Thinkaman's quote method is a much better one than how I was replying last night. I'm also far less exhausted so hopefully my response quality will be top notch.
I'm already very interested and I look forward to testing this build out. Just a couple of questions:
1. Is it possible to DLC any future balances if necessary?
2. Is planking removed? Were you, or could you, significantly reduce the invincibility frames to anyone attempting to hang on the ledge?
Updates are planned. As soon as the "dust settles" we're going to have a true version 1 (this is like a pre-version open to public input, though don't think it's unpolished because of it!).
We wanted to add in a hardcoded ledgegrab limit similar to Ike's Aether, but our coding limitations prevented this.
Also, did you know that Ike can go under battlefield from the ledge and recover to the other side?
We know Ike can do all of this stuff. Most of the cast can do this sort of thing though.
feedback on pikachu
without his grab game and no buffs it really really hurts him. since he cant combo out of most of his grabs at the lower percents this makes things harder when it comes time for killing imo. cause now it ends up forcing more use of kill moves early on for damage purposes, to the point where pika wont be killing till much later(albeit pika killing is one of his main weakness). and not being able to chase f-throw hurts alot period.
idk maybe its just me but i dont remeber to many people complaining about his f-throw CG in the first place
Like we've said, we want to see how this Pikachu performs, and we're defintely attuned to the potential future need for further tweaks to him. His uthrow and dthrow are not true combo moves, but they do have some good follow ups that are hard to avoid (in certain matchups, stale dthrow to utilt IS a true combo). Also, bthrow to Thunder on walk-offs is amazing, and we have to factor in what Pikachu gains from a new stage list...
Do not think the Pikachu concerns are going unnoticed. The purpose of a release such as this is to get good public data so we really know what needs to be done.
Something I just thought of: when you changed Link & Metaknight's B attacks, did you also change the versions Kirby copies?
Limitations in the data gathering mechanisms for hitbox data prevent us from getting two types of data (data we absolutely need to implement changes). One of those types is stage hazard data. The other type is Kirby copy power data. We would GREATLY appreciate any coder who finds the resolution to these issues, and do know that the fact that they weren't changed was a limitation, not an oversight.
If this was really ONLY about balance, you wouldn't have done such a thing. No, this is your own personal version of Brawl.
Personal attacks are below the level of discourse we should expect in this topic and on SWF in general. To be very blunt, you obviously are not going to be possible to satisfy. I really disagree with your assessments of high level gameplay on a variety of levels, but arguing further is fruitless. In any project, one can't expect 100% approval. I suppose you're just doomed to dislike this. If you don't intend to play the game (which is your personal choice), I'd ask that you please stop.
If you wanna do ZSS any favors, you won't change much. SHe's a balanced-or-better character that goes even-ish against 90% of the cast and needs very little in the way of changes:
- Jab combo needs to connect. This is a design flaw, just like dsmash gains or infinite grab combos. Change the angle of the second jab so that it sends the opponent upwards just enough to get them off the ground.
- Grab is hard to deal with. I wouldn't want to see you mess with the grab lag much because it's a weakness that makes sense, but what you should do is increase the stun time on Paralyzer Shot a little bit so that the baby hitbox (uncharged shot) means a guaranteed grab.
That's it. Change nothing else. If you must change Fsmash, make it trip or something. We have no guaranteed jab locks or anything, so that would be fine.
I agree with the sentiment that ZSS doesn't need much help. I am adamant that fsmash is a good move for her, but maybe this is just a communication issue. It's a good move in the sense that it has utility in some specific situations where previously she would have had to fudge and use moves like side-B (also, note that using fsmash instead of side-B in general lets you not stale side-B). I'm not saying it's a game changer; ZSS doesn't need a game changer. The jab combo was omitted intentionally for an initial release just because ZSS's frame 1 jab is already an amazing defensive maneuver, and making it lead into a lot more damage might be too much for an already high leaning and underutilized character like ZSS (her lack of use means she's probably rated a bit below her true worth).
As per Paralyzer Shot, hmm. The stun mechanics on it are mysterious and research would be required to figure out how to do such a thing (if possible). However, if ZSS demonstrates herself as needing further help, this would be a logical avenue to pursue.
Yes, isn't it amazing?
I kid, I kid.
Honestly, DDD's techchasing seems pretty usable. He's certainly not as good as he was before (which was partially the objective since he IS better then Diddy in Vbrawl), but he seems to still have a useful techchassing game.
That's my impression from the the limited playtesting I did with him.
Other impressions. Ganondorf's quake is too slow to really be useful.
