Tier List Speculation

[PlateProp]

Just turn him into 64 kirby, he was top tier in that game

Mostly cause I want to see kirby retain ledge cancel dash attack stuff but with face planting instead of fire

 

[FreeGamer]

Its speed and distance plus the velocity mixups from going off of platforms make it far more useful than simple grabs or aerials. This is in addition to being safe on shield and comboing into stuff, of course.

 

[Certix_]

I never mentioned removing it, just toning it down. It's just a strong move on a not as strong character. If we could leave it as is and buff other parts of kirby without breaking him I would be cool with that. But it will be much harder that way.
I'm not familiar enough with 64 as its been years since I've played it, but it seems like a more 64 focused Kirby would be fun.
Changes to how his copy ability work could make Kirby really dynamic, compared to how they are now. This could be like a set of hats he could use by using his taunts, but they fall off after so much %damage. There's a lot of cool ideas but they are probably hard to implement, time consuming, and not cool with the pmdt.
Other than those, tweaking his current moveset and traits seems the most likely/plausible.
Kirby is really cool as is, but he seems a bit lacking at times. Anything drastic might cause some resentment and that is probably why Kirby hasn't changed too much since 3.02 on top of the fact that his hats are hard to manipulate.

 

[Rizner]

Sex kick pls

Also hats being ported more would be pretty sweet

 

[JOE!]

The only goofiness about snake is port priority. Make mines just hit both people in grab situations pls.

 

[Mc.Rad]

The only goofiness about snake is port priority. Make mines just hit both people in grab situations pls.

Thats kinda ironic since the entirety of Metal Gear has had some goofy ****

 

[nimigoha]

So guys, I guess Jigglypuff is going to be top tier now.

 

[robosteven]

Downtilt forces tripping, a la Diddy banana.

PLEASE NO

 

[Binary Clone]

Effective edgeguarding against Snake exists, but I don't have the time or the energy to go into that right now.

I'm gonna take this moment to point out that Marth and Falcon are both very common and fairly important in the current PM meta, and both of them can dair straight through Cypher. Often they'll even trade, which means they can easily jump back over to the ledge/stage without suffering endlag of their move, after being slightly popped up from where Snake was.

Of course that only works if Snake is recovering low, but if Snake is recovering high, then Snake is above you, which means either you hit him to juggle or you trade with one of his grenades, which means he takes damage from your hit and damage from the grenade, and he doesn't have very good aerial control, so he's probably not about to escape some kind of hit.

 

[Rawkobo]

Kirby works in that he limits what others can do in neutral and sometimes in combos, unique to Kirby. His crouch stops some grabs and jabs,as well as some short hop approaches. His aerials are generally fast and long lasting to catch approach and OOS options as well as facilitate Edge guards. His multiple jumps can help bait out commitment options so he can safely return to stage or punish. His two burst movement options catch bad neutral options and extend combos.
Most of his options are to punish options that work for the other 90% of the cast. Once you figure out what you can't do in the matchup compared to usual, he is (barring a handful of matchups) not a strong character by himself. Since this is the way that Kirby works, he can be not fun to fight against. The nerf to his inhale helped a lot because of how anti-meta and interactive it was. But like many characters, he never got compensated. Nerfing his burst options slightly and raising his air and/or ground speed/mobility would make him more conventionally stronger while also making him more conventionally interactive. Whether that's the way to go or not I don't know.

In short: he makes you play different than others, respect this and he is not hard to beat. I'm on phone so excuse bad stuff.

Edit: It depends on what we are trying to make Kirby be to decide what to change and how to change it. I personally think Kirby should have higher aerial mobility and speed, his first jump reaches max height faster, and that dash attack is harder to combo off of unless it carries the opponent offstage or is used for its platform stuff. Other stuff is more wishful thinking.

It's weird. I kind of find Kirby to have the Squirtle problem, where by all depths of imagination, the character shouldn't really be bad but is bad, and yet losing to it makes you feel like the character has a lot more to it that's extremely frustrating to deal with.

I agree that some aerial mobility changes would actually make things a slight bit more tolerable/interesting, because I feel like while the character could be easily beatable, currently he changes the pace of the match at times in a way that could be even worse than Puff has to do to Fox in Melee. There's nothing wrong with making the standard pace of game slower. But making it glacier-like in a fair amount of matchups to go into the amount of respect you have to give is a bit polarizing.

