User blog:MasterKnight/Common ban list responses

I may as well handle my findings and such with Kid Icarus Uprising here where I won't have to worry about hostility from people who would throw insults like "incel dot com" that think that couldn't possibly objectify women, even when it proves that you don't fight social biases with double standards, not when social biases ARE double standards. Thankfully, Divinipedia has the advantage of being an innate bit of Defictionalization, so I don't have to worry about somebody playing God with their Discord server trying to shut my response out by banning me in willful ignorance of my complaints calling out the likes of a clan against "Don't Cry Noob", so I can at least be sure I'd be held in vindicated esteem for doing my part to make the community not so toxic.

But I digress. I want to see if revitalizing the KIU community would be possible without enabling the toxicity that I complained about above, so I will get to the first thing I want to unload, and that would be to cover my thoughts on each of the common bans in multiplayer, weapons and Powers alike, particularly when weapon modifiers muddle things so badly. I will speak from experience with maining Skyscraper Club but I will do my part to understand other perspectives. I will also cover the Game Breaker page for this game on vanilla TV Tropes to call out that page being a mess, although of course I won't cover the singleplayer examples like Twinbellows Cannon, nor will I talk about Clubs in Free-For-Alls because those are inherently chaotic. That said, let's get right into it.

Flintlock Staff
Vanilla TV Tropes' comment: ''Having a good arm (that means not using Autoreticle) turns the Flintlock Staff into a potential Game Breaker in multiplayer. Its charge shot goes from point A to point B almost instantly just like a real firearm and has the highest shot range in the game, which is important because more distance means more damage for staves. A properly-configured Flintlock with a high Ranged rating and a decent Charge Shot modifier can One-Hit Kill players from the other end of the map if they have no defensive buffs, and with a power like Energy Charge or Trade Off, even Aries Armor-users can get two-shotted. The charged shot also has innate Shot Cancellation for people using certain ranged attacks. The caveat is that charged shots are all the Flintlock is good for, but a player with sniping experience in games should find this a non-issue.''

This becomes evidence of how vanilla TV Tropes needs to clean up the page. Flintlock Staff would be an easy cut on the basis that it becomes a one-trick pony that, although able to be effective, relies on stages like Windy Wasteland in their own blatant favoritism of snipers to not have to worry about people exploiting Flintlock's abysmal mobility. Flintlock Staff innately has to get around defilade, and at that point, 1HKOs stop being easy at all. Everything that isn't Ancient Staff is more mobile than Skyscraper Club, so there is little excuse for making use of this point to additionally outmanuever the Shot Cancel as well.

I will grant that Flintlock Staff does exploit Evasion+ by using dasharound spam to mock close range attack, eliminating its blatant blind spot, but that says more about Evasion+ providing absurd dodge move intangibility that chains right into further movement, than it does about Flintlock Staff itself. I'll have much to say about Evasion+ when I talk about a given Power that exploits it.

Laser Staff
Vanilla TV Tropes' comment: ''Laser Staff. If you can get a mod on it to have good defense and range, you can do absurd damage to people on multiplayer, nearly one shotting them and to easily destroy enemies on 9.0.''

This is a good example of what weapon modifiers allow, even if 9.0 overencourages them beyond belief with VERY inflated enemy stats, which brings up the problem that getting weapon modifiers onto desired weapons involves getting the material through some good luck, and then dealing with the Fusion system, which is counterintuitive with how the results are seemingly random for their own sake, so it ends up being biased in favor of min-maxers and hackers, meaning it's just an arbitrary obstruction that causes matches to be determined from the character select screen.

Now Laser Staff wouldn't benefit from Shot Range+, the most broken weapon modifier that isn't Evasion+ or Walking Speed+ in their own global abuses, or if it does, it'd be by a marginalized effect. Of course, Laser Staff already has the highest range Rapids in the game, with Neutral Rapid even having a whopping 70 meters of range on top of the natural shot velocity. This allows it to load up on attack boosts knowing how the attack boosts are absurd enough to turn 1HKOing with Energy Charge from a luxury Skyscraper Club can barely manage with the Forward Shot and doesn't even achieve with the Side Shot, to a ridiculously common occurrence particularly when effective 8 Stars (the Move+ mods count as 1 Star per Level for the given moves) has the base damage minimum for KOing with EC fall below freaking 40. Imagine if Laser Staff needed to deal 3 times as much damage. Suddenly, you realize that Laser's DPS is not very good, and although it has high range, there is one critical problem: Laser Staff has only barely above standard Staff mobility, complete with the lower running speed and bad Stamina, limiting its ability to run away.

