Tier List Speculation

[Avro-Arrow]

I would agree that it's slightly subpar, but mostly because his options out of it are relatively limited. He has the longest dash->run time in the game, and his dash speed limits the potential of his pivot game. Pivot jabs/tilts are still a good, if underused, option.


Okay.

All of Mewtwo's aerials sans nair are positive on block when HC'd. Nair is -5 on weak hits and -2 on the final hitbox. Non-HC nair is -9 on block but can autocancel out of a short hop, bringing it back to -2. Fair is -0, uair is -3, bair is -7, dair -0. There is a bug regarding the use of multiple aerials during hover, but the PMDT is aware of this and it's generally not too significant in the meantime.

Jab1 is -5 on block, dtilt is -10. Both have good range and slight disjoint.

Think of it like Peach's shield pressure. There are limits to how long she can keep any part of it going, but while it's going it's safe enough that you have to respect it. When you mix up what you're doing and how you keep it going, it's rather effective.


I could say the same of grabs.


Shadow Ball doesn't start conversions, it finishes them. Ftilt is a spacing/get off me poke that can set up edgeguard situations. Uthrow is only an effective combo tool against fastfallers, the percent range in which it works is limited, and on the higher end of that range you can only follow up if you use teleport. It'll kill eventually, sure, but he has better options. If you kill with uthrow, they lived too long on that stock. Dthrow techchases fast and mid-fallers, but his techchase game is somewhat limited. Against floaties it's basically just position/damage. Think of it as a higher damage, somewhat laggy version of Marth's fthrow. Fthrow/bthrow are obviously positional. His command grab is his only consistently rewarding grab option, though the risk in using it is balanced accordingly.

Meanwhile there was no mention of jab1, fair, nair, or uair, all of which are solid options for conversions. Even utilt, which is decently rewarding but not exactly safe, arguably deserves a mention over ftilt or Shadow Ball.


You can put out an HC aerial with just 9-10 frames of total airtime if your execution is on point. Learning to use hover in ways that minimize the risk of trades is part of the gig with Mewtwo.


Moreso that the concepts and thought processes usually attached to the word "approaching" don't really have a place in Smash. Fox for example, since you brought him up: his strength lies in his ability to 1) conditionally avoid engagement while forcing the opponent into action and 2) punish errors with a high degree of efficiency thanks to highly effective pressure and rewarding combo options.

Mewtwo plays a mixture of pressure and punishment while using his own positioning options to play around the opponent's attempts at advancing their own gameplan. When examined from this viewpoint, you'll find that Mewtwo certainly has varied and flexible tools to work with.


1FD has the right idea. A large part of the skew in the Peach v Fox matchup is Fox's superior mobility and ability to laser camp the hell out of her given the opportunity. That advantage is greatly reduced against Mewtwo thanks to his faster, albeit more committed, mobility options. His coverage is a little different with changes in frame data/range/hitbox placement and properties, but combined with his movement options you have the general pressure/punishment/positioning concept I described above.

I'd maintain that Shadow Balls are a way for him to start conversions since they can stuff poor approaches (i.e. shffl) and do an /okay/ job at forcing your opponent to do something, i.e. shield, get hit, full hop, etc.

I wasn't aware of how positive on shield Mewtwo's aerials were when hover cancelled, although it seems painfully obvious in hindsight; I'll crack it up to not having studied his frame data and never playing against a good Mewtwo.

Jab was something I used as Mewtwo but never thought was mathematically /that/ good of an option. And nair/uair's coverage, especially when combined with Mewtwo's hover cancel seem like good options in neutral. Plus, they're pretty good OoS I think.

I agree 100% about the throws, ex. Uthrow with good DI only really starts killing until after 150% on FD on spacies.

 

[Chevy]

Spacies on FD is a pretty terrible metric for how good a kill throw is lol. Samus is dead from a grab to Mewtwo at like 90-100% on most stages, though that's the opposite end of the spectrum.

