Okay, to be honest I'm a little disappointed with people circle-jerking over how great Ike is. I'm not hating on Ike, I love Ike, he's my main. But he's definitely not perfect. I just tried searching for a thread on /r/ssbpm I saw a couple days ago but I can't seem to find it, so I'll just explain what was in it. Basically, people were saying how Roy is such a great and balanced character (Roy's our boy! etc.) and how the PMDT did such a good job with Roy (of course people don't only say that in this thread, people say how Roy is such a well made balanced character all the time, however people don't really say that about Ike). Anyways, so someone jumps into the comment thread and adds, "Ike is a really balanced character too!" (I'm paraphrasing ofc). Immediately the comment gets sent to a score of 0 and someone replies with (paraphrasing again) "not everyone agrees with that". The reply comment gets 20+ score. That was just an anecdote, but we can't say Ike is "perfect" until the character reaches the point where other people say he's balanced as well, like Roy. Now, in terms of viability, I think Ike is completely fine. He's somewhere in the middle of the tier list probably, and has tools to deal with pretty much all characters. However, something is keeping Ike from having the same general consensus that Roy has. And that something is his free grab combos, and the centralizing QD. People get pissed at things like Fthrow to QD attack at low percents being guaranteed, or Fthrow to Fair at medium-high percents being guaranteed. Now let me reiterate, these options are NOT overpowered, it's just they are so free that it makes Ike slightly imbalanced. QD is so fast and Ike can do so much out of it, which is also centralizing. Now, whenever the topic of QD being centralizing is brought up, I always hear, "but DJ Nintendo doesn't use QD very much, and he's a top 3 Ike!". Well, DJ Nintendo is just a single player, and I hope we can agree that his Ike game would actually get better if he utilized QD. DJ Nintendo can get by without QD mostly because he has such incredibly strong fundamentals due to his Melee background. Anyways, making solutions to fix this over centralization is not really my job, and I would have to put some more thought into it to come up with something, but a suggestion that might work is to put a bit of time during the initial burst of QD where the player can't JC it. Maybe about .33 sec? This would restrict Ike's options at the beginning of QD to only QD attack. In return, Ike could be given a buff to another of his movement options, such as a slightly longer wavedash. Anyways, I didn't intend for this post to get so long, but basically I'm fed up with people talking about Ike being such a great, perfectly balanced character. He's not.
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