The Neutral Rapid has 2 Shot Cancel, so Dash Rapid attacks would generally have problems getting through, but a standard Neutral Shot wouldn't, although Cursed Palm and Eyetrack Orbitars may say otherwise because they too have only 2 Shot Cancel on the Neutral Shot. I will cover more about the 2 Shot Cancel Neutral Rapid aspect with another weapon type where it's more of a problem, but I can definitely point out now that once the Neutral Rapid abuse falls apart from having to put up with being gimped by terrain cover, Laser Staff collapses into something far more beatable by relying on external factors with their own counter play.

Brawler Claws
Banlist entry, but also listed on vanilla TV Tropes: ''As of recently, the Brawler Claws have been reaching Game-Breaker status. Having the most mobility in the entire game and powerful melee, it is easy to run into the fray and score a couple kills with melee combos. On top of that, their projectiles, while weak and short-ranged, are fast and have ridiculously high shot cancellation. With Shot Cancellation and Walking Speed mods, one could merely speed-walk up to their enemies and block incoming fire from almost any average weapon simply by keeping their continuous fire up.''

Now this is something I can agree about as an easy ban, and the funny thing is that if Kid Icarus Uprising provided subtle yet useful reward for melee to encourage players to be brave even when using even something like Flintlock Staff, Brawler Claws wouldn't be. Let's get the ONE point against banning Brawler Claws out of its way: the melee isn't superlative and the range ability is sketchy enough. The projectile damage power is generally 2/3 of that of the First Blade so it relies on melee, and in that regard, Brawler Claws doesn't clear 70 base damage on the Melee Dash Attack OR the full Melee Combo, although it comes close with the latter, but the important point is that Brawler Claws can't passively 3HKO with base damage. Skyscraper Club has the advantage of being able to passively 3HKO with any of its Shots, with Forward and Side Shots at point blank managing the passive 2HKO, so at least Brawler Claws can end up being a cavalry type up against Skyscraper Club's heavy infantryman type with that particular matchup.

The problem is when Brawler Claws has other traits to push things too far in the clear majority of matchups. Brawler Claws still passively, as in before doing something like using Trade-Off, 4HKOs with either melee attack, which wouldn't seem like much, but Brawler Claws also has the highest mobility of any weapon type in the game without fail. It ends up suffocating any weapon reliant on projectiles when getting away is simply not reasonable. Melee combat is meant to have plenty of counter play by its very nature of the melee combatant being right where they can be hurt, but KIU doesn't make a lot of competition strong, and Brawler Claws has plenty of advantages. The mobility would already speak for itself just for inciting added hit and evade, but it also brings up Energy Charge, which although it would be on a melee weapon, it would STILL be easier to maintain, and although maxed EC doesn't have the Melee Dash Attack 2HKO, it does 3HKO through Super Armor, which can still be outmaneuvered enough to make the overly reduced effectiveness on the damage cut a red flag.

Not helping matters is that Brawler Claws has some Shot Cancel shenanigans. First up is 3 Shot Cancel on all of its Rapid attacks, including the Neutral Rapid. Weapon modifiers do aggravate this with Shot Range+ eliminating the short range otherwise that causes the dispersion fire of this Jojo's Bizarre Adventure imitator to actually matter, and Shot Cancel+ allowing the Neutral Rapid to instantly mock the majority of Dash Shots. Even without them, though, besides how Eyetrack Orbitars and Cursed Palm never clear 3 Shot Cancel on ANY attacks, 3 Shot Cancel on the Neutral Rapid still shuts out Neutral Shots, and the insult is that Brawler Claws has its mobility percentage penalty when using the Neutral Rapid basically HALVED from Claws standard, granted that Claws don't have that big a penalty to walking speed when using the Neutral Rapid, but Brawler Claws simply doesn't get gimped.

