New Smash Bros. Wii U/3DS Patch Confirmed to “Nerf” Bayonetta, Not Much Else
There's a Nerf Bow and Arrow commercial parody playing in my head now.
Smash Bros.‘ DLC characters have drawn a lot of ire for being so good they’re practically “pay to win,” (whether or not that’s actually accurate), but none more so than Bayonetta. Her nigh inescapable kill combos have plagued the game since she was introduced, but it looks like that’s a thing of the past in an upcoming patch from Nintendo.
The Smash development team doesn’t defer 100% to the competitive community as far as patches go—plenty of characters that lag way behind have gotten little help (*cough* Jigglypuff *cough*), and a few more are still considerably above the rest—but they seem to have heard the outcry over Bayonetta loud and clear. Though there are ways to escape some of her tricks, they’re fairly off-putting to less experienced players and still considerably difficult to avoid, but all that is coming to an end with the next patch, version 1.1.6.
Though development on the game officially ended back in February, someone has stepped in to adjust things, and so far, it seems squarely aimed at Bayonetta. The patch hasn’t been released yet, but it’s been added to Nintendo’s servers in preparation, and of course, it’s been data-mined as a result. When checked for file differences, Bayonetta was the only character to receive changes in the new files. You can see the details over on SmashBoards, but suffice it to say that her death combos have been made much easier to avoid by making her multi-hit moves easier to escape, and her diving kick can no longer combo into itself, because it sends the opponent farther away horizontally. (These changes are being tested through mods, since the patch isn’t out.)
There’s still some debate happening in the SmashBoards thread over whether the full patch will feature more character changes, because it’s large in file size just to change one character, and previous patches have had more content upon launch than the originals uploaded to the server. However, the file size would probably be as large no matter how many characters got changes just because of how the patches work, and content withheld from previous patches was more in the interest of secrecy rather than withholding balance changes. It’s pretty likely that only Bayonetta will change this time around.
She’s getting toned down pretty severely, but she still has a lot of solid tools, an incredible counter attack, and a variable recovery that’s difficult to stop. The witch hunts may be over after the patch finally drops, but she’ll likely remain a force to be reckoned with in the right hands. The patch is due to be ready for download before the end of the month.
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