 

[Searing_Sorrow]

Also you would be using back throw or forward throw at that kind of percent anyway vs a spacie. Mewtwo has a lot of nice options, they just are not crazy fast anymore. He went from being one of the two main eyesores from 3.02 (other being Mario). To a more balanced but still very good character. Can just no longer spam long range sheik tilts and overly safe on shield hit and wiff moves anymore. He still has arguably the safest recovery in the game.

 

[Thane of Blue Flames]

Uh sorry

Pit was very much an eyesore

Glide for days

Great neutral [Great projectile, DD]

Juggles

Fair Carries

Vertical kills with Up-B OR USmash

Ridic Dthrow

Literally had everything, wasn't even particularly light/floaty/easy to KO.

 

[Searing_Sorrow]

Uh sorry

Pit was very much an eyesore

Glide for days

Great neutral [Great projectile, DD]

Juggles

Fair Carries

Vertical kills with Up-B OR USmash

Ridic Dthrow

Literally had everything, wasn't even particularly light/floaty/easy to KO.

True but when I say eyesore I mean obvious to how did this make it out of development? Rito please... I mean pmdt please. Mario's fireball alone made a 1/3 of the cast nonviable.

Mewtwo had sheik ' tilts at the cost of more range. Samus chargeshot at cost of being useful uncharged. Peach float at the cost of being able to go in every direction. A comboable command grab that reflects with a wind box for reasons.

Ivysaur 's back air at cost of being single hit. Pit's up air... cause he needs it and with arcing range. Lucas kill throw without the negatives of having a tether grab, along with a ness-like back throw. A zelda teleport at the cost of being able to act out of it, a brawl metaknight nado at the cost of being able to act out of it. Wolf's fair at the cost of being faster (maybe stronger) and with more range. Do I really really need to go on? The most generous powershield in the game, increased his weight to appease cthulhu and a longer reaching roy forward tilt.

Now without seeing lucas, diddy, or Pit's 3.02 kit in play, it is difficult to determine how strong they would be, but mewtwo was literally let's put an snk boss Ivan ooze character in the game.

I feel better now. 3.6 is fun, though I still feel like something is a miss on a few characters. Bowser/ kirby

 

[Player -0]

Pit's pretty easy to KO. His recovery was amazing in 3.02 but he's light (really light) and fairrly floaty

Also wtf. Fox shined me in the middle of my Up Smash as Pit. Why? Also prob something else but I forgot

 

[tasteless gentleman]

this is the same logic ppl had for making him bottom tier in 3.5 and honestly did it really make sense? could a ****ing recovery really hold someone back that hard? look at sheik, she should never be coming back to stage ever. she isnt the most used character for other reasons, but come on i think one aspect of a character cant make them that bad. i know you arent saying that olimar is bottom tier but i just wanted to bring that up.

But it had invincibility, strong hit box on the appearing part, hard to follow because you can't see where they are aiming it. With olimar it's one angle, one direction, punishable on hit, I mean I welcome opinions but I really think olimas is on another level of predictable, weak, laggy, and very hard to actually control

 

[Searing_Sorrow]

Olimar's recovery isn't trash... Its advanced trash. Seriously the recovery is so slow he needs two purple pikmin circling around him in order to try and cover him. But I could forgive that if it wasn't on March lvls of landing lag (at least feels that way.) Do enjoy his throw game, and forward smash edgeguard does make some other character's recoveries look just as bad, but at the end of the day a slight speed boost to up b or less ending lag wouldn't hurt. Believe me, it is punishable enough and makes platform cancel mandatory. Marth dair for free.

 

[steelguttey]

But it had invincibility, strong hit box on the appearing part, hard to follow because you can't see where they are aiming it. With olimar it's one angle, one direction, punishable on hit, I mean I welcome opinions but I really think olimas is on another level of predictable, weak, laggy, and very hard to actually control

thats besides the point. shieks recovery in melee if she doesnt have a jump is as easy to edgeguard as grabbing ledge, if she doesnt land on stage shes dead if she does punish the landing lag, repeat. a recovery move just simply cant hold someone back that hard to the point where they are a bad character. he has an onstage game near the level of fking falco tho so its cool

 

[Avro-Arrow]

Spacies on FD is a pretty terrible metric for how good a kill throw is lol. Samus is dead from a grab to Mewtwo at like 90-100% on most stages, though that's the opposite end of the spectrum.