Now, the Neutral Rapid still wouldn't touch things like Dash Shots, Clubs Shots, or Staff Shots, except Brawler Claws would be using mobility to keep those under control. Of course, for good measure, Brawler Claws also has 5 Shot Cancel on the Back Shot. While the Back Shot is an arc shot and thus a bit awkward to use, it still instantly defeats Club shots and Cannon shots alike, so those can't be used for trapping anymore. Club Shots would want to use Neutral Shots to minimize this, but the Neutral Shot is better for calling out escapes than it is calling out strafing attempts, when the Back Shot would be doing an escape attempt. You might retort that Brawler Claws must have a slow chargeup time to justify this, but unfortunately, Brawler Claws has the fastest of all Claws, and the 4th fastest behind only Fairy Orbitars, Aurum Orbitars, and Magnus Club. This is where I'm left wondering why Brawler Claws doesn't have only 4 Shot Cancel instead on the Back Shot and why Clubs don't have better Shot Cancel ability on Dash Shots to maintain consistency in calling out improper dodging and overuse of the Spin Shot technique.

People complained about Meta Knight in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Brawler Claws is the incarnation of what people complain about with Meta Knight, and while again Brawler Claws' matchups with Babel and Skyscraper Club are mercifully sketchy where Smash Bros. doesn't even make raw power useful in general at all, this isn't an excuse for Brawler Claws having enough traits to have overly powerful confounding melee. Heck, Raptor Claws doesn't have the Shot Cancel or especially not the chargeup time leniency, and I think THAT becomes questionable enough in its own right via still easy mindless melee that makes most Claws redundant. Brawler Claws is simply broken.

Beam Claws
Vanilla TV Tropes' comment: ''Beam Claws. It may not have the best charge shot, but it still makes you decently fast and its rapid fire is just one Large Beam that goes on for a very long time. It's like you have the Mega Laser power equipped, except you can use it infinitely.''

All of the speed stats are actually good with Beam Claws, yes, but the power stats are rather questionable to say the least. The burst damage is painfully bad and the DPS, while decent and definitely augmented by the speed stats, doesn't make up for it enough for Beam Claws to be genuinely busted. Really, the only reason Beam Claws gets on here is because of the meme based on the preview multiplayer video. This is simply an easy cut.

Angel Bow
Finally an entry not mentioned on vanilla TV Tropes.

Angel Bow already seems innocuous. I will say that I actually tried this out when the game was being demoed at Game Developers' Conference 2012, and there I felt like my victories were based on the weapon involving homing shots, rather than my own skill and intelligence setting up sophisticated gameplay. However, the Angel Bow turns out to have shot velocity issues, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was why I felt like I was just being bad with range attacking, not that I wouldn't have issues anyway. Getting past that, Angel Bow doesn't have stand out damage or range with its projectiles, and the mobility is above average but not any nightmare to overcome.

Why does Angel Bow get an entry then? Well, remember how I mentioned about homing? Well, some weapon have enough homing capability to do something called Shot Looping, and Angel Bow is definitely among them with its Shots.

I need to clarify my stance on Shot Looping: I find it a potentially useful game design decision when it doesn't get out of hand, because Shot Looping subtly encourages being closer to the target to have it happen more easily and either hit them with higher consistency, hit them repeatedly, or hit them later with a weapon like Angel Bow where the projectiles deal more damage later into the attack lifespan. This is a good thing about Shot Looping, when it gives an actual challenge factor to the likes of Clubs in when they would close the distance, a way to punctuate that any victory achieved by something like Skyscraper Club isn't because the weapon provides incredible close range, much as that helps after overcoming mobility issues, but because the player behind it is the one shaking off the threats. That's my thought process with the GDC point: that a game becomes more satisfying when the player is the one making their power instead of the other way around.