With increased aerial mobility, he does get to weave in the air, which also makes his aerial game better. But as a tradeoff, doing that increases the motivation to approach, making the matchup a hell of a lot more interactive.

 

[MWEX]

Kirby is rather useless if you're incredibly passive.

 

[Deleted member]

"lunchables definitely hated ROB this weekend
nothing new there"

How could Lunchables hate on ROB anymore? ROB finally got the weight changes. "Just make him easier to combo, it will be alright"

Lemme guess, that wasn't satisfactory?

My ROB hate irl is partially joking, partially serious

I do really like the 3.6 full changes, I feel like they addressed some of his issues. Do I think he's perfect? No. There are still some problems with the character at his core, but I don't think they'll actually change so he's probably the most like-able he'll ever be.

Air dashing is pretty hard to balance as it turns out lol

 

[FreeGamer]

If I had to pick one aspect of the game, I would say Kirby hates fast characters the most. Have fun trying to punish less-committal movement options with a linear Dash Attack and embarrassingly risky Cutter Dash. Once the other person adapts to those, you'll end up spending the entire match crouch camping or spamming B-Air because you can't do much else. ^_^

 

[KinGly]

As someone who spent a year+ playing against nothing but Kirby aside from biweekly tourneys, I can say that he is downright boring to fight against. The only character I enjoyed vs Kirby was marth and that's cause it was free is crap and made my friend switch to Ike. I don't care how/if he's buffed, but please make him not a total bore to fight

 

[Rizner]

It's weird. I kind of find Kirby to have the Squirtle problem, where by all depths of imagination, the character shouldn't really be bad but is bad, and yet losing to it makes you feel like the character has a lot more to it that's extremely frustrating to deal with.

I agree that some aerial mobility changes would actually make things a slight bit more tolerable/interesting, because I feel like while the character could be easily beatable, currently he changes the pace of the match at times in a way that could be even worse than Puff has to do to Fox in Melee. There's nothing wrong with making the standard pace of game slower. But making it glacier-like in a fair amount of matchups to go into the amount of respect you have to give is a bit polarizing.

With increased aerial mobility, he does get to weave in the air, which also makes his aerial game better. But as a tradeoff, doing that increases the motivation to approach, making the matchup a hell of a lot more interactive.

But Kirby isn't and has never been like puff, to weave in and out while in the air. He doesn't like using tons of jumps before grounding, and he's different as a character because of that. Does it make matchups harder? Yeah, some of them. But that's not inherently a bad thing.

If more aerial movement were added, giving him weaving would be bad. Not in terms of balance, but in terms of building Kirby with Kirby's design staying true as a priority.

If I had to pick one aspect of the game, I would say Kirby hates fast characters the most. Have fun trying to punish less-committal movement options with a linear Dash Attack and embarrassingly risky Cutter Dash. Once the other person adapts to those, you'll end up spending the entire match crouch camping or spamming B-Air because you can't do much else. ^_^

It makes sense to me that characters should have some matchup types harder than others, and that in those it might require playing differently. If we made other moves better and redesigned him to have these tools against fast characters, would he then be playing the same game against all of the cast? Spacing with bair makes sense to me; idk, doesn't feel boring lol. But in those matchups I generally approach with safe fairs, use utilt a good amount, crouch, bair to gain stage position, ftilt and dtilt to poke. It's not easy, but he has tools that can be used more than just cutter approach dash attack imo

As someone who spent a year+ playing against nothing but Kirby aside from biweekly tourneys, I can say that he is downright boring to fight against. The only character I enjoyed vs Kirby was marth and that's cause it was free is crap and made my friend switch to Ike. I don't care how/if he's buffed, but please make him not a total bore to fight

What about it was boring, and what characters aside from Marth did you use? How did the Kirby play? What would you do to mitigate the aspects you found boring?

 

[TheBOSS]

Lol certainly havent logged onto smashboards for a while...Babaganoush here btw.

