• Welcome to Smashboards, the world's largest Super Smash Brothers community! Over 250,000 Smash Bros. fans from around the world have come to discuss these great games in over 19 million posts!

    You are currently viewing our boards as a visitor. Click here to sign up right now and start on your path in the Smash community!

Tier List Speculation

Searing_Sorrow

Smash Journeyman
Joined
May 19, 2014
Messages
433
Location
Alma/Statesboro Georgia
Tier list using base opinions and zero matchup data!

View attachment 78362

Not a PMDT member, not a known player, fewer than 1000 SB posts so you probably won't take me seriously, just a guy with some opinions.

1. To put the letters in context, I'd call Fox an 8.5/10 character and Yoshi a 6. Arbitrary scale but hopefully adds a little bit of meaning and scope to the difference between top and bottom tier.

2. Some order in tiers, but I don't have comprehensive knowledge so arguing positions like +/- 4 placements is useless, although I want to hear opinions about things you think I'm completely off the mark with.

3. A+ tier I think could use a bit of toning down. These characters really have it all, even though they definitely have exploitable flaws.

4. A tier, maybe just a hint of tweaking. Some things I feel are a little too good right now, some things I could see being very good once optimized (Mewtwo's HC, his teleport cancel, Lucas's punish game, Lucario of course) but on the whole I don't see any "problems".

5. A- tier is just really solid. Maybe GW's Up B could use a bit of design change but that's a whole discussion on its own. Pikachu could definitely climb the ranks if his QAC is fully utilized but it's a very difficult thing to pull off consistently to the point where it's oppressive, and messing up can lead to death half the time...

6. B tier: This group is just missing something. Each character is generally fine but lacks a tool to really break through, like Ivy vs CC for example, or maybe Ness's recovery.

7. B- tier, this is where things start to fall off.

---Pit still feels incomplete to me, I firmly believe that he was overnerfed after 3.02 because of two of the world's best players representing him when he was a good character. Still working his way back up but has things that are still off. His Upsmash, his arrows, his Dtilt and Utilt... fix a few things and he's a solid character.

---Jigglypuff is still trying to figure out what to do. Her transition to PM is very very tough. On one hand, it's sensible to keep her playing like Melee Puff, but on the other her design is very very strange, and her playstyle struggles a bit more against some of the new characters. For the Melee top 8, when they "ported" over Fox and Falco and Sheik they were working with characters that were relatively complete, moveset-wise, outside of Chain. Falcon got buffs, Peach got buffs, Marth got a little bit of buffs, ICs got... that remains to be seen. But Jigglypuff has near-useless Specials outside of Rest. In a port where Falcon Kick and Raptor Boost and Peach Bomber all became actually good, we're left with Sing and Rollout.

---Charizard I'm iffy with his placement. I find his neutral to be strange because he has a great run speed but poor fall speed. He has far recoveries but they have little wiggle room and are commitments. He has strong kill options and good combo moves. I just feel like he's missing something. I don't know. Maybe he doesn't belong here but I certainly wouldn't put him higher than B tier.

---Yoshi... For no discernible reason he was gutted in 3.6. I found him a completely fine character and his recovery was smacked, his grabs were smacked, his weight was changed from PAL Melee to NTSC Melee. My favourite line in his 3.6 changelog is "Horizontal momentum: 0.125 -> 0.04" with regards to his aerial Egg Roll. It's terrible and it eats your jump, it's just not worth using and you're left with either use jump hight and end up way above stage, or drift more and then jump and you're recovering from below. Having an option like Squirtle's where you can Side B and then Up B (or for Yoshi's poor soul, double jump and maybe get an airdodge) but probably with more endlag after Side B. I'm not here to propose Yoshi changes, just saying I think he really needs some.

8. F(ix) Tier

--- Bowser's neutral is what holds him back, we all know this. He punishes hard, can kill here and there, but him getting in is tricky, and once he fails to do that he's just combo food. As easy as it would be to give him back his old crazy Dash Attack to let him crunch right through moves, it was pretty brain dead and I know that PMDT (now fortified by Odds) can and will do much better.