Water essentially is a blastzone over 90, honestly, I'd just make it auto-drown period, (therefore making the stages in question completely nerf recoveries and be better for power characters) or make you able to last a reasonable time at any percent.
Do note that his techchasing game applies to the whole cast while his cg game did not (his dthrow in general was almost useless against some characters like Mr. Game & Watch). I don't feel he's nerfed overall, though it's hard to say.
Ganondorf's "Murder Quake" actually HITS really fast; it just has horrible recovery time. It is definitely something to be seldom used, but the fact that he has the ability to hit at that speed means he has some protection from certain kinds of pressure. In other words, it's something you only use once in a while but are glad to have.
As per the water, we're really limited in terms of implementaton. If I had my way, water would be percentage independent and act like it does in this version of the game at about 40% always. We just don't have the code resources to do that though, as always, any competent coder who happens to read this could do us a great service. Auto-drowning would not really be a good idea though possible since the water is so close to some sections of Delfino and it would generally be really dumb on Jungle Japes.
I do want everyone to understand how few choices we have here. With the current codeset, we have basically two options. We could go back to standard Brawl water mechanics, which would require the Pirate Ship to be banned, or we could do what we have now. A middle ground is simply not possible with the current codeset. It might (and I stress might) be possible to extend the time you have to jump out at arbitrarily high percentages (like make it a 5 frame window instead of 1 frame at 90%+), but that's not good either. That basically re-introduces water stalling; the design idea here is that, once you hit the water, you should have two options. You can return to the stage, or you can die. Just hanging out in the water should be a non-option. Sadly, we can't quite get this since we either need to mostly remove the first option at high damage (you really don't return to the stage when you hit the water at 90%+) or leave the last option in (hanging out in the water, gamebreaking on the Pirate Ship in standard Brawl). It's hard, and I think we can agree that a coder in shining armor would be lovely. In the meantime though, I do strongly feel our changes are more positive than negative and thus justified to include... even if not without their own problems.
Also, there's no basis to believe any character drowns more often than others. I've simply seen no evidence of this, and until someone provides some, I'm going to assume it's not true. I have no idea where this claim originated, but my experiences and non-scientific testing do not suggest it's true.
I tried out the new knee and it kills Mario at 53% if he doesn't DI from the middle of FD. His Utilt kills at about 100% too. CF is scary now. Maybe you should tone down the knee a little since it's stronger than a fully charged giant punch now. His up b doing 22 damage is nice but I always found it weird how his up b is stronger and does more damage than Ganon's. With Ganon's new shoryuken I don't really care about that anymore though.
I love the new wizkick with Ganon. It is finally safe on hit at low damage and actually has knockback. The pitfall mechanic and new Dtilt is also very nice. The new shoryuken on his up b is also very fitting. I approve of the new King of Evil. You can still attack Ganon out of his up b grab though. I think the only way to fix it is to make the last hit have a fixed amount of knockback. Just enough so that Jiggs won't go into tumble so that no character can attack out of tumble hitstun. If you can't change the knockback you could make it do more damage and send at a semi-spike angle to make attacking him more difficult.
In response to Thinkaman's answer about his Dtilt being a "slip" move I don't think it is working as you intended. You say it can double trip but no matter how I try, after the first trip they won't trip a second time until after they roll/get up. In fact it just makes them get up instead. I'm just putting this out there since you say you have to adjust the frames to get rid of a trip lock. You probably don't need to do that judging from the small amount of time I put into trying it out.
Thank you for taking the time to do some testing. We appreciate it.
Do note that the main improvement to both utilt and knee is a lower angle. Without DI it kills substantially lower, but now those moves are more susceptible to DI. I think you'll find the difference less drastic if you compare it to other moves post-DI, and the practical effect for knee that I've seen so far is that knee offstage is a lot better while knee onstage is about the same (still good but only normal among kill moves).
Our testing with his up special suggests that it can only be hit back by a select few moves at select times. Notably, in exactly one case, a Meta Knight was able to dair Ganondorf (barely) after it. We definitely couldn't reproduce it with non-disjointed attacks, but the mechanics are still a bit mysterious in terms of how our change affected things. If you can go into more specifics on what situations you find it possible to hit back and those turn out to be such that hitting with the move is still generally bad, we definitely explore other avenues to prevent it. We understand the importance to Ganondorf's mediocre regardless recovery of this being safe on hit.