Snake can be a frustrating experience, especially if you have minimal to no match up experience against him. He has lots of tricks and traps, but at the end of the day he's a good character, not great. Snake has very minimal approaching options, I choose to play snake quite defensively because I feel his move set is designed for more of a zoning/defensive style. Also, I play snake defensively because I co-main wolf and just go ham with him so if I want to be aggressive I go howl on some motha snuckas.

While facing Drinking Food, I quickly could tell he he wasn't familiar with snake...so i pulled out all his weird little tricks and traps that I could; and it ended up working. If I were DF, I'd be equally as salty. Loosing to someone you probably havn't heard much about round one of bracket at Paragon to a character you don't quite understand would be frustrating for most. I don't take the shots personal, we all say things when we get heated. I'm down to rematch anytime you want homeboy. GG's.

I could make a huge post about all his pros and cons and why I (like most) believe snake is good where he's at (as far as plausible changes go) but I feel FlashingFire made enough solid points a few pages back. Professor Pro, myself, and Messi all communicated throughout paragon (snake pit unite lol) and the conclusion we came up with, is that at high level play, snakes victories heavily rely on if he gets the c4 sticks or not. And against top level players...that can be difficult. His stage control imo is his best overall attribute; but once the opposing character gets in and gets snake airborn, snake gets bodied.

My ending advice against snake for those of you who struggle with the matchup...stay patient and alert! Master your punish game so that when you do hit him, you hit hard. And most importantly, re-watch Snakes on a Plane with Samuel L. Jackson.

 

[JRad]

I used to main kirby. Here are my thoughts on kirby:

1. Dash attack is a great tech chase move. Its gimmicky/good as an approach option only when your opponent doesn't have much experience or is not patient. It should be used as an approach to read dash dance or punish a bad move, and thats about it in a perfect world imo. All of kirby's other approaches out of dash are not that good and are a lot shorter range than dash attack, so if you see him coming at you on the ground, you pretty much know what to expect. Any character with good CC options is just going to let you DA them so that they can punish.

2. Kirby's grab range is mediocre and getting grabs with kirby is fairly difficult so I would like to see kirby get more off of his grabs. With the exception of fast fallers you are either counting on bad DI or you just dthrow and go for the tech chase (with probably dash attack or cutter). Tech chasing is kirby's strength so havin a tech chase dthrow isn't bad, but I think he should have a throw that can lead into more.

3. His recovery is really predictable now that his horizontal cutter -> airdodge is gone. In melee kirby's recovery is one of the worst and in this version his recovery was definitely cut back. You count his jumps until he has to cutter and you are good to go, cutter is also a huge commitment that leaves you very vulnerable after. Unlike our beloved GnW, kirby doesn't have stellar hitboxes he can throw out so having the second double jump isn't as good as his awesome airdodge. YOu can also just CC the cutter and then punish. If you opt to cutter early, you lose all of your jumps, so realistically like I said before, you count all the jumps until you know he has to cutter.

4. For a character that in an ideal world wants to get in on your opponent, his shield pressuring options are pretty bad. His jab is fast but can be shield grabbed. Dtilt has too much end lag so your opponent can just WD OoS or jump away. Uptilt isn't really safe and ftilt is only safe at a good range but suffers the same problem as dtilt. He doesn't have the best shffl so he can't just spam aerials on shield either since things like rising nair/fair aren't great.

5. He has one of the worst combinations of weight/fall speed for survivability so he always dies early and he still doesn't escape certain set kill moves that don't work on Puff such as DK's cargo uthrow uair. Kirby gets combo'd a little harder than he should for his lack of survivability, which I think would be ok if his recovery wasn't nerfed.

And the reason why I really hate the fact that you cant drift while inhaling besides obvious gimps is because:
1. It was great move to use like a tomahawk, approach with inhale when you have them conditioned to shielding an aerial
2. I really liked comboing into inhale with aerials as a strong finisher.

CC is also really powerful tool against kirby since most of his moves are not safe against it except for like Dair/spaced bair at low percents. Don't get me wrong, Kirby has strengths but I just want to point out his weaknesses.

