Well this ended up being a big post. There's a lot of complaining in it. Know that you invited this on yourself Karst
You know, we both play the heaviest character in the game. A character of the grappler archetype. Patience and reads are the name of our game. Customs might force us to be a little more patient, but that is all that changes.
I suppose I'm just not finding myself all that patient lately. I'm sick of getting hit, really. Sick of many characters seemingly getting a free 0-60+ on me, then having every attack send me so far out that the rest of my stock becomes the "how am I getting off the ledge this time?" game. Nintendo should be sending me a ledge plushie given how much time I spend holding it virtually... To use the example of Iron Tager from Blazblue again, while he is definitely a character that has to be patient, he is always proactively working his way towards his opponent, using the space between their attacks and the guaranteed invincibility of certain moves to move towards that goal all the time. And when you get there, the reward is oh so sweet. With Bowser, my patience is rewarded with chip damage from any number of projectiles and fast attacks, I get one punish in (jabs, fortress, klaw, even Bowser bomb occasionally) and I'm generally back to neutral where I started. If my opponent underestimates me, maybe I get a fair, or punish their roll recovery. It's as if Tager got to his opponent, hit them a single time for maybe 1/6 of their life bar and then went all the way back to his side. Tager needs 2-3 good opportunities to win a match. Bowser needs 6+ per stock. I think I'll be less frustrated if I take a small break.
I don't think we have any 3-7 matchups. I have never felt entirely shafted as Bowser. Any character, and I feel entirely able to take him or her out with good reads. The good reads part can be frustrating, but that is how Bowser is designed. If you hate having to make good reads, this game has a solid selection of characters with safe and aggressive neutral games.
Palutena with customs just means you need to be more mindful of your spacing and options. Super Speed is probably the best move in the game, and you need to go in hard whenever it is on cool down. It does need space to be effective, so if you stay on top of Palutena, it isn't much of a factor.
I was having a lot of trouble even being close to Palutena. Unblockable explosive flame at midrange, jab that clanks or outprioritizes everything Bowser has outside of flame breath, and smashes that when whiffed have a windbox to give her time to recover. The short hop dodge cancel crossup game works in her favor, as her speed makes it hard to judge which side I'll be landing on and down smash covers all options, making the only safe option a fortress. Which I should have been doing more.
One character archetype that Smash has a lot of is characters that benefit from time to themselves. Activated specials on timers, specials that charge for later use, and cyclable moves are all factors here. If you give these characters space, you are hurting yourself. These matchups are Bowser's hardest, because he is not good at applying safe pressure. It just isn't his game. Against these characters, Bowser has to take more risks than he otherwise would, because he needs to pressure these characters, but doesn't have great tools to stay on them consistently.
See my frustrations earlier in this post. Regarding approaches, this is a case where playing for glory matches is a detriment, approach options like short hopped fairs work way too often there and their success in that arena leads to punishes when I fight better players. I'll see about cutting out the SH fairs, but in the end there are no safe approaches.
It is healthy to recognize the limitations of your character, and what he struggles with. Customs can make your more frustrating matchups worse, but that is to be expected. Everyone gets better with customs. Some get better than others. Palutena is honestly not even in my top 5 most frustrating matchups for Bowser. If you want, save a replay next time and we can analyze your match together. Also, Super Speed has a startup time that is not insignificant. You should be able to consistently react to it.
Give me this top 5 list, you tease... I'd be more interested in analyzing good Bowser matches than my shitty ones. Wish there were more good Bowsers getting on streams... If the vids from the tournament you went to get posted please let me know.
My reaction time is shit, unfortunately. Went
here and did some testing. Depending on how well my best of 5 tries goes with that site, I fall between 33-41 percentile in reaction speed. Usually somewhere a little under 300 ms. Add internet and tv lag to that and yes, I legitimately don't raise my shield in time to block certain fast moves sometimes. direct_quote hit me with super speed from half way across the stage a number of times. Each time I think I hit the button in time, obviously the game doesn't think so. Same thing happens to me when recovering, I see the person going to gimp/hit me, time my airdodge... and get hit before it happens. I'm thinking about taking my Wii U over to a CRT tv I have to see if it's really me or my tv... I appreciate your trying to reason with me here. It's just the cumulative effect of getting hit before I react, or getting hit when I think I reacted appropriately, and the ledge game I mentioned earlier taking its toll on me at the moment. It's that feeling of helplessness that really takes the fight out of me. I've never felt so out of control in a Smash game, or any competitive game. Every game I flub inputs:
-dash instead of walk
-a dsmash instead of dtilt
-a buffered dair SD instead of dtilt because an opponent's body or attack pushed/hit me off the stage.
-a spotdodge or roll instead of an OOS attack
-dash attack instead of up smash
-hit slightly off the ground before fortress comes out, go helplessly straight up
-jump off to edgeguard, SD because I realize too late I accidentally used the second jump when I jumped off stage. Because our second jump animation is nearly the exact same as the first. Most other characters do fancy flips on their second jumps, Bowser's jumps both look the same. I play without music on and I don't even notice the different sound effect or the little thing under his feet most of the time, let alone in a tournament where I can't hear anything.
Butterfingers?! Only in this game.
Is this your first time playing a fighting game seriously?
I went to a college Smash Bros. Brawl tournament once... Won the doubles tournament with my roommate, got beaten in singles. Think I was using Lucas at the time. I've always been of a competitive nature, but this is the first time that I've gone to multiple tournaments, played it seriously online, watched streams etc. I think I was just starving for a fighting game I could play online. The glory days of Melee/Brawl, Soul Calibur 2, DOA 4 and Blazblue are all behind me... I was probably only ever really good at Soul Calibur 2, of that list. Probably an average player in everything else. My friends circle is generally not very good at games, and they don't own them themselves. I've had friends try to be competitive against me and eventually give up in various games. With most of them living an hour away and barely playing games anymore, the competitive community is all I have, and it's obviously at a much higher level than I ever dealt with in my prime years.
I've been playing nothing but Smash since November. When I'm not playing, I'm watching streams or reading things about it. I'm halfway through Bayonetta 2 and I'd love to finish it, but I've been consumed with smash 4 in a way that's unusual for me. But at some point, I've have to accept that I'm not winning anything, I'm not even the best Bowser player I know. I don't play this game to place 17th in a local tournament when half the best players in the region aren't even there. If I can't cut it, I'm eventually going to have to let it go.
Edit: here is a matchup that becomes significantly more difficult with customs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noZgIAU8pXI
I had a couple matches with FSLink where he used that, IIRC. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Like Zero's friend said, I didn't know what to do about it. Now I'd at least put on the fire shot custom I guess.
It's likely due to bad DI. Are you DI'ing away from Sheik or towards the stage?
In that case I have no idea what I was doing (it wasn't "in place" as I described, but that doesn't matter), but regardless of a string being a true combo, when you're being held just above the ground your only options in this game are to keep getting hit or air dodge, hit the ground and keep getting hit. Really doubt DI'ing down would have helped in that situation. Talking to that player afterwards, he was saying when it comes to Sheik's fair combos, DI'ing doesn't help. I will think about DI'ing down when I'm being combo'd in the future though... Karsticles has talked about wanting to get together certain data... what I want access to is data on which way to best DI out of each characters' generic combo strings. Everyone knows what direction to DI when Diddy throws you, it's been well publicized. Other combos and throw combos, not so much.
