Ultimate’s first official tier list

[Perkilator]

After nearly a year and a half since Ultimate’s final update, UltRank has put out the first official tier list. I know it sounds pretty weird to just now get a tier list, but keep in mind the constantly changing metagame during Ultimate’s life and COVID having screwed over in-person tournaments.

[Troykv]

1 hour ago, Perkilator said:

After nearly a year and a half since Ultimate’s final update, UltRank has put out the first official tier list. I know it sounds pretty weird to just now get a tier list, but keep in mind the constantly changing metagame during Ultimate’s life and COVID having screwed over in-person tournaments.

Yeah, it takes a while for a meta game to solidified, so I can understand that with COVID messing with events.

About the tiers themselves, I fully agree with the Top Top and the Bottom Bottom.

The Top Tier has two characters with a ridiculously high skill ceiling, but also a lot of good tools even in the mid level competition. And Pyra/Mythra, well, they have great tools, and tons of them, they basically have two movesets, and unlike the other characters that are like that, both characters are actually High Tier by themselves, and they also have some other traits, but I'm not so familiar with them.

And the Bottom Tier has the two characters that need to be weak for the newbies' sake (also K. Rool applies to this design philosophy, but to a lesser extent because he's definitely better than this two).

[Etrurian emperor]

Wait I thought people kinda liked Ganondorf this time around. 

[Troykv]

22 minutes ago, Etrurian emperor said:

Wait I thought people kinda liked Ganondorf this time around. 

Ganondorf is lacking results, and despite all his buffs, he still has some of the obvious problems of his archetype and the fact that Namco still wanted his recovery to be meme.

But at least using him isn't instantly losing like in the days of Brawl where using Ganondorf was like using a maze that you can barely move.

He's the worst character in the game for results but in many cases you can get away with using a lot of stuff in tournaments even if it's considered "bad" in comparison just because Smash Ultimate is a lot more balanced compared with other Smash games.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

Two Thirds of Ultimate's lifespan has been stunted by COVID. And now you can't even have a major Smash tournament thanks to Nintendo. If anything I feel like they waited two years too long to put this together, because the amount of serious play had dropped long considerably even as they were still adding characters.  A lot of peoples' opinions of Ultimate's roster are just influenced by Twitter clips. I dare anybody to play Bayonetta in an offline setting. She has the highest skill ceiling of any character and even the few people putting in the effort still never placed well. Sheik's placement is even more baffling. Every Smash 4 Sheik main has dropped her and they will have many reasons to share about why. I know putting together an 80 character tier list is a monumental task, but damn. 

[SoulWeaver]

You know, this might be the first Smash game where I main someone considered high tier. Yo wait hold on two actually.

I have a great love-hate relationship with tier lists. While I like to see people's opinions on which characters are good, often those opinions end up being formatted uselessly because nobody bothers to actually name their tiers anything useful or informative. What metrics are all these top players using to define their tiers? Are players keeping in mind the subjectivity of tier lists, or are they just taking this and reshaping their entire view of the game around what a bunch of other guys said?

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

This is the best possible spot for Little Mac, since he's closest the the ground.

Anyway, surprised how middling Pichu is this time. I've never actually been able to hit the obnoxious little rat.

But hey, at least we finally have a game where a skilled Roy can beat any Fox.