 

[FreeGamer]

I used to main kirby. Here are my thoughts on kirby:

1. Dash attack is a great tech chase move. Its gimmicky/good as an approach option only when your opponent doesn't have much experience or is not patient. It should be used as an approach to read dash dance or punish a bad move, and thats about it in a perfect world imo. All of kirby's other approaches out of dash are not that good and are a lot shorter range than dash attack, so if you see him coming at you on the ground, you pretty much know what to expect. Any character with good CC options is just going to let you DA them so that they can punish.

2. Kirby's grab range is mediocre and getting grabs with kirby is fairly difficult so I would like to see kirby get more off of his grabs. With the exception of fast fallers you are either counting on bad DI or you just dthrow and go for the tech chase (with probably dash attack or cutter). Tech chasing is kirby's strength so havin a tech chase dthrow isn't bad, but I think he should have a throw that can lead into more.

3. His recovery is really predictable now that his horizontal cutter -> airdodge is gone. In melee kirby's recovery is one of the worst and in this version his recovery was definitely cut back. You count his jumps until he has to cutter and you are good to go, cutter is also a huge commitment that leaves you very vulnerable after. Unlike our beloved GnW, kirby doesn't have stellar hitboxes he can throw out so having the second double jump isn't as good as his awesome airdodge. YOu can also just CC the cutter and then punish. If you opt to cutter early, you lose all of your jumps, so realistically like I said before, you count all the jumps until you know he has to cutter.

4. For a character that in an ideal world wants to get in on your opponent, his shield pressuring options are pretty bad. His jab is fast but can be shield grabbed. Dtilt has too much end lag so your opponent can just WD OoS or jump away. Uptilt isn't really safe and ftilt is only safe at a good range but suffers the same problem as dtilt. He doesn't have the best shffl so he can't just spam aerials on shield either since things like rising nair/fair aren't great.

5. He has one of the worst combinations of weight/fall speed for survivability so he always dies early and he still doesn't escape certain set kill moves that don't work on Puff such as DK's cargo uthrow uair. Kirby gets combo'd a little harder than he should for his lack of survivability, which I think would be ok if his recovery wasn't nerfed.

And the reason why I really hate the fact that you cant drift while inhaling besides obvious gimps is because:
1. It was great move to use like a tomahawk, approach with inhale when you have them conditioned to shielding an aerial
2. I really liked comboing into inhale with aerials as a strong finisher.

CC is also really powerful tool against kirby since most of his moves are not safe against it except for like Dair/spaced bair at low percents. Don't get me wrong, Kirby has strengths but I just want to point out his weaknesses.

I disagree with you about his recovery, grab range, D-Tilt, survivability, and not moving during Inhale.

Most of these things are where they are to fit within the realm of a 3.5-3.6 meta, and do a fine job at that. IMO the problem is his underwhelming offense. Due to slowness and limited approaches outside of Dash Attack and crouching, some MUs force him to play like an even more boring version of Puff. It's fine if some of you prefer him to be so intrinsically defensive, but I think he would be better to play as and against if he could do more to encourage interactions.

 

[TFerg]

I really don't understand the Ness player apologetics train to convince everyone that he's not strong.

"No really guys, we had more representation than any other character in top 64 and a player in top 8, we promise he's bad."

It's genuinely okay for the character to be considered strong. Nobody is buying that Ness players have some super secret inherent talent that makes them outplay every supposed "terrible" matchup they come across. Neither is anyone saying that Ness is overpowered, it's just kinda silly at this point to consider him weak, and I don't really get what there is to be gained by defending such a stance. It also seems their only formula for a bad mu is basically: "They have more range than me" and don't take any other aspect of neutral or punish game into consideration.

 

[Rizner]

I disagree with you about his recovery, grab range, D-Tilt, survivability, and not moving during Inhale.

Most of these things are where they are to fit within the realm of a 3.5-3.6 meta, and do a fine job at that. IMO the problem is his underwhelming offense. Due to slowness and limited approaches outside of Dash Attack and crouching, some MUs force him to play like an even more boring version of Puff. It's fine if some of you prefer him to be so intrinsically defensive, but I think he would be better to play as and against if he could do more to encourage interactions.

