Tier List Speculation

[Airrider]

I´m pretty sure they are still top tier. I believe that Fox/Falco generally have the best match-ups. It´s kinda hard to tell though. If some PM characters have good spacie match-ups then i´m pretty sure that they still have more bad match-ups than Fox/Falco.

 

[Tero.]

I'm quite sure Bowser will drop eventually.
His new features are great but I think people will work their way around super armor and will punish him for still being slow as hell and combo him for still being heavy and big as ****.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

And Bowser has nowhere to go but down, really. Pretty much everything he is capable of has been shown; he's not a complicated character. That mostly leaves the more intricate characters to figure out how to play around him.

 

[Spiffykins]

I'm quite sure Bowser will drop eventually.
His new features are great but I think people will work their way around super armor and will punish him for still being slow as hell and combo him for still being heavy and big as ****.

I don't know, Bowser has surprisingly little end lag on a lot of his moveset. His approach options aren't great and he can be a punching bag sometimes, but I don't think his success is just a fluke of metagame development. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

 

[trahhSTEEZY]

Fox and falco have been developed for 7+ years. The metagame could evolve quick but they still have a lot of years on the rest of em. Soooo many characters are under utilized still, people are going straight to fox/falco for top tier when so many characters now have such great normals, recoveries, tricks, combos, and other things to keep them relevant. Let's not forget how damn hard fox/falco get combod. They honestly should die or be close to being KO'd off most times they are touched, if you're a good player.

I'd argue with most people here that fox/falco arent broken anymore and I doubt i'd have anyone giving me actual points outside of generalizations.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

More-or-less ignoring the rock-paper-scissors of shield pressure and superior mobility in general is a pretty big deal.

Fox's dashdance is still incredibly useful. Falco's jump is phenomenal and he has instant control via lasers almost all the time.

The main point is, these characters don't have to commit to options nearly as much as a lot of the cast, though the advantages are not as huge compared to Melee. That's still really, really good, though, and it will become more apparent as people stop trying to run face first into their opponents. Everyone wants to play the game a new, arguably-better way, but the game still revolves around mobility to a large extent, and the average example of gameplay will shift to that in time.

 

[DMG]

If Fox and Falco are not top tier, what characters have taken over those spots and how strong are their MU spreads? Because frankly what it seems like is that plenty of characters have "doable" Spacie MU's, but tend to trade wins and losses with the rest of the cast. Like maybe you somehow have a character that beats Fox/Falco (say Pit or Bowser for example), who then gets **** on by Marth and Sheik. But then ROB beats Marth, while losing to Wolf, who might be even with Mario, but then he loses to Sheik, etc. Basically RPS everywhere, including this mythical "better than Fox or Falco" character.

I don't see the same chain of advantage/disadvantage swapping going on for Spacies. I still see plenty of advantages, maybe a few more evenish or even MAYBE a new outlier MU that they lose. I honestly don't think there's a character that beats say Falco, and then turns around and literally sweeps the rest of top/high tier better than Falco originally does to begin with. I don't want to be a naysayer, but like you all realize how unlikely that would be right? That kind of character should have presented itself and made more of an impact by now imo. If you want my honest opinion, 2.1 Lucario/Ike were pretty close to that threshold (Lucario especially), but even then it was debatable how well they did vs Sheik Marth Peach or even Spacies themselves.

You can say Fox and Falco are no longer at the top, but I think healthy skepticism prevails over that call until something huge happens.

 

[trash?]

It's almost like having one-frame moves and zero-to-death combos puts you at a massive advantage over everyone else or something

 

[metroid1117]

I'm quite sure Bowser will drop eventually.
His new features are great but I think people will work their way around super armor and will punish him for still being slow as hell and combo him for still being heavy and big as ****.

Just to clarify, Bowser's armor is knockback-dependent and not pure super armor (which is independent of knockback).

 

[TheReflexWonder]

See? It's stuff like that that allows people to challenge it in the proper situations instead of just assuming that it just beats everything at the right time.

Once people learn that and other things, they'll have an easier time against Bowser.

 

[Strong Badam]

additionally, grab goes through armor.
and bowser has buffalo sad times when he gets grabbed against a lot of chars.

