits with PKF. Literally NEVER. And what does he have? Results.
The only thing I don't do here is waveland out of DJ, and camp.I understand your style of Ness is fairly campy but that's really not how I want to play the character. Baiting an opponent requires them to approach somewhat, and there are ways to do that without having to camp. Falcon, for example is a very bait heavy character, but he has ways to assert shield pressure without playing guessing games.
Personally, I think I bait a lot more than you and StereoKIDD in unique ways that involve playing in my opponents space with breeverse magnets and breverse mag dashing, while you are far more about safely chipping and chipping until an opponent decides to challenge you. I would like both play styles to be viable because, as a Melee Ness player, I don't want to play Ness's neutral game like I'm Samus. That's not my idea of fun.
I played and beat Cactuar, one of the smartest players of all time. All throughout the set, he was adapting like crazy. He was one of the only Fox players besides GP that would SDI fair so it was impossible to follow up on. So I just kept mixing up my options, baited nair approaches and punished with WD back grabs or CC dtilt. Adapting is a two way street.
This is sort of the crux of what i'm talking about. Cactuar was one of the only Foxes you face to SDI fair...it sort of exemplifies what i'm trying to say. I think Ness is a strong character when his opponents don't have character specific experience, but when his opponents do have that experience a lot of his neutral game crumbles beyond its paltry options. Ness is a pretty tricky guy when you are trying to adapt midset. Personally, I think we'll see a pattern where Ness will do worse and worse in his local scenes where players learn the character and still continue to do well at Nationals dependent on brackets and who he faces. I actually live in a region where the Melee players have more Ness experience than pretty much any region in the world, seeing as the best Melee Ness of all time lives here.
Someone like Mafia has only played me once in bracket, and he was figuring stuff on the fly but still knew quite a bit about character limitations.
I'll agree that Ness suffers from Marth syndrome. He can't really kill at higher percentages. But you're failing to mention nair, which is arguably his best kill move. Ness is more about edge guarding. Every character you listed can be edge guarded besides Mewtwo and Kirby.
I don't disagree with this. I just think almost every character in the game has a variation of jab -> usmash/fsmash or leadins to kills except the occasional strong character like Marth. Those characters that don't have those types of followups either have decent smash attacks for the purpose or at least disjoints to safely tack on damage till the kill opens up. Ness doesn't have those things. Its either usmash once your opponent is at 140% or its spaced bairs which are largely unsafe.
And most importantly, I don't think most of your points are farfetched. You're right. He has a weakness to CC, his shield pressure isn't the greatest, and his recovery is pretty abysmal and requires stupid amounts of mix ups. But I don't think Ness is a bad character by any means. Certainly not third or fourth from the bottom.
The summary of my argument is simple. When Ness is one character length away, he has a lot of options. Dash grab, mag dash, djc aerials, WD dtilt, and awesome OOS options. When he's 3 characters away, he has no good options. The difficulty is, how do you get from the 2 character range into something closer or further when you don't have the dash dance/grab range/spaced aerials to get there?
As a final note, i'd challenge anyone to list a character that doesn't have some combination of those 4 pillars that advantage a player v. Shield. I have a feeling no one will be able to come up with a character in this game that doesn't have one of them.