It's just what's called the "magic number" according to Taj in Melee. And the whole convo was in the perspective of spacies.

 

[Avro-Arrow]

Pit's pretty easy to KO. His recovery was amazing in 3.02 but he's light (really light) and fairrly floaty

Also wtf. Fox shined me in the middle of my Up Smash as Pit. Why? Also prob something else but I forgot

IIRC Pit is in the 90s for weight. At /least/ in Brawl, dare I say it, he was 95.

 

[Soft Serve]

But it had invincibility, strong hit box on the appearing part, hard to follow because you can't see where they are aiming it. With olimar it's one angle, one direction, punishable on hit, I mean I welcome opinions but I really think olimas is on another level of predictable, weak, laggy, and very hard to actually control

Olimar at least has the option to recover high and platform cancel/avoid some setups. Shiek haa litterally no real mixups, you can cover them all with the same timing of ledge get up>move. It also only has a hitbox on the vanishing part.

Not saying olimars recovery is better than shieks (it might be, other than shiek having access to zeldas), but olimar has better mixups imo with just when he does it and how he chooses to drift

 

[Ripple]

Pit weighs as much as pikachu which is 80. and they also have identical fall speed

 

[Life]

Pit is literally lighter than Squirtle guys. Do you REALLY want to hear my "3.02 Pit was overrated" rant again? Didn't think so.

 

[robosteven]

Not saying olimars recovery is better than shieks (it might be, other than shiek having access to zeldas), but olimar has better mixups imo with just when he does it and how he chooses to drift

one of these recovery moves can be angled everywhere

I don't understand what you're saying at all when you say Oli has better mixups.

 

[MLGF]

Pit is literally lighter than Squirtle guys. Do you REALLY want to hear my "3.02 Pit was overrated" rant again? Didn't think so.

...Can I hear it, never heard it before.

 

[Life]

...Can I hears it, never heard it before.

The short version is that 1) the only players who ever found overly much success on Pit were Armada and Zero, both of whom are extremely talented in their own right, while Gallo was a distant third and AFAIK his placing changed little after 3.5 dropped, which doesn't exactly indicate someone being carried by a broken character; 2) he had a couple of particular aspects that were overrated, e.g. his survivability and the efficiency of his wall of pain combo. (The latter is me speaking from experience. Maybe I was doing it wrong, but in the entire time I got to play 3.02 I very rarely had one fair lead into several. The former was literally just demonstrated on this page of this thread.)

 

[Soft Serve]

one of these recovery moves can be angled everywhere

I don't understand what you're saying at all when you say Oli has better mixups.

Being able to up b high and and potentially ledge cancel the landing lag is a better mixup than what sheik has recovering high. It's not a great mixup, but olimar at least has options other than going to the ledge

 

[Oracle]

I was really bored today so I made a thing. Since tier lists for a game that's only been out for a few months are fairly knee-jerk and usually don't mean much, I made a chart that juxtaposes each character's current development with their potential to be long term viable. For metagame development, I looked at how many good players there are for a character, how optimally the best players use those characters, and how much untapped potential these characters have; for example, I consider lucas very undeveloped, as there are very few good lucas players, and the ones that do play lucas generally don't fully utilize djcs/magnets/confirms into dacus etc.

For potential viability, I looked at the characters overall design, checking for significant weaknesses, relevancy of their strong points, and how abuseable their weak points are. For example, mr. game and watch is low on the list because a lot of the tools he has like up oos, bacon spam, and lingering hitboxes can be completely played around with really good spacing, and past that GW doesn't have a ton of depth to work with, whereas even though ROB has a few exploitable weaknesses that people aren't really taking full advantage of, the advantages you get from exploiting them are not as strong as ROB's existing neutral game/punish game on most of the cast.

Additionally, keep in mind that the further left a character is on the chart, the more uncertain I am about their placement. Zero suit, lucas, pikachu, and samus have a ton of development to do before they're optimized, but at this point it isn't certain whether or not that optimization will be relevant enough for them to be really good characters. Also, I just really don't know what the hell to do with squirtle. that character will forever be an enigma to me.