 

[Deleted member]

This is from a relevant private discussion from a few weeks ago:

Hi! I've read quite a bit of your thoughts on Marth both in P:M and Marth and coming from reading the PP/Cactuar thread and talking more expressly with Chi (Clowsui), I wanted to try to understand your thoughts on Marth in a more, I guess, in a formal way.

More specifically in P:M than Melee, though. What characters do you feel are currently (or ultimately, assuming Marths design does not change) than him in P:M and why? Which of these characters do you think prey on the weaknesses he has? You've gone into why his strengths are not as... hm, pronounced(?) in this game compared to Melee, but could you elaborate some more?

I guess I ask this not only because I find threads like Cactuar's thread interesting, informative and helpful... but it also allows me to examine my own game more. I mostly stick to P:M Watch, who I think has some decently strong parallels to Marth (with obvious differences) and I think it might be easier for me to wrap my mind around them both through talking to you. For the record, I also play Melee Marth as a main and play a lot of Marth in P:M as well.

Well to start with, talking to Chi, Kevin, and Charles is pretty much getting anything I'd tell you second-hand. I frequently share ideas with all of them usually by text, and you're likely to encounter a good portion of rephrased redundancy.

I do not believe that Marth has a weakness. A lot of modern gaming revolves around the idea that <entity> is good against X and bad against Y. This is simply not the case for many older designs of interaction in gaming. In a lot of these examples, the <entity> loses to more subtle types of exchanges that are based around experience, finesse, and working around a margin. For an easy example, the older Pokemon games are this way; many Pokemon do not "lose" to something, but those Pokemon can still be defeated for many other reasons. As you've probably guessed, Marth is also this type of character.

Marth in Melee is a character that is based strongly on his strengths. In much the same ways as other more obvious characters, Marth can be played such that he makes the match totally degenerate and unplayable for the opposing character. This is done with those ideas of experience and finesse rather than through an overt tactic, but the strategy is degenerate regardless of its execution. Properly played Marth is very aggressive, non-committal, and removes options from his opponent amazingly fast.

In Project M, this is simply not the case. Marth can still do those things, but they are not the certain death that they were in Melee- and that death was very certain. Rather, his lack of strengths means that he is no longer able to leverage the same critical advantages that he had in Melee. To be clear, Marth in Melee is a fair character, except that he has a broken dashdance, that leads into a move that creates instant positional advantage in his upthrow, or down/forward throw in more pocket cases. From the point of the conversion at the upthrow, Marth can choose to engage the aerial opponent and win 100% of the time. This ability to use a broken tactic, and then convert into a flawless air-to-air interaction indefinitely until KO is fundamentally degenerate. But for Project M, dashdancing is not as good of an option because the movement speed of the cast is normalized to be much faster. The conversion with upthrow is still solid but Marth no longer wins air-to-air interaction 100% of the time even when it is done correctly. Finally, characters live longer due to bigger stages and better recoveries, so there's lots of margin to lose out on. The last part is probably the most important and that's why I covered it in that thread, but all of it is applicable.

I only feel that Marth is mediocre because I'm under the assumption that players will eventually learn that they do not have to respect Marth from poor positions to nearly the same extent that they did in Melee. Simple shield camping bad Marth players and waiting for a slow dedicated swing is actually acceptable method to beat him when you shouldn't be able to. More directly, I'm telling you that it's usually okay to expect Marth players to be bad in Melee. In Project M, the same still holds true, except Marth can't dashdance to the same extent, and the nature of the game actually encourages the Marth player to blind swing more rather than less, which we've already established to be "bad" overall (you can still lose to a bad strategy, but that doesn't make it less bad). As players learn to finesse through Marth's no-longer-perfect juggles, as they learn that he's easy to defend against, and as they learn that his swings in neutral are hardly threatening, Marth's relative goodness as a character can only go down. I'm simply a master of the character from 10 years of experience so I don't need to learn it from scratch like most PM players do.

I'm sure all of these ideas create more questions than they answer. Ask anything you want and I'll do my best to answer it. When you are satisfied, I would like one of us to post this exchange somewhere to the public as a reference.

I've posted this before but I believe that Bowser can only go down as people start to understand his risk-reward evaluations better and as they find other marginal holes in his neutral game. Bowser is similar to Marth in this regard, although their holes are different. Conversely, I feel that a character like Mario can only go up as players start making better use of his much improved grab and air games.