Well feel free to pick me apart, I'ill explain placings.
A lot of this looks right, though I start questioning as early as diddy's placement. He has amazing tools yes, but so many surprisingly even matchups, and loses to quite a few characters such as peach, samus, jiggs, luigi, mario, wolf, and fox. Could be + or - on falcon, wario, and sheik. Granted this is a game with a lot of characters, but many of those characters are 'melee' characters, and a large amount of the high level talent pool still comes from melee players.

Wario is so hard to place, on paper he is ok, but in practice it just works. With that being said, what necessarily makes him better than an optimized suped up mario, tink, samus or ike.

Hungrybox has conditioned you all to undervalue jiggs. She beats falcon, sheik, diddy, and peach solidly, yet somehow she constantly ends up on the bottom spectrum of the tier list with... charizard? Gutted yoshi in same ball park as them, that good. OK a few here and there missed swings for me but overall still objectively better than the s tier g&w list.
 
Last edited:

DMG

Smash Legend
Joined
Feb 12, 2006
Messages
18,958
Location
Waco
Slippi.gg
DMG#931
Falcon Jiggs MU might be workable for Falcon now that "crouch down for max lulz" is no longer as relevant
 
Last edited:

Tarul

Smash Cadet
Joined
Jan 31, 2015
Messages
64
Location
Austin, TX
I've never liked the argument that Hungrybox's results do not reflect Jiggs' potential.

I mean, in the context of Melee, Jiggs is considered a top 6 character. However, if you check Melee it on Me's rankings, only 3 Jigglypuff mains are in the TOP 100 (yeah yeah, I know- it's not perfect, but they're good enough for this example):
  1. Soft
  2. Darc
  3. Hungrybox
And Soft and Darc aren't even considered top 50. In other words, Hungrybox currently is the main reason that Jigglypuff is considered top tier in Melee (results-wise), so I don't see why his results don't reflect the character's potential in PM. I'm not saying that Jigglypuff is high tier or anything, but calling the character straight-up underpowered isn't quite true.

Also, while Mang0 did get results with Puff back in the day, a lot has changed tiers-wise since. The metagame's advanced a fair amount since.

A few small buffs to her tilts and ground game to improve her QoL is all she needs IMO.
 
Last edited:

Bazkip

Smash Master
Joined
Dec 15, 2013
Messages
3,136
Location
Canada
I still feel like people misuse s tier. I think people try to play it as a top tier, when it should really be "brawl mk aka no losing matchups and possibly counter several relevant characters."
But Brawl MK was SS tier.
 

CELTiiC

Dong 2 Strong
Joined
Nov 2, 2008
Messages
651
Location
Pennsylvania
NNID
TBGCELTiiC
3DS FC
3840-7097-4621
Wut? Man, brawl mk was s dumb...
Nope, Bazkip was right. Brawl MK was SS tier at the end.


I've never liked the argument that Hungrybox's results do not reflect Jiggs' potential.

I mean, in the context of Melee, Jiggs is considered a top 6 character. However, if you check Melee it on Me's rankings, only 3 Jigglypuff mains are in the TOP 100 (yeah yeah, I know- it's not perfect, but they're good enough for this example):
  1. Soft
  2. Darc
  3. Hungrybox
And Soft and Darc aren't even considered top 50. In other words, Hungrybox currently is the main reason that Jigglypuff is considered top tier in Melee (results-wise), so I don't see why his results don't reflect the character's potential in PM. I'm not saying that Jigglypuff is high tier or anything, but calling the character straight-up underpowered isn't quite true.

Also, while Mang0 did get results with Puff back in the day, a lot has changed tiers-wise since. The metagame's advanced a fair amount since.