What does Kirby do which doesn't encourage interactions? All of his moves are close, his follow ups are chases and not guaranteed, and he has to approach to do anything, even if it is at a slower pace than a spacie

 

[FreeGamer]

and he has to approach to do anything

Which is problematic when you factor in his mediocre mobility and good-but-not-great punish game. He can try to encourage interactions, but doesn't do a great job of it when the optimal strategy is to bait things by crouching or platform camping.

 

[DrinkingFood]

Kirby's dash attack is fine btw guys lol
It's okay for characters to have a degree of jank, particularly stuff that DOESNT force the player to just avoid the opponent or drop earned punishments or just not interact in general
Kirby's dash attack is just a tool like any other that threatens space and asks that anytime you want to threaten Kirby's grounded zone that you take the risk of eating a dash attack. This is a basic crux of neutral interaction, most characters have this. Kirby's dash attack is just a little bit longer and a little bit safer because he lacks long and safe aerial approaches that other characters usually have in place of dash attacks

My ROB hate irl is partially joking, partially serious

I do really like the 3.6 full changes, I feel like they addressed some of his issues. Do I think he's perfect? No. There are still some problems with the character at his core, but I don't think they'll actually change so he's probably the most like-able he'll ever be.

Air dashing is pretty hard to balance as it turns out lol

I'm still brainstorming solutions to work on him and if I think I come up with something good I might learn PSA and make a build to use as an example when applying for PMDT

 

[DMG]

Let's just not make Kirby Dash Attack ungrabbable again plz ty. Give him laser beam eye blasts or something, just please nothing like old Dash Attack. "1 man gimmick army" moves probably ain't like good to make and give to chars

 

[FreeGamer]

Let's just not make Kirby Dash Attack ungrabbable again plz ty. Give him laser beam eye blasts or something, just please nothing like old Dash Attack. "1 man gimmick army" moves probably ain't like good to make and give to chars

That can be arranged...

 

[Ripple]

my initial thought

 

[robosteven]

I don't really get what there is to be gained by defending such a stance.

The possibility of future buffs.

 

[Droß]

Question... why not move Kirby's dash attack to his side B (enables midair usage), since it's literally the burning kirby power, and add the ability for him to bounce off of walls? This would make his recovery more modular, and introduce some mixup potential (seeing as the burning kirby power speeds up his movement). Giving the move a large-ish hitbox but a long landing lag (or long start up time) could be used to create meaningful weaknesses in the move without nerfing his recovery potential back to square 1.

The Kirby players I have watched don't seem to use hammer as a bread and butter move anyway.

 

[TheoryofSmaug]

Um, Kirby's hammer is one of his best moves, it kills if you get a jab reset or read and it auto cancels so you can space it in neutral and it's good. I don't think any Kirby wants to lose it for the possiblity of a new dash attack that can't be used out of dash lmao.

 

[Narelex]

With the way MU's and MU inexperience work in PM I still don't think tourneys are the best way to talk about character balance.

Maybe if they were held in a round robin format instead of a bracket. But until we all learn the huge amount of varied MU's in the game. MU inexperience will be a big contributing factor in tourney placings and thoughts on character balance.

It's why we need to analyse character strengths and weaknesses and "why" something is too strong, instead of just X won Y tournament please nerf character.

 

[DrinkingFood]

hammer doesn't actually autocancel, it has 12 frames of landing lag, but it IS safe if spaced on shield (which is required to get the strong hitbox anyway)

instead of just X won Y tournament please nerf character.

But there are very very few players even saying this
and no respectable players saying this

 

[FreeGamer]

Um, Kirby's hammer is one of his best moves, it kills if you get a jab reset or read and it auto cancels so you can space it in neutral and it's good. I don't think any Kirby wants to lose it for the possiblity of a new dash attack that can't be used out of dash lmao.

You read my mind. <3

If anything, I would replace Cutter Dash with an aerial fireball dash.

 

[Narelex]

But there are very very few players even saying this
and no respectable players saying this

Masses tend to spout this but overall I agree.

I was referring more to the current arguments about Ness being strong or weak. Was it overall MU inexperience and solid play from the Nesses at Paragon or is Ness actually decent. (you guys did play really well though)

I should have said "done well" instead of "won"

in the case of MK there was not a single solo main for the character in the Paragon bracket and most people would agree he's an extremely strong character (granted people were brandishing him as a secondary). Ditto for Ike.