Characters I'm least confident about are bowser, zelda, kirby, squirtle, d3, sonic, ness, samus, and TL. I'm pretty confident about most of the characters that are further to the right.

tl;dr: roy sucks rob needs buffs

 

[robosteven]

Being able to up b high and and potentially ledge cancel the landing lag is a better mixup than what sheik has recovering high. It's not a great mixup, but olimar at least has options other than going to the ledge

That's fair.

Personally, I'm mostly upset by two things in Oli's recovery.

1. The distance, primarily in comparison to his old recovery. In 3.0 (and even in 3.5) he could go just a little deeper than he currently can, and that slight distance really shafts his offstage edgeguard ability. Aerial Pluck's nerf worsened this too.
2. Sweetspot isn't easy, especially compared with other characters. Mario's up-b, a move that travels roughly the same distance, I can consistently sweetspot. With the exception of Ness, Lucas, and anyone with a b-tether, I'm pretty able to consistently sweetspot. Not with Olimar though, the distance is barely too high for a consistent distance. Not sure if it's just me being bad, but I'm pretty sure it's not.

The fact that he can ledge-cancel it is amazing though.

 

[FreeGamer]

Sad Kirby looks sad.

 

[TheGravyTrain]

Squirtle is an enigma to everyone. Nobody will know what to do with him if he ever starts getting consistent results. I have seen so much salt over Squirtle and he isn't even perceived as good yet. Doesn't help that nobody knows what he does or where he is punishable. Its a definitive struggle.

 

[Life]

Oracle I think the chart needs more whitespace on the ends. There's Fox and Falco metagame stuff that the players with 10+ years of Melee spacie experience don't really need to learn (e.g. Falco laser momentum tricks--I've seen Westballz do some when he plays PM but I don't know how much thought he's put into that) and I think the lack of vertical space makes the top characters look unstoppable when they're merely the best.

I doubt that's what you intended though.

 

[Thane of Blue Flames]

So what changed from 3.5 to 3.6 to kill Roy??

 

[Life]

So what changed from 3.5 to 3.6 to kill Roy??

Recovery nerf, dtilt tipper knockback reduced, Sethlon getting frustrated with the character and I think Lunchables is playing him less too(?) so with the two most notorious Roys gone suddenly people don't think he's good. When Sethlon and Lunchables are the Grand Finals in howevermany IABs it was in front of hundreds of people and they do Roy dittos, people will assume it's the character at work even when he has little presence outside that local meta. (The verb tenses in that sentence, ugh!)

 

[Parz]

Sethlon pretty much said it all in one of Roy's thread:

I can't speak for Lunchables, but I can say that this is very much not the case for me. If I had any shred of hope for Roy being viable to solo-main, then I would stick with him 100%, but I don't. He had rough matchups as it was, previously, and now his spread is worse across the board...the potency in attacks isn't really a big deal, but his recovery being even worse is huge. There are still matchups where he excels or does decently enough at, but way too many where he doesn't for there to be any hope for success as a solo main.

Losing at the character select screen feels like pointlessness.

I've been screwing around with other characters, but TBH I'm mostly done with serious competitive Project M.

Its a combination of several things, not just the hang time. His ledge grab box is significantly lower (meaning that sweetspotting with it is more difficult, leaves you higher and easier to hit, and will not actually reach the ledge in situations where it used to). Thats one of the changes under the blanket "-Up Special (Blazer) --Altered animation and some physics to be closer to Melee" in the changelog. His ledge dash also being neutered means that its much less safe to get to the stage from the ledge, and makes that a prime position for Roy to get sniped out of his double jump and die at basically any percent.

Whether or not the changes should be is open for debate, but the combination of those three makes for a significant decrease in survivability, in a game with characters like D3 / ROB...

The natural response to being squishier in matchups that turn into wars of attrition would be to play more defensive and rely more on dashdancing to never commit...but why pick Roy to do that when Marth has a better dashdance, better recovery, and better reward for spacing safely?

