Yoshi is good, but he's too fair.
Yes! Thank you! This is pretty much what I've been trying to get at with all of my posts, but you've done a far better job of getting it across than I have.
Yoshi's competitive advantage, being fair, is that you will have roughly an even match-up or better against the entire cast. The downside is that, when you lose, it simply means
you didn't play well. You don't get to john about things because Yoshi has the tools to fight through all of it. This is, in my opinion, the most frustrating thing about Yoshi - it's
always your fault!
See if Yoshi has evenish matchups with most of the cast, to me that doesn't mean he's high tier, it means he's somewhere in the middle.
Think about it this way. Ness is "high tier", right? But, he's not "top tier" because he has a few match-ups, like Rosalina, where he just straight-up
loses (like, 10:90 loses). If Ness's match-ups (just the "Ness" part) were 80, 70, 60, 50, ..., 10 across the whole cast, and Yoshi's match-ups were 60, 60, 50, 50, ..., 40 across the whole cast, Yoshi's "average" match-up score would actually be about the same as Ness's.
Characters under "high tier" either have a lot of bad match-ups, or are like Yoshi in that they're okay against the whole cast, except they have even less going for them.
I don't agree that Yoshi's recovery is one of the best in the game. It's one of the worst IMO. He's one of only 2 characters that don't have a true recovery move (Jiggs is the other) that is therefore usually boned should they be caught off stage without a double jump and is always boned should he get stuck under the stage. Almost any character can continue trying to recover with their up b if they get hit mid recovery, but not Yoshi (he doesn't get the little air hop back from his egg throw if he gets hit). His recovery is pretty linear and he has no side b's or anything similar to help him (something almost all top tiers have with the exception of Rosa). His airspeed plays a large part in his recovery as do his eggs to cover his approach to the ledge.
There are a few things I want out of a character's recovery:
* Vertical distance
* Horizontal distance
* Multiple parts (think Jigglypuff's jumps)
* Long length (think Villager or ROB Up-Bs)
* Floatiness (think Jigglypuff "hanging" between jumps)
Basically, if you can cover tons of distance, from any location, and do it unpredictably, I think you've got an amazing recovery.
I would agree Yoshi's recovery is too linear (we don't float like Jigglypuff or have the ability to delay like ROB), but I would argue we actually still have a great recovery. We travel a lot of vertical and horizontal distance, we're able to recover in multiple parts (thanks to egg toss) in many circumstances, and our double-jump has armor on it (which most recoveries in the game don't have). Characters with "bad" recoveries are Ness/Lucas, Little Mac, and so on that fail many of the "tests" I have above.