Placements aren't everything is all I'm saying.

 

[KinGly]

What about it was boring, and what characters aside from Marth did you use? How did the Kirby play? What would you do to mitigate the aspects you found boring?

My friend was a tier or so lower than me when we played, so I pretty much used all but like 5 characters. Saying just Marth may be an overstatement, but :/. My friend played super slow, just spacing bairs, occasionally dash attacking. If I started a juggle it was always box to come down, or if I verbally called it before hand usually jump away bair. It was just frustrating to play neutral against, cause I could win whenever I wanted, but it required I play defensively, and force the approach with say sheik needles, which gets pretty boring 5 hours in with nothing new, and he doesn't approach well given even for a Kirby.

It probably wouldn't bother me in tourney, but holy cow it got old fast in friendlies.

Now that I'm thinking about it more though, this may have less to do with Kirby than I've been thinking. Still could use some approach options or something to make him feel more dynamic as long as it's not too strong imo. Maybe give swallow less startup but shoot a set distance so it kinda functions like wario's bite, but I'd need more knowledge from actually playing Kirby rather than playing against him to feel out his weaknesses.

 

[mimgrim]

I don't really have any problem playing against Kirby (but I don't mind defensive characters all that much).

But he has been made more and more boring to play as, imo.

I had started to play him a good bit in 3.5 and it started out as being immensely fun because of some of the "jank" he had, which I felt made him unique, and it really wasn't all that bad in terms of "jank", but I also don't mind characters having "jank" as long as it isn't Melee Shine like (aka super safe and versatile with a big reward and just too good at too much stuff while not being bad in any real way). 3.6b came around and he became a bit less to play as for me, mostly because of the "dejanking", then 3.6 full and came out and he is no longer fun to play as imo and feels so bad now, I especially hate the Cutter Dash change because it feels so super horrible to use now because of how slow it seems to travel now.

 

[ShadowGanon]

my initial thought

Thank you. Thank you for bringing back my childhood.

 

[TheoryofSmaug]

I don't really have any problem playing against Kirby (but I don't mind defensive characters all that much).

But he has been made more and more boring to play as, imo.

I had started to play him a good bit in 3.5 and it started out as being immensely fun because of some of the "jank" he had, which I felt made him unique, and it really wasn't all that bad in terms of "jank", but I also don't mind characters having "jank" as long as it isn't Melee Shine like (aka super safe and versatile with a big reward and just too good at too much stuff while not being bad in any real way). 3.6b came around and he became a bit less to play as for me, mostly because of the "dejanking", then 3.6 full and came out and he is no longer fun to play as imo and feels so bad now, I especially hate the Cutter Dash change because it feels so super horrible to use now because of how slow it seems to travel now.

I feel the same way, I played and loved Kirby in 3.02 and into 3.5, however he just got kind of boring to me. Idk why exactly but I don't like the new Dthrow he got, also just in general the little chances to his moves took away his uniqueness and made him just generally way less fun.

 

[Boiko]

I really don't understand the Ness player apologetics train to convince everyone that he's not strong.

"No really guys, we had more representation than any other character in top 64 and a player in top 8, we promise he's bad."

It's genuinely okay for the character to be considered strong. Nobody is buying that Ness players have some super secret inherent talent that makes them outplay every supposed "terrible" matchup they come across. Neither is anyone saying that Ness is overpowered, it's just kinda silly at this point to consider him weak, and I don't really get what there is to be gained by defending such a stance. It also seems their only formula for a bad mu is basically: "They have more range than me" and don't take any other aspect of neutral or punish game into consideration.

Representation is not an indicator of viability. I've broken down how Ness operates time and time again, and how the counter play against him is simple. I've stated earlier that I don't care if Ness is weak/strong. I don't need to rely on updates to validate my wins.