 

[Thane of Blue Flames]

I honestly figured that a modest recovery nerf wouldn't be the kind of thing that'd make players quit. Like Lunchables suggested most of the implemented changes.

What's that about his ledge dash being neutered, though? That sounds kind of unfair.

 

[Ripple]

it didn't match melee's so they had to nerf it.

ledge dashing with full invul was EASY with roy in 3.5. now, its a challenge because he let's go of the ledge much lower. if done perfect it feels about 5 frames slower. so he could probably dash into shield with full invul, but not attack anymore

 

[Deleted member]

So what changed from 3.5 to 3.6 to kill Roy??

The general consensus is that his recovery is too frail in comparison to his onstage game, although I don't really agree with this. The whole "can't solo-main him" thing also kind of aggravates me, because this argument has applied to many characters both in 3.6 and in previous versions of project m, yet people are only starting to complain about this recently. In a game with 41 characters, extremes are going to happen and likely create near-unwinnable matchups unless your character just ignores an axis of which to approach the game on aka making them broken.

I understand why people like Sethlon would not like to play Project M due to the matchup variety and how that affects national brackets (There are like 10 people who could've won paragon if they got the bracket that they needed), but this creates it's own discussion of "Is double elimination what we should be running for this game, or should we be running more of a pool format?" rather than "do we buff Roy/etc other character?"

Oh and his ledge dash was more of "normalized" rather than "nerfed". His ledge release point was glitched so he warped upwards, allowing him to reach the stage much faster than intended. "It didn't match melee's so they had to nerf it" is a very narrow POV (See Magus' post for details: http://smashboards.com/threads/so-3-6-roy.407527/#post-19495976)

 

[Strong Badam]

In previous versions of PM, Roy warped upwards on ledge release due to how the animation interacted with our SCD engine. In 3.6 this was cleaned up; it's actually notably better than Melee's ledge release still and wasn't fully matched, in the context of trying to ledgedash or perform ledgehop aerials.

 

[Ripple]

it was a joke you scrubs...gosh

 

[Life]

It's hard to tell when someone's joking on the Internet.

 

[Deleted member]

it didn't match melee's so they had to nerf it.

ledge dashing with full invul was EASY with roy in 3.5. now, its a challenge because he let's go of the ledge much lower. if done perfect it feels about 5 frames slower. so he could probably dash into shield with full invul, but not attack anymore

As a reference, Roys Dsmash comes out frame 6 and the intangibility lasts for frames 6-7. This means that Roy could:

• Ledge Dash -> Shield (frame 1)
• Ledge Dash -> Jab (frame 4)
• Ledge Dash -> Utilt (frame 6)
• Ledge Dash -> DED 1 (frame 6)
• Ledge Dash -> Dsmash (frame 6, already shown)
• Ledge Dash -> Grab (frame 7)

and do all of these with Intangibility during the beginning of the move . While these options are all assuming you ledge dash perfectly, it is important to note that his Ledge Dash is one of the better ledge dashes in the game.

Edit: It's also worth noting that Roys Dtilt comes out frame 8, which means that he is intangible up until the first frame the hitbox is out.

 

[Ripple]

I said probably!

I was just going by feeling

 

[Deleted member]

I said probably!

I was just going by feeling

this is why i miss sheik's infinite tech chasing

 

[InfinityCollision]

Yeah, I'm not particularly sympathetic to the "can't solo main" argument. In a perfect world with 1681 perfectly even matchups that would certainly be a viable option, but that game doesn't exist and never will. There are very few characters that have a decent shot as solo mains right now and if anything I would expect that number to decrease with future updates. It's a nice notion, but not a practical one; certainly not something any PM player should feel entitled to. Roy is just one of many mid-ish tier characters now and has the same struggle as the rest of them.

Out of curiosity, how many characters don't have at least 5 frames invulnerability out of a ledgedash and/or can't attack with invulnerability frames?

