This is what you disagreed with however:
It's out of context though, you cut out a central part of it and this is the full claim:
Jump, Smash and Shield are seriously tampered by this fact, and I did note that jump is good for recovering, but it's not intrinsically good for anything else because you take more damage and knockback while it's activated, and this way it can be risky offstage as well unless you get to recover very high. Smash is so dangerous because it makes Shulk die equally fast and it makes his attacks less safe so shielding pretty much defeats it despite Shulk getting a moderately strong dthrow. In addition most characters have better and safer kill options to abuse Smash art, although it may have uses for something like edgeguarding. I still disagree with you about the usefulness of shield except versus very slow characters. Most can literally just double jump over him when cornered and Shulk simply can't catch them on the way over, plus it's still not hard to just beat him in neutral in that situation. Speed you said is good versus characters with better neutral, and I did mention that speed is probably good in some matchups. Buster for everything else, it's a good art.
I still think any good placements that you may have gotten in France with Shulk can be attributed to player skill rather than the character. Finland used to have a Shulk getting top 5s as well, but we also have a Lucario winning almost every tournament, and hell, one player who doesn't play often has won 4/4 tournaments he's entered with Palutena/Falco. Meanwhile myself and like 5 others are right behind, quietly gazing upon them with our top/high tier characters.
Regardless, Shulk does have a really poor neutral game if you know how to abuse his startups and endlag / landing lag, otherwise he can keep people out quite well but that's irrelevant. His disadvantage isn't good either due to the same reason, and his advantage mostly consists of single hits and if he misses a read he can't frametrap you because his attacks take a long time to finish. His up b as a recovery doesn't autosnap very well so it can be straight up meteored or otherwise screwed over by many characters, and if he drops deep enough that the up b does autosnap, you know exactly the timing for his up b and will be able to intercept it regardless. Jump art is an essentially free recovery but it's not infallible and not always available.
Yeah, sorry for taking your claim out of context. I still disagree with it though, so let me try to elaborate. It's gonna look like I'm repeating myself but the Arts' weaknesses are minimal if used correctly
because Shulk players are going to use them when it's relevant to, and when the weaknesses don't matter as much.
Jump only takes more knockback through the extra damage Shulk takes, there is in fact no knockback multiplier applied and it's a common misconception to think that there is. (so he actually only dies 4-5% earlier) And you get a lot more than a safer recovery: the improved edgeguarding does matter, you have enough aerial movement to always stay in front of your opponent when edgeguarding and to recover before they do so it's not as risky as you say, and you get bigger rewards for landing a hit (combos I already mentionned)
And as I said, if the extra damage taken is a problem, you can deactivate the Art during hitstun.
Smash is mostly used when in advantaged state (including edgeguarding, yes) when you
do have more options and opportunities to kill than your opponent does, provided you don't overcommit. You just deactivate it when you're back to neutral where your opponent can kill you or shield.
Waste your double jump against a Shulk in Shield and you'll most likely eat a Dash Attack or a Bair on landing, depending on the presence of platforms or not. (for the record, Shield Shulk's Dash Attack covers as much distance as Vanilla Shulk's)
Shield is probably easier to time out on Smashville though, because of how the platform moves.
I can't add much about player skill vs. character choice justifying results except that it's pretty nice to have a game well-balanced enough to be able to say that x) (In my experience though, I don't think I've been overcoming that kind of character disadvantage through player skill to get these results so I'm really not convinced Shulk is that bad)
Besides, there are also other occurrences of Shulk players placing well, most notably in Canada (shoutouts to
@Jerm and
@Artryuu ). I'm not sure these multiple occurrences (including Finland, Canada, England and France) of Shulks placing well can only be attributed to "players' skill overcoming the flaws of a bad character and thus outplacing 4/5ths of their scene"
Shulk's neutral game is his main weakness indeed but let's keep in mind that he does have some safety on shield now. (+ MALLC exists, his grounded options such as Dtilt aren't slow enough to see them coming, Speed grabs are good in neutral, etc.)
His advantage isn't that bad because what matters isn't the number of hits but the actual reward in terms of percentage/stock/positionning and how much he can make out of it (I'm stating the obvious but eh ^^). Shulk has a lot of 2-hit combos (
combo thread on the Shulk boards here) at low/mid% in Speed, Jump and Buster, and Buster single hits deal between 14 and 25% so his rewards aren't bad at all. He can take stocks from a Nair in Jump or Speed at various percentages (even in Buster through Nair > buffered art deactivation > Fsmash). All of his aerials and smashes can kill, Ftilt and Utilt can kill, Smash Dthrow and Bthrow can kill. And positional advantage is huge for Shulk thanks to Jump/Smash/Speed edgeguarding and to his ability to cover so many options on the ledge. Nair does frame trap into jab/Ftilt/grab and so does Utilt most of the time (it is no Falcon Uair though xD). MALLC creates landing frame traps as well (any aerial gives a guaranteed Fsmash if airdodged for example).
His disadvantage is only bad because he doesn't have a fast gtfo aerial (he does have a counter though, so it mitigates that to a certain extent). Fair+Jump+Speed stop most edgeguarding attempts and Jump/Shield can help escaping juggles (though he does struggle against juggles). Any attempt to edgeguard his upB can be reacted to by delaying/spacing more or less the upB.
UpB can only be meteored if you're above him beforehand in which case he drops deeper. If you wanna intercept him on the way up, he only needs to B-reverse upB while sliding against the stage. upB's horizontal range is long enough that he can use it and hit the opponent with it before being within the range in which it'd trade with the edgeguarder's hit.
Thanks for taking the time to read through my posts, I understand that we're just drawing different conclusions from the same information ^_^ I think the Arts can save the character, you think they're not enough, that's fair x).