A few small buffs to her tilts and ground game to improve her QoL is all she needs IMO.
Also while saying you don't like the argument that Hungrybox's results do not reflect Jigg's potential, how can you prove that he isn't an outlier? Like you said Soft and Darc aren't even top 50 but are the second and best third Jigglypuff respectfully. Also, who's the next best Pikachu after Axe in Melee? Those two players are phenomenal and have defined the meta for their character, but at the end of the day the skill difference between them and the second best at their character is very drastic. Drastic enough to deem them outliers, thus skewing opinions / statistics on the character. This could also be under utilization of the character, but you would imagine at least by now the second best Jiggs would be much more prominent and defined than they are currently.
 
Last edited:

nimigoha

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 31, 2014
Messages
877
The denomination of "S tier" is weird because in Melee, Ice Climbers are S tier.

I would initially say it means "play this character if you want to win or hope you outplay the **** out of your opponent" but S tier in 64 is Kirby and Pikachu and I don't know enough about how quickly viability drops off after those two.

So really we have Brawl, with S tier ICs that just dominate, and SS Metaknight that is Metaknight. Viability tanks after this.

Melee, S tier is pretty much the top 8 characters. Which is kinda tricky, because we see things like Samuses and Pikachus and Luigis in top 8s of Nationals, so I don't think there's a big cut in viability between S and A. At least not to the extent that there is in Brawl.

And 64, as I said I don't know enough about it but I know people still compete with non-S tier characters so it seems like another way of saying "top tier".

What I can draw out of all this is that S tier in PM is essentially arbitrary. None of the games seem to use "S tier" in the same way.

So do we want S tier to just mean Tier 1? Or do we want to not use it so it's not misleading people to believe that the top tier of the game is way better than the second tier?

It comes down to whatever group creates the tier list. I personally think having the top tier called A+ would represent the character strength better but that's just my opinion.
 
Last edited:

nimigoha

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 31, 2014
Messages
877
Yo that's my bad, the old 2013 one did but definitely should not have referenced that one.

The next Melee tier list will come out soon and we'll see what kind of S tier they have, but despite my mistake I think my point still stands. Do we need S tier in PM tier lists?
 

Soft Serve

softie
Premium
Joined
Dec 7, 2011
Messages
4,164
Location
AZ
On puff, Kaos beat ipk/lucky on Monday playing puff (imo his best character still). Puff has some results outside of hbox in pm.
 

steelguttey

mei is bei
Joined
Mar 25, 2014
Messages
1,674
i think fox is dominant enough to deserve s tier and MAAAYYYBE wolf/whoever you think the second best char is but further than that it gets a lil unnecessary
 

DrinkingFood

Smash Hero
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
5,600
Location
Beaumont, TX
the old 2013 tier list was never good, it was mostly just knee-jerk reaction to wobbles getting 2nd at evo'13 so the makers assumed "Oh, if ICies are equally viable to fox, everybody better than ICies are equally viable" and put them all in S-tier
it even recieved heavy criticism at the time lol
 

nimigoha

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 31, 2014
Messages
877
That makes sense. It will be interesting to see the newest list, a lot has changed since 2013.

Especially keen to see what people think of characters in the old A tier like Doc, Luigi, Ganon, Samus, and Pikachu, and how much their exposure will change the standing.
 

DMG

Smash Legend
Joined
Feb 12, 2006
Messages
18,958
Location
Waco
Slippi.gg
DMG#931
ALL OF THOSE CHARACTERS (minus Ganon) SCARE ME IN PM PLZ STOP

I'm gonna try to win my local with Samus today she's fun
 
Last edited:

Nausicaa

Smash Lord
Joined
Mar 7, 2013
Messages
1,485
Location
Here
Funny enough, that's probably one of the first (like maybe 3 times ever) times that I've ever referred to Ivy as male.
lul
So do we want S tier to just mean Tier 1?
This S thing confuses me.
Can we just say it's the best characters? XD
ALL OF THOSE CHARACTERS (minus Ganon) SCARE ME IN PM PLZ STOP
Butterflies in the tummy you utter the truthiness of Zeus the mighty!

Puff is insanely hard to catch without getting paper cuts.
Kirby is insanely hard to hit without getting paper cuts.