Where problems arise is, of course, weapon modifiers. Shot Range+, while making this aspect more broken on a couple of other weapon types where I will go into more detail, does still have Angel Bow bring up how the increase lifespan on the projectiles not only allow for the Shot Looping to happen at mid range to eliminate the risk factor, but also allow for adding in additional projectiles for traps. Shot Homing+ is also worth bringing up for not helping matters since it effectively screams turning Homing Boost into a passive, although 25 Value for a passive that would inevitably be better than a 10 Space Power is believe me a relatively minor problem with weapon modifiers, but every little bit adds up at this point already and this would stand out outside the weapon modifiers' jacked up standards. And, of course, the ridiculous attack increases don't help matters as always.

Now, without weapon modifiers? Well, Angel Bow punctuates what I was talking about with the above 2 paragraphs when it comes to Shot Looping balance. I tested: only the Back Shot has looping strong enough to complicate dodging the later part, and even that isn't truly undodgeable, although I have little doubt it can still set up sufficient trapping to cause problems. At least, until you realize that the Back Shot still has only 4 Shot Cancel, when Clubs' Shots have more to get away with having low velocity. Any weapon type can instantly destroy it with their own Forward Shot, although Cursed Palm and Eyetrack Orbitars could have concerns with power fall-off while up against the Angel Bow's 40 Shot Stamina. Add to it that on plenty of weapon families, the Bow being no exception, the Back Shot is actively committal compared to the other attacks, and you start realizing how much weapon modifiers enable one-trick ponies, which Angel Bow isn't quite that, but it does try enough even though I've honestly never had it on my own radar.

Ninja Palm
This is worth review, but I would not mind this proving to be balanced when weapon modifiers don't aggravate things, if only because Ninja Palm does at least have its sense of character. It is sketchy enough, though, I will grant that much.

Ninja Palm is an absolutely aggravating weapon on randoms, such that I become surprised it didn't get included on the ban list I am referencing. It is commonly known for being able to spam Neutral Shots while exploiting the fastest walking speed of any weapon type, including Brawler Claws by a slight amount. The Shots all have a surplus of velocity and convenient homing that allows them to get past light terrain cover as well, and I am left wondering why Ninja Palm couldn't have had its damage falloff increased to discourage staying away. To be sure, the Back Shot doesn't have much range, but the Side Shot does have decent range and thus it wouldn't be gimped by the Spin Shot technique, and the Side Shot still kills in 10 hits on simple base damage at max range if you're wondering, which might seem like a lot, but I imagine it would get marginalized by easy homing.

Of course, there is no denying that Ninja Palm is a significant abuser of weapon modifiers. Shot Range+ is definitely among them because of the free homing bolstering, though oddly Ninja Palm is still a relatively tame offender of Shot Range+ abuse. The modifier that warrants the active complaint, however, is Walking Speed+, because this is a meager 16 Value modifier to have walking speed improved to be just as good as running speed, and it results in not having to care about drawbacks with running: Stamina maintenance and reactionary dodging difficulty. Again with the Shots' velocity and homing, you can see how it would be even easier to kite with this red flag raising weapon.

If Neutral Shot spam can be reasonably staved, a possibility thanks to ironically the velocity, there are some positives that would provide hope for dealing with Ninja Palm, namely that it has below average power and range on the projectiles. I see signs that it ends up relying on strong buff Powers, and as soon as Ninja Palm really does do that, that's where it starts falling apart. I did a bit of a test with the viability of a perfect fit combination with Energy Charge/Quick Charge/Bumblebee here and it brings up that Ninja Palm inevitably takes some suffocation from the 3 Active Buffs rule (basically a player is limited to 3 Buffs being active at a time, with the oldest one being overwritten), and misses something with a lack of each of the following Powers:


 * Slip Shot - ability to get past significant terrain cover
 * Homing Boost - ease of hitting with the Spin Shot technique
 * Energy Charge - an attack boost that would work off of the high walking speed
 * Quick Charge - DPS and pressure ability
 * Bumblebee - an actual defense for Energy Charge

And this becomes relevant because this can snowball. Energy Charge must be leveled to not suck even if Bumblebee is around, given that Bumblebee will then make the walking predictable. Bumblebee will also contradict leveled Slip Shot so stronger terrain cover would keep being useful. If Slip Shot is used instead, Quick Charge would have to be the damage boost Power to have any maintenance of defense with additional Powers, and Quick Charge has the problem that it lacks a burst effect that Powers are meant to be about in general, so it's more likely to be at a higher Level where it would use actually more compromising Power Grid shapes. As for Homing Boost, it already uses 8 spaces minimum for an effect that can very well become marginalized here.