 

[Deleted member]

Yeah, I'm not particularly sympathetic to the "can't solo main" argument. In a perfect world with 1681 perfectly even matchups that would certainly be an option, but that game doesn't exist and never will. There are very few characters that have a decent shot as solo mains right now and if anything I would expect that number to decrease with future updates. It's a nice notion, but not a practical one; certainly not something any PM player should feel entitled to.

Out of curiosity, how many characters don't have at least 5 frames invulnerability out of a ledgedash and/or can't attack with invulnerability frames?

While I agree that we should make it a goal to balance the characters as well as we can (and the first step is by bringing attributes closer together) I feel like theres also a certain skill set to maining multiple characters, as we have 41 of them and 10-12 stages in our stagelists.

I wouldn't be surprised if characters like ness/lucas/peach/m2 couldn't ledgedash w/ intangibility due to their double jump cancel shenanigans.

 

[Strong Badam]

Peach and Mewtwo can ledge jump and instantly float with invincibility as far as I know, and Ness/Lucas usually ledge jump -> djc to get back ontsage.

 

[Oracle]

Roy didn't get neutered from 3.5 to 3.6, he just wasn't that good in the first place. The reason he was so popular was because he fared much better than average against all of the good characters in 3.5, basically the melee vets + diddy and lucario (to an extent), in addition to being almost unchanged from 3.02 meaning that his metagame carried directly over. He had some terrible matchups across the cast; 3.5 luigi, d3, bowser, wario, DK, rob, and yoshi all destroyed roy, and his recovery/combo weight was so mediocre that even otherwise underwhelming characters like zelda, link, ike, and pikachu could compete with or beat him. However, you almost never had to worry about playing any of those characters in 3.5 because other than ROB, they were all pretty bad against the rest of the popular characters. Everybody saw roy everwhere, got tired of it, and misinterpreted roy's dominance as an issue with roy, when in reality it was an issue with the rest of the game around him.

3.6 comes around and you see slight nerfs to all the 3.5 top tiers, plus buffs to most of the bad characters, and suddently the metagame becomes a lot more diverse and you start to see good players doing well with characters that destroy roy; and with the 3.6 roy nerfs pushing matchups that were already bad in 3.5 into nearly unwinnable territory, there's almost no reason to play roy anymore. There are a handful of pretty good characters he can definitely beat, such as zss, diddy, or lucario, but when roy loses, he loses hard. I think that if you put 3.5 roy straight into 3.6, he wouldn't even be top 10. He might not even be top 20 long term, but that's up for debate.

In my opinion, changes to roy in 3.6 were totally unnecessary. He seemed pretty broken because sethlon and lunchables were tearing it up, but in reality most good PM players either didn't play one of the many characters that wrecked roy, or were inexperienced/bad at the counterplay to roy's recover/juggles/ledge options. Now that the game is a lot less top heavy and a lot more balanced, roy can't survive by just doing ok against the good characters. A good character needs to be able to at least fight back against their bad matchups, which imo is not really feasible for 3.6 roy, but might be for 3.5 roy in 3.6

 

[InfinityCollision]

While I agree that we should make it a goal to balance the characters as well as we can (and the first step is by bringing attributes closer together) I feel like theres also a certain skill set to maining multiple characters, as we have 41 of them and 10-12 stages in our stagelists.

I wouldn't be surprised if characters like ness/lucas/peach/m2 couldn't ledgedash w/ intangibility due to their double jump cancel shenanigans.

Peach and Mewtwo can ledge jump and instantly float with invincibility as far as I know, and Ness/Lucas usually ledge jump -> djc to get back ontsage.

Floats/hovers are not restored from ledge grab, so they can only do this if they had access to their respective abilities prior to grabbing ledge. The same is true for Ganondorf's nB float.

Mewtwo can get up to 12 actionable frames of invincibility on the ground from <100 ledge jump->hover->NIL. >100 ledge jump only gets four, there's some weirdness with the transition to hover that might trim off a few frames. Check it out in frame advance some time, it's pretty wacky. His ledgedash caps out at six frames invulnerability with good timing. Pretty sure Lucas' four frames out of ledgedash is the second best out of the DJC crew, so I would imagine that he/Ness/Peach/Yoshi make use of ledge jump options when possible.