Honestly, based on all the videos I've watched from the lot of you posting up in the video dump thread, I would advise that everyone go back, reevaluate your play-style and try to ween yourselves off of bananas completely for awhile. As far as I can tell, the stagnancy of two-dimensional play is swift; most of you are already succumbing to the drawbacks of banana codependence.
The majority of the videos I've seen up until this point comprise of Diddy mains glide-tossing and cartwheeling into a F-smash, D-smash or F-air after the opening has been created. That's it. What's worse is that the guys that are partaking with you in these friendly matches don't seem to have caught onto establishing a deterrent against the banana rush. This might appear like an advantage on paper, but take a brief moment to look at the larger picture: the only thing that's occurring is that you are being rewarded for bad, narrow-minded game-play. This is particularly difficult to isolate and distinguish (after all, why fix something if it isn't broken?), but the thing you all must realize is that you are all just digging a hole for yourselves by accelerating the shelf life of your already stale routines.
Inevitably, you guys will run into a brick wall when you run into that player who literally breaks your style in half and 2-stocks you - and you guys will ask yourselves, "How is this possible? I've dominated for weeks playing exactly as I did today, and I still lost."
I've been on the "no potassium" diet intermittently for the last several weeks, and I can personally testify that I've made monumental progress in my game by administering every single move in my move-set in order to keep things fresh. Part of the pervasive problem with banana codependence is that when smart opponents are able to temporarily restrict most Diddy mains of their banana access, they panic. This is because they are being abducted from their comfort zone of being able to combo away with the aid of bananas' tripping properties, and then they are washed over with a realization that they have never operated without bananas before when they are thrust into this foreign scenario. In simpler terms, you feel naked and vulnerable without your primary method of approach, and entire matches end up being thrown away in a dismal, catastrophic 3-stock fashion as a result.
The good news is that the pervasive sense of dread that you all are overcome with is mostly an illusion. Even without his bananas, I'm of the firm belief that Diddy is still a reasonably solid character. You all just have to get over this self-instilled psychological inhibition that Diddy's stock drops 300 points for every 10 seconds he goes without a banana in his hand. Once you divorce yourself from this self-destructive logic, you will no doubt start to discover a minutiae of strengths and creative uses for Diddy's more underused moves. It all starts with building confidence in your own ability to play a solid ground game without bananas, and once you're able to assertively do that, you'll find that you will also have the capacity to win entire matches without bananas.
There's nothing more intrinsically rewarding about crushing a Falco or a Wolf for a stock and a half, and then demolishing them for the rest of the match with the reintroduction of a reinvigorated banana game halfway through.
Alternative Approach Suggestions:
• One of my new favorite things to do lately is to fake spacing issues by doing a dash attack early, only for my opponent to discover that I was in fact properly spacing myself just inside of F-tilt range. It's especially easy to do since you'll most likely be buffering forward from previously activating your dash attack, and all that is left to do his push the attack button again. You will be surprised at how effective this is: Diddy already covers amazing distance with his ground speed and dash attack feint alone, but I can't even begin to tell you how many late-percentage surprise kills I've gotten when I tacked on a sucker punch F-tilt at the end of it.
• I still enjoy either stutter-stepping or rolling into position behind my opponent and spamming D-tilt. This can potentially set you up for dash grabs, U-tilt, F-tilt and F-smash follow-ups.
• B-air, incidentally, tends to get a lot more love whenever I go banana-less.
Finally, keep in mind that you can still combo without bananas; they just happen to greatly aid you in starting them. It takes a lot of work, but you will benefit greatly from deepening your own creativity in managing or baiting your opponents into the open. Having this capability at your disposal as well as bananas when you decide to randomly re-debut them will needlessly drive your opponents crazy.