What I would like to point out is that there are A LOT of Ness players. But there are very few that perform at the same level as me, Aki or Stereo. So when players have "Ness experience" what they actually have is PK Fire spam/fair>grab MU experience. I can list all of the unique techs that higher level Ness players use, but you can just watch some sets. This is the reason that Stereo and I don't usually break top 5 at our locals. The last NYC local we both attended, he got 9th and I got 5th. The players we were playing against know Ness. They know that when Ness is hanging on ledge, you crouch just outside of LJC dair distance. You know who didn't know that? Kaos, IPK, SW, Hero of Time, etc. They know that when Ness goes into the air, run up shield covers all of his options that aren't empty landing. IPK learned that in between sets and look at how well it worked out for him. Or what about holding down and in when Ness dash attacks? M2K certainly didn't know that when I tech trapped him with a dash attack>up tilt>jab reset.

But then there are things like how I hit M2K with a bair at the edge of the stage at 100% to win the set, and he survived, because Ness has arguably the worst center stage kill power in the game. He then won with up throw>up air at 90%. Do you know how hard it would have been for me to get another kill set up at that point? All he had to do was circle camp and there was nothing I can do about it. My only options at that point are to CC>dtilt a nair approach but that wouldn't work at my percent, fish for a grab into an up throw>bair conversion, but that may or may not kill depending on positioning, or just space bairs in the neutral. Either way, you're forcing Ness to approach and he has some of the weakest approach options around. If I tried to space a fair, I wouldn't get a follow up off of it. I would have to hard commit to a fair, and if I miss the auto cancel window, I'm dead to up smash OoS, shield grab up throw up air, CC grab, CC up smash..

Or what about how when I played against Mach, and he edge guarded me by down smashing over and over again. If I tried to sweet spot from below, all he would have to do is grab ledge.

Paragon was a great tournament for Ness players, yes. And based on results and representation, you may say that Ness is a good character, but he's really not great. In terms of tier list speculation, he is presumably in the lowest quadrant. However, I like to believe that PM is a very balanced game, and even a character that low can still succeed, although it is difficult. What was experienced at Paragon was solid players playing very well combined with a lack of match up knowledge.

I have a plethora of examples of things that people don't know about Ness because they've never experienced it before, like people who would DI his down throw incorrectly every time (FTR, it's not always in front of him). After sets I was often met with, "Wow, I've never seen Ness do that before." or "How do I avoid this? How do I counter that?" etc. etc.

tl;dr: CC, run up shield, don't get hit by dair, if you do, tech, SDI fair, don't always DI his throw in front of him.

And one last point I would like to bring up, I can't speak for any Ness mains aside from myself, but I'm not saying that Ness is weak attempting to advocate for buffs. I'm stating Ness is weak in terms of tier list speculation. After Stereo lost to IPK we went out to eat and he wasn't saying, "Ness needs an option to deal with run up shield" he said, "What can I do to counter run up shield?" and we had a discussion about it. We're playing the game as it is now.

 

[JOE!]

Pls make Bair do 16% and Dair do 13% for the PK boy <3

 

[smashbro29]

On a personal level and I could be wrong, I'm not some top player. I feel like Sonic is a ton of fun to play as but he's just ****ty.

You put in a ton of work getting an opening and guessing correctly for about 30 or so damage while other characters can just eat one or two of your pathetically weak and frankly not that quick hits to combo the hell out of you with guaranteed setups.

And don't even get me started on that DDD matchup.

 

[Narelex]

I threw together a tier list so we can actually "speculate"

Mewtwo, Lucas, Sonic are all horribly underused.

I'm 100% certain DK is in the wrong spot but I'm too tired to know where I should put him. C tier and A tier feel messy. Ordered left to right but what do any of us know about what an actual list looks like at this point in time.

We're kind of High tiers, Giant Middle tier soup and Low tiers atm. Discuss.

On a personal level and I could be wrong, I'm not some top player. I feel like Sonic is a ton of fun to play as but he's just ****ty.

You put in a ton of work getting an opening and guessing correctly for about 30 or so damage while other characters can just eat one or two of your pathetically weak and frankly not that quick hits to combo the hell out of you with guaranteed setups.

And don't even get me started on that DDD matchup.

Star wrote a huge guide all about Sonic and is pretty passionate about the character I'd suggest giving it a read.

Sonic does require extensive knowledge about the game overall and your opponents options to be successful but he's a good character with a lot of tricks up his sleeve.

http://smashboards.com/guides/endless-possibilities.587/

Any aspiring sonic's or those who wish to know more about the character should read his guide.