Although Ninja Palm does show enough signs of inflated stats, it isn't Brawler Claws. It doesn't have running speed that becomes an absurdity to overcome, certainly not when Ninja Palm under Trade-Off L4 fails to clear 18m/s, which is how fast Skyscraper Club runs when under Super Speed. It doesn't have enough base damage on the melee attacks to 2HKO under just Energy Charge, even if Super Armor still doesn't allow thwarting the 3HKO. And it definitely doesn't have 3 Shot Cancel on the Neutral Rapid or 5 on the Back Shot, or anything to allow for Ninja Palm to just destroy projectiles. Ninja Palm has to stay in character, the likely problem being that it can be rewarded too much for doing that. However, it's still worth giving the benefit of the doubt, in the hopes that it can't cheat the combat system by having too much leg room for improper dodging.

Atlas Club
This thing is easy to call out the idea of banning: it's "needing shot homing" to be "broken", or in other words, it spams the Forward Shot for looping. It's another one-trick pony, and surprise surprise, weapon modifiers enable that much yet again.

Now it is true that none of the Clubs have innate Slip Shot on the Dash Shots; that's for the Neutral Shot. Is this the problem? No. What suffocates the Forward Shot spam is how Atlas Club has the third highest chargeup time of any weapon type in the game, exceeded only by Babel Club and Black Club, so the Forward Shot just comes out and then there's no range attack for a while. I think Atlas Club just screams Glass Cannon to me, and even then it barely achieves 75 base damage at the tip of the Forward Shot's range, something that is decent but it could be better on the high chargeup time. Not helping Atlas Club's case is how it has the attack speed problems saddled with being a Club, leaving me to wonder why there are THREE Clubs on the entire banlist.

Atlas Club never even really stayed active on my radar, and I have heard it's considered BARELY broken with an overly specific setup anyway.

Capricorn Club
Okay, the first of the two weapon types that punctuates why I think Shot Range+ would be the most broken weapon modifier in the game if not for Evasion+ and Walking Speed+. Here we go.

Let's elaborate first on the involved problem that Shot Range+ causes here. Plenty of weapon types have their projectiles deal reduced damage over distance, as a way to encourage being closer to the opponent in the interest of better emphasizing positioning when it has to put itself to the test when an opponent capable of breaking through defenses has to be kept under enough pressure themselves to stop them and would end up with an easier time from taking less damage from anybody who is overly defensive. Oddly, though, this general rule applies to only 4 of the 9 weapon families (Blades, Claws, Palms, and Arms), though I can get that Cannons don't take the penalty to make up for difficulty in opening the distance, Clubs have to worry about shot velocity issues so they get more damage over distance, and the remaining 3 (Staffs, Bows, and Orbitars), while they do deal more damage are meant to be range attack families and also have some speed-based weaknesses involved, although subtle with Bows. Of course, weapon families do have exception to this rule that works both ways, but my point is the same I had with Shot Looping: the developers want to encourage risk assessment. How well they achieve this is variable. Regardless, like with everything else, Shot Range+ messes with the mere idea, because projectiles achieve the whole damage over distance handling by a max range modifier. Why does this matter? Well, the max range modifier applies directly only to the end of the projectile's lifespan, the percentage of the difference used being based on the percentage of the progress through the projectile's lifespan. Thus, Shot Range+ makes the damage change over distance more gradual, which also helps damage-based statusing because it's base damage that gets increased as a reuslt. Of course, while this did contribute to Ninja Palm being a problem on randoms, surprisingly the issue with Shot Range+ there had more to do with the inflated homing ability.

Capricorn Club makes this VERY relevant because it has THE lowest max range damage multiplier, at only 22%.