Characters are OP.
Yet they could be Z Tier still.
PM is crazy.
 
Last edited:

Life

Smash Hero
Joined
Jul 19, 2010
Messages
5,264
Location
Grieving No Longer
Basically, once, long ago, we eschewed "Top, High, Upper, Mid, Low, Bottom, Negligible" tiers and that ilk in favor of using lettered tiers, which can be expanded to even more tiers without having to come up with new words.

Also, at some point long ago, somebody decided that rather than grading things alphabetically, as is done in public schools for example, they could be super cool and throw in an S-for-special letter ranking to make people feel cool about their accomplishment.

So we combined those traditions and now top all our tier lists with an S ranking so we can be cool kids, too.
 

nimigoha

Smash Ace
Joined
Jan 31, 2014
Messages
877
A list made of either mass rank voting or matchup data will be the best at splitting the tiers. I think that eventually the top tier isn't going to be much better than the next best tier so I think an "A+" would be more accurate than "S" but it's semantics.

Right now I feel like the only character that could be S tier by my definition in 3.6 is Fox.
 

Life

Smash Hero
Joined
Jul 19, 2010
Messages
5,264
Location
Grieving No Longer
I've felt for a little while now that PM has exactly three tiers:

high-tier characters that have insufficient bad matchups that their best main could reasonably expect to win a national without secondaries, regardless of bracket luck (e.g. Fox);

mid-tier characters, who have a small handful of problematic matchups but could still win a national on the basis of the fact that we have fewer top-level players than we have characters so it's possible to make it all the way through without seeing a sufficiently good pilot of their hard counters (best example of these characters succeeding is probably MrLZ's GnW runs);

and low-tier characters that run into their debilitating matchups commonly enough that they can't expect to win a national solo (e.g. Bowser).

I suspect the vast majority of the cast is mid-tier by this method of categorization, but I'm not sure where most characters belong.

I suppose you could also add borderline or even non-linear tiers for weird cases like Marth, whose worst matchups are mostly unpopular.
 
Last edited:

Nausicaa

Smash Lord
Joined
Mar 7, 2013
Messages
1,485
Location
Here
A flat tier list doesn't work for a balanced game.
Though I think we've been over that enough without alternatives/solutions.
 

DMG

Smash Legend
Joined
Feb 12, 2006
Messages
18,958
Location
Waco
Slippi.gg
DMG#931
Some chars can be crazy but it also probably requires some mind numbingly silly or "boring" gameplay. Morph Ball Samus always doing perfect Upb platform cancels and turtling up may be like top 5 but it's not very proactive/engaging so nobody does it for 8 minutes every match. They run in after a missile or maybe bait something with WD back tilts. I may cry if someone ever grinds out legit morph ball abuse and sticks with it

Puff may be hard to hit but who wants to play hard to hit for 8 min? People like doing sloppy spaced Bair and either winning or losing with her. Inevitably, people want RPS to play out. I did x, it won or lost, we move on to the next one. People zone in on the aftermath of the "ambiguous" neutral instead of extending that phase for as long as it's practical. If people actually did that, can't say the game would actually fare better despite the probably added layers of complexity and interaction that often don't end up further explored.

Bit happy for that bit of human tendency, since that tends to lean the game towards how people "want" to play, vs how the game "should" be played.

TL:DR

Lack of patience or lack of wanting to extensively do "boring" things the entire match, spares tourneys from the wrath of lord knows what
 
Last edited:

DrinkingFood

Smash Hero
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
5,600
Location
Beaumont, TX
Some chars can be crazy but it also probably requires some mind numbingly silly or "boring" gameplay. Morph Ball Samus always doing perfect Upb platform cancels and turtling up may be like top 5 but it's not very proactive/engaging so nobody does it for 8 minutes every match. They run in after a missile or maybe bait something with WD back tilts. I may cry if someone ever grinds out legit morph ball abuse and sticks with it
I cry myself to sleep over morphball every night
during the day I grind out samus so I can counter morphball with my own morphball strats
 

DMG

Smash Legend
Joined
Feb 12, 2006
Messages
18,958
Location
Waco
Slippi.gg
DMG#931
It's so good AND NOONE ABUSES IT!