Thinkaman didn't really get into the trip mechanics; allow me. We implemented a global change for tripping. When you are in the tripped on the ground state, any move that would inflict a trip on you instead causes you to do your get up from trip animation (which is pretty fast and generally safe to do in such a situation). This removes banana locks and prevents Captain Falcon and Ganondorf from having trivial infinites by just spamming down tilt. However, you can still trip the opponent at other times. You can trip during the initial trip animation (which is the mechanic by which Luigi's dash attack works; attacks under 39 frames apart [40 for C.Falcon as the victim] that both trip will cause a double trip), and you can punish the response to a trip with a trip (like, you could techchase a trip, hit the trip roll with Ganon's dtilt, and trip them again). Only as long as they are actually sitting on the ground can you not trip them again; them doing anything lets you trip them again.
I mean, really; You want to be conservative with buffs, and here you have some of the most highly respected ZSS mains (seriously, I didn't even know who Holms was until you mentioned him) telling you not to give us a particular buff, and your response is, "nah, I think we'll keep it"? Explain this anomaly.
Just because you don't know someone (and he generally doesn't post on the boards) doesn't know he's good. We did our internal testing largely with the KS and MO smash scenes, Holms being one of those players. Players here aren't generally well known outside of the region; we're just too far away to travel to east coast tournaments and even Texas ones are the "once a year" type of trip. It doesn't mean the region is weak though, and I wouldn't use a video of Holms losing badly to UTD Zach (who is extremely good, one of the top G&Ws) as much of a sign of him being bad [youtube videos are always isolated incidents anyway, seldom indicative of quality].
This is a long way of saying that just because you haven't heard of players doesn't mean you can discount them. You're just dealing with players from out of your region is all.
Also, a fully spaced fsmash is not unsafe on block. I'm just throwing that out there.
I don't believe you guys have responded to this yet.
Sorry, I'll get right on addressing it.
Yoshi still has any follow ups out of THROWS that he had before (like, chasing people after fthrow is the same as always), just not grab release. We did make his pummel stronger. Honestly, the very first thing we agreed we wanted to do with Yoshi was buff his throws so he does get more out grabs (for the reasons you are saying really), but the codes just aren't there.
i've noticed something interesting about the wifi waiting/ training room in versus mode, even witl all items on, a;ll it produces are sandbags and stickers XD
It's not a bug. It's a feature! We knew about this; we just didn't think it was a big deal. Likewise, if you are on this stage in training mode (needs the optional custom stage select screen code, which causes instability with replay previews), you can only forcibly spawn Smashballs and Dragoon Parts on it; the game won't let you spawn any other items. It probably is all caused by the stage having no item spawn points.
just to say, ur sheik changes. yeah u have removed the ftilt lock, but u have given her NOTHING to make up for that. if ur going to make the dtilt any better it needs to have alot less cooldown. without the ftilt lock she now will be bottom tier, defiantely. at least give her a better fair so she can at least edgeguard better.
u cant say things like (make her combo better), as there are no combos in brawl that she can actually pull off.
oh and falcon still sucks cause the entire concept of falcon is that he needs to be able to combo. his main problem is lack of priority and ability to inflict damage, and without histun he will never be mid tier
For one, don't think of "Sheik". "Sheik" is not a character we balanced. Do think of the character "Zelda & Sheik". The two are tied together, and we balanced them as a single character. That being said, we are definitely watching them, and they were a general problem for us throughout development. Dtilt is definitely non-trivial though; she can follow up on it pretty nicely especially at low damage (maybe not true combo, but that's not the end of the world). Making her better at killing (edgeguarding is a form of killing) is definitely NOT something we want to do with Sheik. Her whole design is centered around her one main kill move: switch to Zelda. We aren't going to hurt her limited other kill options like usmash and Vanish, but at the same time, we aren't going to encourage the playstyle of neglecting the other half of the character.
As per Captain Falcon, I don't think you are really in-line with his concept. His concept is being a power character who accepts low range and priority in exchange for exceptional mobility. In other smash games it happened that this led to him being a beastly combo character, but those are other smash games, and we were looking to balance Brawl Captain Falcon as himself, not as a different Captain Falcon from a different game. What I'm saying here is really just give Captain Falcon a chance, and don't be biased by previous versions of Captain Falcon and how they worked when looking at him. He doesn't combo like 64 and melee C.Falcon, and he doesn't just lose like brawl C.Falcon did in practice, but he does work like you would have expected Brawl C.Falcon to work had you just analyzed him independently and not in the context of previous smash games.
Regardless, hitstun is not changing (it's a global value anyway). It's non-negotiable; increasing it would completely defy all of our design principles. I disagree strongly that Captain Falcon can't be good with the current physics of the game, but even if that were true, it would just mean that Captain Falcon would be bad and we'd just make him as close to good as possible.