See, what Capricorn Club does to deserve that low a multiplier is what gets it commonly banned, namely that Capricorn Club has the second best chargeup of Clubs (only Magnus Club has that), resulting in solid DPS with its Shots, as well the Shots having good velocity. If you haven't guessed, however, Capricorn Club is another one-trick pony brought to you by Weapon Modifiers Inc., and its trick is the Neutral Shot having the Club standard of innate Slip Shot to be able to spam it from behind terrain cover. Of course, you can see how Shot Range+ aggravates things, particularly when Capricorn Club's damage at what would be its normal maximum range of around 55 meters is practically doubled. (Multiply 78 by 2/3 and you get 52. Subtracting that from 100 results in 48.) Even at 30 meters where distance closure starts being reasonable against Capricorn Club, Shot Range+ effectively increases damage by at least 20%, and remember that this is multiplicative with the regular attack boosts, not additive. Without this problem, or reported looping that I can tell you just can't happen with only Homing Boost and I can be sure isn't possible regardless with the Neutral Shot even with Shot Range+ and Shot Homing+, Capricorn Club is significantly less able to snipe to asinine effect.

Of course, you might say that I would still be missing the point that the Neutral Shot still has innate Slip Shot effect, even though Slip Shot effect provides a more technical sieging option, something to help the Neutral Shot on Clubs have a way to be considerate of how to combat overly defensive opponents while still having a challenge factor with as much to consider the Dash Shots for calling out strafing efforts. But that wouldn't matter, not when it still somehow invalidates terrain even though a grand total of one attack would be doing that and it could always have drawbacks.

Here's the funny thing: I remember a time when Capricorn Club got a nickname that simply added in a single letter, I'll let you guess which one and where it would be placed. Yeah, you want to know why that happened before things would change? Well, that happened because Capricorn has OTHER weaknesses too. Besides that it is a Club with all that comes with as much, Capricorn Club is conveniently one of the least mobile weapon types in the game. It barely beats out Skyscraper Club, but it also has the added issue of not getting improved walking speed when using the Neutral Swing, so it actually has slower Neutral Swing walking than freaking Skyscraper Club. Also, as far as Clubs go, Capricorn Club doesn't have any attacks with Shot Cancel of at least 5 or Shot Stamina exceeding 30, so mixing in opposing Dash Shots would be worth considering, because Capricorn Club isn't going to be able to follow up with any Rapid attacks.

Capricorn Club is unusual enough as a Club, but it's definitely more reliant on being a siege monster than anything that weapon modifiers mutates into some imbalanced mess.

Magnus Club
Vanilla TV Tropes' quote: ''The Magnus Club. While it is debatable whether or not it is the best club, its fast charge time makes it the most powerful, and its innate speed boost over other clubs is a huge selling point. When combined with the right powers and the proper stats, the player becomes a beast. Nintendo at least realized this and thus banned it in official tournaments.''

Ah here we go. Kid Icarus Uprising's definitive Melee Tornado, something that makes Skyscraper Club look like Flintlock Staff, which naturally is an accomplishment. This right there should tell you that there is inevitably going to be counter play against Magnus Club. Distance closure stops being a problem for the defender when they realize that every correct move still leads to them being the only one dealing punishment as I'm able to display with videos like this (Super Smash Bros. 4 on 3DS); the Melee Tornado character simply tends to afford more mistakes with the melee combat itself and the range combat against them would be for wearing them down to decrease that affordance. Magnus Club is really no different, and although it has the fastest chargeup time in the game and the highest mobility of any Club, this doesn't mean that Magnus Club ends up with any decisive advantages, because it doesn't; any weapon type playing to its strengths can force Magnus Club into maneuvers in the melee combat itself and can build off of that.

Having actual experience using it myself, I can safely say that Magnus Club has more weaknesses than just being restricted to having the shortest projectile range in the game. It is, of course, a Club, so its only good point with the attack speed is the fast chargeup. The Shots' consistent availability simply provides options, but all of them are at risk of tactical maneuvers beating them by exploiting the still persisting attack speed problems, particularly when the Neutral Shot even takes 3/10 of a second to release and thus has to worry about average human reaction time. The Neutral Shot becomes even more predictable when Clubs' Dash Shots don't even involve any decent shifting momentum at all, meaning evasion options become limited as well. It really goes to show how being a Club does indeed involve compromises with the close range itself.