I'll pave the way
 

Soft Serve

softie
Premium
Joined
Dec 7, 2011
Messages
4,164
Location
AZ
Some chars can be crazy but it also probably requires some mind numbingly silly or "boring" gameplay. Morph Ball Samus always doing perfect Upb platform cancels and turtling up may be like top 5 but it's not very proactive/engaging so nobody does it for 8 minutes every match. They run in after a missile or maybe bait something with WD back tilts. I may cry if someone ever grinds out legit morph ball abuse and sticks with it

Puff may be hard to hit but who wants to play hard to hit for 8 min? People like doing sloppy spaced Bair and either winning or losing with her. Inevitably, people want RPS to play out. I did x, it won or lost, we move on to the next one. People zone in on the aftermath of the "ambiguous" neutral instead of extending that phase for as long as it's practical. If people actually did that, can't say the game would actually fare better despite the probably added layers of complexity and interaction that often don't end up further explored.

Bit happy for that bit of human tendency, since that tends to lean the game towards how people "want" to play, vs how the game "should" be played.

TL:DR

Lack of patience or lack of wanting to extensively do "boring" things the entire match, spares tourneys from the wrath of lord knows what
Not a **** post, but a really good post from dmg? What is going on
 

Chevy

Smash Ace
Joined
Mar 12, 2014
Messages
736
It's so good AND NOONE ABUSES IT!

I'll pave the way
I crawl all day yo. I use it mostly to duck projectiles and slip under high aerials. It's good, and underdeveloped, but it's not like it's an end all to every problem you have. You maintain all of your options(aside from grab taking 1 frame longer cause have to shield grab) but what does it actually accomplish in neutral? Obviously Samus is super small and hard to hit. But are you just waiting for them to whiff or mis-space something and mindlessly approach the ball constantly before punishing them? I agree that you should be in morph ball when you aren't attacking, retreating, putting out projectiles, shielding, or any other actual action. But that's not a huge amount of actual time. Like describe this crazy optimal lame crawl play to me cause I don't see it lol. If people can hit Squirtle ever than they should be able to hit a 2mph basketball. Keep in mind that unless you buffer into crouch from normal landing lag it takes around 10ish frames to actually get all the way into crawl, 7 to be crouching far enough to start crawl attack.

Sort of related: can we get a crawl attack nerf please? That **** lingers like Mario's dash attack, it should terminate when she stops moving.
 

MTL Kyle

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
269
I haven't seen a reasonable list on this thread until now.
How the **** you say the list is reasonable when ICs are put in the middle of the list ?
FFS, do you guys even play this game or you just keep checking gfycats on r/SSBPM and Discord chat ? lol

Charizard and DK are nowhere near the bottom 2 of the actual game lmao

The circlejerk is just too strong.
 
Last edited:

DrinkingFood

Smash Hero
Joined
May 5, 2012
Messages
5,600
Location
Beaumont, TX
Nonsense! If samus's best evasion/shield poking tool didn't combo into her kill moves at kill percents, what else would she kill with? Missile gimps? Charge shot? Fire Fsmash? Dsmash? Ice Usmash? Ice Fair? Nair? Bair?
I'm half joking. Samus has some really good stuff, but my only actually issue with her is that vertical juggles are the only way to build damage on her reliably
 

DMG

Smash Legend
Joined
Feb 12, 2006
Messages
18,958
Location
Waco
Slippi.gg
DMG#931
I think the issue is assuming you have to act, engage, or accomplish something in neutral to be on the path to winning. Don't have to totally defend center stage, find a perfect counter to their bait, etc. People with leads, and especially characters with mobility or above average walling/countering potential, should probably start reconsidering how often they approach (Does Squirtle *need* to approach after a lead?)