 

[DMG]

Grabbing Bowser is always good times. He is begging to get trapped and TC'd and juggled out of throws, so please deliver!

 

[Rat]

Wanted to add that Fox/Falco they were indirectly buffed from their melee counter parts. The environment changed in their favor.

Reverse Ledgegrabs
Makes Fox/Falco's sideB better.
No Momentum Teching
It's easier to tech chase with fox.
Running Up Smash
You don't need to jump cancel running Up Smashes anymore. Simply run and tap up on the C-stick. This really helps fox - one of the best running speeds and one of the best up smashes. Also makes tech chasing easier and more consistent.
New Stages
There are more wide floor - low ceiling stages than stage bans (PS1, PS2, Rumble Falls, Castlevania) This was not the case in melee. (Unless DK64 was legal.)
No Light shield
Currently, the only way to push yourself out of Shine pressure is with shield DI. And Characters with bad out of shield options have less ways to escape fox/falco pressure.
RAR/Pivots
RARing helps fox/falco more than marth/peach/jiggs/falcon. High Landspeed + Amazing BAir.
B-Reversals
They already had amazing movement and then they've gained some new ways to move around. The B-Reverse helps Fox/Falco more than Ganon/Falcon/Marth/Jiggs/Peach. (Maybe not marth.) B-Reverse lasers are no joke.

 

[TheReflexWonder]

Pivot grab doesn't do Fox any favors, though, to be fair.

 

[Juushichi]

I can only imagine if there was someone like Shroomed playing P:M Mario, or even that dope California Mario that I saw on KoC.

@ Rat: I've had DACUS help me extend strings/combos/tech-chases with Falco more than a few times as well. But your mileage may very on the utility of Falco usmash.

 

[GunBlaze]

Wanted to add that Fox/Falco they were indirectly buffed from their melee counter parts. The environment changed in their favor.

Reverse Ledgegrabs
Makes Fox/Falco's sideB better.
No Momentum Teching
It's easier to tech chase with fox.
Running Up Smash
You don't need to jump cancel running Up Smashes anymore. Simply run and tap up on the C-stick. This really helps fox - one of the best running speeds and one of the best up smashes. Also makes tech chasing easier and more consistent.
New Stages
There are more wide floor - low ceiling stages than stage bans (PS1, PS2, Rumble Falls, Castlevania) This was not the case in melee. (Unless DK64 was legal.)
No Light shield
Currently, the only way to push yourself out of Shine pressure is with shield DI. And Characters with bad out of shield options have less ways to escape fox/falco pressure.
RAR/Pivots
RARing helps fox/falco more than marth/peach/jiggs/falcon. High Landspeed + Amazing BAir.
B-Reversals
They already had amazing movement and then they've gained some new ways to move around. The B-Reverse helps Fox/Falco more than Ganon/Falcon/Marth/Jiggs/Peach. (Maybe not marth.) B-Reverse lasers are no joke.

Add Falco's new Jab and Up Aerial and I'm sold.

 

[Scythe]

Running Up Smash
You don't need to jump cancel running Up Smashes anymore. Simply run and tap up on the C-stick. This really helps fox - one of the best running speeds and one of the best up smashes. Also makes tech chasing easier and more consistent.
.

this one is seriously absurd when you experience it lol

 

[Strong Badam]

Add Falco's new Jab and Up Aerial and I'm sold.

up-air is melee

 

[GunBlaze]

up-air is melee

Aesthethically, of course. The new animation actually makes it able to hit people in front of Falco

 

[BryE]

this one is seriously absurd when you experience it lol

Even worse when your opponent fishes for the upsmash kill like a shark.

 

[Hylian]

It's really..not any different. I don't see the problem people have with that, it's not like it's hard to JC an upsmash in melee not to mention you can also dash cancel it if you are bad at jump cancelling lol.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

Yea, back in the day I didn't even really know about jump canceling, but dash canceling it works pretty much just as well.

 

[Scythe]

It's really..not any different. I don't see the problem people have with that, it's not like it's hard to JC an upsmash in melee not to mention you can also dash cancel it if you are bad at jump cancelling lol.

it really is, ask dsf. he raves about it lol

 

[SpiderMad]

I'm all for the easyness of PsuedoJC Up-smash via C-stick, JC Grab has a purpose of using the normal grab over a dash grab: JC'ing an Up-smash doesn't and just adds an L-canceling thing to it.