Now Magnus Club doesn't have problems with chargeup, shot velocity, or mobility, which would be standard Club weaknesses, but it has its own unique weaknesses, and this is where things do get compromising. The biggest issue is that Magnus Club's Shots travel a short distance in a VERY short timeframe before expiring, making sure that only the Back Shot, which at least is a stationary tornado, is capable of blocking range attacks to good effect. The Back Shot is committal particularly on Clubs, though overcoming that could happen, but the real concern is the general issues with struggling to have any blocker projectiles makes Magnus Club anything but synergetic with Counter. Standard Clubs could use Counter to bypass the chargeup times intended to check their big and strong projectiles by intentionally taking hits, preferably lighter ones to minimize damage taken, and this is something I make particular use of with Skyscraper Club to consistently useful effect, but Magnus Club practically gets just the auto-aim, which can help in finding a hiding opponent, but more often than not will mess with the player's control. Counter is still viable on Magnus Club, granted, but in a more technical manner because the knockback immunity will trigger on the Neutral Swing walking but the auto-aim/attack won't, and this at least is helped by Magnus Club's Neutral Swing having the mobility boost percentage at 25% instead of the 10% of other Clubs, making Magnus Club actually the fastest Neutral Rapid/Swing walker other than maybe Ninja Palm, and even then Magnus Club isn't too overwhelmed there. Otherwise, though, Magnus Club's best use of Counter would be low cost buff protection against Black Hole via vacuum immunity, and when the whole matchup with Skyscraper Club already practically amounts to who sets up the melee combat on their terms, it shows how Magnus Club has to actually worry about its Power economy management.

That's another thing: Magnus Club doesn't even 3HKO without an attack boost except with the Melee Combo, the Forward Shot or the blatantly telegraphed Back Shot. It is mobile enough for the affordance of needing to land extra hits, but this only serves to bring up how Magnus Club is more of a cavalry type than it is a heavy infantryman type, which I think was the real reason Magnus Club got banned in Nintendo's ONE official tournament, because Kid Icarus Uprising is designed to be a shooter, and anything that closes the distance easily is going to threaten that key aspect. This doesn't make Magnus Club in and of itself broken, and that the tournament in question happened early into KIU's lifespan as well means that players wouldn't have figured out how to handle close range threats when Skyscraper Club would have been clear enough that I myself would have been going through the Dunning-Kreuger Effect of things all too easily. Magnus Club would eventually have to worry about Reflect Barrier becoming popular due to its ease of use for its effectiveness against any offense short of one that was particularly sophisticated. Also, while the number of things faster than Magnus Club isn't that big a list, they do exist and can exploit that Magnus's need to get close is absolute short of involving Powers like Mega Laser.

Really, once again, weapon modifiers are the real aggravation with Magnus Club, though the the capability for abuses are actually more global, with all of the Speed+ modifiers being enabling, and it's practically impossible to tell which one a weapon would have for sure throughout an entire match until it ends, as well as not worth the trouble regardless, making all of the mobility control abuses of the Speed+ modifiers even more aggravating. Also capable of causing imbalances is status application modifiers, most notably Weaken+ and Freezing+, because Magnus Club's base damage values are still high enough to consistently apply the statuses. Like with Shot Homing+, Value increase in the 30s is without a doubt too low for a passive applying a buff issued by a Power that rightfully costs about 10 spaces at max Level. The depth is just not around with weapon modifiers, really, and Magnus Club is of course yet another convenient scapegoat for a hacker's ease of use.

Honestly, calls for Magnus Club being kept banned are just a knee-jerk reaction.

Predator Cannon
Next up is another weapon that exploits one particular attack to effect that weapon modifiers. This time, it's the Back Shot, which under Homing Boost has such insane tracking ability that if it didn't expire upon getting close to the ground which it happens at around 30 meters, it would be literally undodgeable. ....oh, it can avoid expiring that soon.