People focus on things like maintaining good positioning after throws or once combos end, certain projectile patterns or usage, etc. Go be a God on stage positioning, movement, flexibility, etc first. Be tight, efficient, comfortable on every pixel of the stage, and be mean if their character sucks relative to your situation.

You could 0-death someone from a 50-50 approach, or have them lose by shrinking their chances of winning to minimal while being half as aggressive and much safer. Option #2 is the one waiting for strong players of applicable characters to fully apply it.
 
Last edited:

Chevy

Smash Ace
Joined
Mar 12, 2014
Messages
736
I get that sitting still and being small with Samus' defensive options is not a bad position. But you still can't react to everything, and staying in crawl is just autobad DI. At some point you have to make a move if you are being encroached on, I just don't see it as particularly abusable. Balance aside, how much fun would it be if crawl attack could go off of ledges like the DK crew? Cute ass boost ball gimps and extra fun evasion.
 

Binary Clone

Easy Money since 1994
Premium
Joined
Jul 11, 2014
Messages
1,275
Location
Evanston, IL
How the **** you say the list is reasonable when ICs are put in the middle of the list ?
FFS, do you guys even play this game or you just keep checking gfycats on r/SSBPM and Discord chat ? lol

Charizard and DK are nowhere near the bottom 2 of the actual game lmao

The circlejerk is just too strong.
Good try, but baits work better when you pretend to have any semblance of a real argument.



Frost | Odds Frost | Odds I really like your tierlist. What makes you place Kirby so low, though? I haven't examined the character much, and I don't think he's good, but I never really thought he was 2nd worst.




Also, can we reopen that discussion on how RNG is dumb?
 
Last edited:

Frost | Odds

Puddings: 1 /// Odds: 0
Joined
Nov 12, 2013
Messages
2,328
Location
Calgary, Alberta
Frost | Odds Frost | Odds I really like your tierlist. What makes you place Kirby so low, though? I haven't examined the character much, and I don't think he's good, but I never really thought he was 2nd worst.
I could probably be persuaded to move him around, but he just seems very frail, with a poor combo game, mediocre defense and terrible approaches; there just aren't a lot of redeeming qualities to the character other than being annoying to hit when he's crouching, and having a bunch of jumps. He's even relatively easy to edgeguard because of how slow he is in the air, so his long distance recovery doesn't help nearly as much as it theoretically 'should'.

He also has a bunch of useless moves on top of his poor basic stats, which doesn't really help him with his pigeonholed playstyle.
 

Frost | Odds

Puddings: 1 /// Odds: 0
Joined
Nov 12, 2013
Messages
2,328
Location
Calgary, Alberta
Also re: Charizard, he tends to extremely overperform against bad players and those unfamiliar with the matchup, but his inability to approach, the ease of edgeguarding him, and his extreme weaknesses to run up -> shield and projectiles make him very tough to succeed with at top level. His DD and defensive game are overall very strong(though he struggles some with shield pressure), but once behind, he kinda has no way to force openings in a lot of matchups - might even be worse in that respect than Bowser due to his lack of any sort of 'bulldozing' move to get through projectiles or weak hitboxes.

His setups are also all fairly easy to DI out of.
 
Last edited:

MTL Kyle

Smash Journeyman
Joined
Aug 26, 2014
Messages
269
Good try, but baits work better when you pretend to have any semblance of a real argument.

Also, can we reopen that discussion on how RNG is dumb?

There is no bait there my friend. Ice Climbers are by far the worst character in the game and taking seriously a tier list that puts them in the middle is laughable. The buffs they receive don't outweigh the nerfs they got by losing infinites and having that ****y momentum glitch + nana being weird as ****.
Put that with the fact that every character in this game has giant hitboxes to start mauling Nana and tools to prevent ICs from approaching and you have the best case to put them as the worst character in the game.

DK and Charizard get combod and have bad recoveries, yes... so do ICs, and their punishes are nowhere near close DK or Charizard.

But sure, disagreeing with dumb **** is certainly a bait and lack of argument. I thought it was just general consensus that they need to be looked upon, but I guess the circlejerk took over.
 
Top Bottom