If they took that out of the game to make it like Melee, and worse for specifically the easyness of Fox to abuse his Up-smash more: then I'd be pissed. But not as pissed as Jump start SH frames were reverted to be read a second early like in Melee (Which makes it 1 frame harder for all characters), and then both of those don't even compare to how incredibly saddened I'd be if Light press air dodge were removed from the wifi version with no select-able option to bring it back in either version (which needs to be developed if they find out how to make the melee air dodge work for replays/wifi, hopefully for a specific slot basis).

 

[Magus420]

C-stick u-smash in dash and run without jumping happens because of dash attack with c-stick, and dash attack being able to cancel into u-smash.

 

[Hylian]

it really is, ask dsf. he raves about it lol

Or..it's really not. It's exactly the same except for people who don't have polished tech skill. JC upsmash is one of the easiest technical things in melee, especially when looking at fox's overall gameplay. It doesn't give him any new options, it just makes something that was already easy easier. It's not unreasonable to never miss a JCupsmash in a tournament. I mean..wavedashing is harder lol.

 

[Tero.]

There are quite a few characters capable of being top tier. Like I've been telling people about Pit for months now and they only start to realize because Armada won beast.
Lucas also has a lot of combo potential plus good finisher and also has a decent projectile.
Diddy is quite fast, has an awesome projectile and tool for stage control combined with a good recovery and Aerial Grab (Side b is really good!).
And even if you take spin Camping away Sonic has extreme speed, good recovery a very High damage output and an awesome edgeguarding game.
Wolf is also very well build, i miss the english Term but moves just work together really well and there is a lot of Combo, juggling and killing potential to be further developed (Side b!)
Lucario and Ike even tho not as awesome as in 2.1 still have good traits overall.

All of those characters obv have weaknesses but so does everyone (even the spacies and maybe aside from sheik)

And even characters now considered to be low Tier can cause some upsets. Zamus for example has and incredible Range combined with much Speed and also some great Combo moves

 

[Juushichi]

The word you are looking for is cohesive, I believe.

In my opinion, I think the lowest "tier" grouping in the game strength wise would be a "mid", which I would not personally put ZSS in.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=MFvUzXHR

This is my 2.5 Tier list (grouping).

 

[Oracle]

how are you gonna main game and watch but put him at the bottom

 

[BTmoney]

The word you are looking for is cohesive, I believe.

In my opinion, I think the lowest "tier" grouping in the game strength wise would be a "mid", which I would not personally put ZSS in.

http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=MFvUzXHR

This is my 2.5 Tier list (grouping).

That was almost a really good list, almost.

Puff 27/33?
Someone please name these extremely violent new MUs that slaughter puff

Other than right, raise Sonic and as of right now, Fox is still the best character. He's a lot easier to be consistent in PM due to jumping mechanics and he's better than Falco in the first place.

Well that and the name of the tiers. I think this thread already discussed why you shouldn't name tiers like that. For example, Watch is last on your list, that means he is bad not mid tier. Mid tier implies being in the middle of the tier list. Goodness is all relative blah blah etc. I don't think I feel too strongly about anything else.

how are you gonna main game and watch but put him at the bottom

Well it shows some sort of lack of bias. Most people overrate their mains.

 

[Juushichi]

The number count within the tier doesn't mean anything, Oracle. I mostly copy-pasted it from another pastebin as a primer. I don't personally believe that Game and Watch is the worst character in the game. We came from the bottom, now we here (still in the worst tier though, comparatively).

Alternatively, I don't think that Jigglypuff gets slaughtered by anything. I also don't really think that Link gets slaughtered by just about anything either outside of maybe top-tiers. I just think that her traits are by the by mitigated by improved general movement strategies, faster character movement speeds and longer character range on the whole. She still has very good placement of hitboxes and probably a pretty good runaway, but I think that's not enough. [EDIT:] Actually, maybe Wario poops in Jigglypuff's cereal really hard. Like diarrhea poop.

I guess it would appease people by putting the last category as "Low-Mid", but given the order of the list groupings, it wouldn't make sense without putting a "Mid" tier in there. But I think it would be splitting hairs much like the people who want to separate out Link, Mario, Pikachu, Young Link and Donkey Kong in Melee. I just like my grouping better.

To be honest, I'm a bit conflicted when it comes to Lucas. I think he's not that good, but he might be a character that we don't have enough really good players of yet. We've got two in the MW that I've had the pleasure of playing that I think are good players, but ultimately Lucas in P:M feels the same to me as Lucas in Brawl... minus the silly GR stuff. He's got cool and flashy moves and an unorthodox/technical playstyle that allows great rewards off of a hit, but I'm not sure if he can really get that hit consistently when you know what's up.

I'm more than willing to be proven wrong or to see things that changes my perception. I guess I gave Lucas the benefit of the doubt, currently.

 

[Rat]

Or..it's really not. It's exactly the same except for people who don't have polished tech skill. JC upsmash is one of the easiest technical things in melee, especially when looking at fox's overall gameplay. It doesn't give him any new options, it just makes something that was already easy easier. It's not unreasonable to never miss a JCupsmash in a tournament. I mean..wavedashing is harder lol.

Ok well when you come at it with that attitude Mr. "I'm going to throw this bomb 40 times before I land on the stage." You should play Kels/DSF next time you're in chicago. Their foxes are pretty monstrous.

Imo wavedashing is easier than JC stuff.

 

[t3chn0g0at]

Puff 27/33?
Someone please name these extremely violent new MUs that slaughter puff

.

Bowser, Dedede, Pit, Link, Sonic, Tink, Pikachu, Wario, Ganon, Ike (maybe? I'm not sure about this as of 2.5). Hell, even Ness/Lucas are kinda hard for her to deal with.

 

[Scythe]

Or..it's really not. It's exactly the same except for people who don't have polished tech skill. JC upsmash is one of the easiest technical things in melee, especially when looking at fox's overall gameplay. It doesn't give him any new options, it just makes something that was already easy easier. It's not unreasonable to never miss a JCupsmash in a tournament. I mean..wavedashing is harder lol.

proper jc usmash in melee with fox actually isn't easy aka it's the claw style technique where you move your index finger to Y and press up cstick while running so you don't need to alter the direction of the analog stick. This allows for the fastest upsmash while running. While this is something that is mostly mastered in high level melee, you see people mess this up ALL the time in matches and not always go for the perfect up smash tech chases with fox. In PM this is really really easy.

learn what you are talking about please

 

[trash?]

To be honest, I'm a bit conflicted when it comes to Lucas. I think he's not that good, but he might be a character that we don't have enough really good players of yet. We've got two in the MW that I've had the pleasure of playing that I think are good players, but ultimately Lucas in P:M feels the same to me as Lucas in Brawl... minus the silly GR stuff. He's got cool and flashy moves and an unorthodox/technical playstyle that allows great rewards off of a hit, but I'm not sure if he can really get that hit consistently when you know what's up.

I'm more than willing to be proven wrong or to see things that changes my perception. I guess I gave Lucas the benefit of the doubt, currently.

He seems a lot more technically required, definitely. It doesn't help I can only recall one lucas player off-hand, which I suppose is a problem also associated with a lot of the new characters.

 

[GunBlaze]

He seems a lot more technically required, definitely. It doesn't help I can only recall one lucas player off-hand, which I suppose is a problem also associated with a lot of the new characters.

He requires rather high techskill on some cases.

 

[Hylian]

Ok well when you come at it with that attitude Mr. "I'm going to throw this bomb 40 times before I land on the stage." You should play Kels/DSF next time you're in chicago. Their foxes are pretty monstrous.

Imo wavedashing is easier than JC stuff.

I beat Kels in pools Rat lol. I also played DSF several times.


Edit: On Lucas I feel like people vastly overrate him. He doesn't have the range or survivability to offset his major glaring weaknesses. He's good at comboing but gets comboed, out-ranged, and edgeguarded so hard it almost doesn't matter :/.

 

[Oro?!]

Beating Kels with Bowser is like beating a downs kid on the head with a foam bat.

 

[leelue]

Just to clarify, Bowser's armor is knockback-dependent and not pure super armor (which is independent of knockback).

Except crawl armor iirc, which is damage based