Yeah, that's another thing about Shot Range+: convenient breaking of magic numbers. There are already key range values where a lot is changed, the most notable being how Black Hole is effective at a maximum of 30 meters, something that Shot Range+ easily breaks by making sure weapons no longer need to care about stopping Black Hole. Of course, that's not the issue I want to cover with Shot Range+. What is, is an excessive demand of players to carry around specific tools, namely Armor Powers in Shot Range+ Predator Cannon's case to work with Predator Cannon's Back Shot being reliant on the multi-hit.

Let me put this out there: I got into Kid Icarus Uprising because I do NOT like effectively unconditional flinching, which fighting games have a problem with throwing about, because unconditional flinching renders durability invalid as a tool for momentum, which muscle-bound threats are going to exploit, such is how they can easily be bullies in real life. Here in Kid Icarus Uprising, base unconditional flinching becomes a design strength because you can actually stop it at will for what is practically a significant opportunity cost, and the Super Armor Power is the poster child method of doing so. A simple yet effective result that justifies me spending 14 spaces of the Power Grid on Super Armor and Counter with the 2nd least mobile weapon type in the game, it's satisfying to be rewarded for knowing when to use the boost, both strategically and tactically, but more importantly, it's a CHOICE, one where not using that boost involves the fighter going into the arena of base unconditional flinching with their head held high.

Shot Range+ and Shot Homing+ have Predator Cannon spit upon those who makes that braver choice.

For all that my seeing things from the other side of the fence would inevitably have some clumsiness, never let it be said that I don't make enough of an effort. I condemn Shot Range+ partly for a reason Super Armor would actually shut down, because not everybody is going to pack Super Armor, and I have actually seen Club users not do that because they would be gung-ho with the offense, something that inevitably involves the Dunning-Krueger Effect, funny when I myself always had use Armor Powers in the interest of bolstering kinetic gameplay. It's still a mess to have Predator Cannon turn this scenario into an RPS triangle, but that's what happens because of things like Shot Range+.

And before you might point out that Predator Cannon is managing an explosion effect and would surely be doing it at the end of the shot's lifespan to make sure none of my points would mean a thing, actually, Predator Cannons' Shots only explode with wall collision or Pierce being used up. The explosion won't go off if it has hit nothing, so dodging them would in fact matter.

Mind you, even without Shot Range+ or Shot Homing+, Predator Cannon can still use Homing Boost to give the Back Shot the hyper tracking, and the Spin Shot technique can always be used to bolster the Back Shot's effective range a bit if the Predator Cannon can get past Cannons' insanely early release on the Back Shot. However, it wouldn't be literally undodgeable at 40 meters and below, and it would be unlikely to be undodgeable, period. Even if it would be undodgeable at base, Homing Boost still delves into significant Power usage, which in and of itself is going to involve the opponent's reasonably customizable tools. Predator Cannon is by no means a bad weapon in general, but with still mediocre mobility and some iffy projectile usability, it's nowhere near as capable of excessive shenanigans when cutting out the undodgeable Back Shot.

Leo Cannon
Like Predator Cannon, Leo Cannon becoming broken comes from a literally undodgeable Back Shot under certain circumstances but the hit itself is multi-hit and thus its power gets divided up so easily that an Armor Power would break it more than usual. I want to say, though, that the Back Shot only needs Homing Boost to be undodgeable, and unlike with Predator Cannon, Leo Cannon has its Shot explosions be unconditional, although the Shots have 2 Pierce in return so they don't immediately explode on mere contact with a player. However, in return, Leo Cannon's damage bases aren't very good, not something that would matter with weapon modifiers of course, but if Ninja Palm is an indication that Power necessity for efficiency hurts, Leo Cannon would inevitably be such, and Leo Cannon barely gets more walking speed than Predator Cannon but doesn't even get that thing's better running speed.

Something I have heard is that Leo Cannon can chain Back Shot right into itself. This is at least worth a look to stop the 0-Death from getting out of hand against anybody who doesn't pack something like Super Armor, but I have also heard that the chaining additionally requires Quick Charge, and although Quick Charge requires only 4 spaces at Level 1, this would likely be surprisingly be big. Why? Well, let's think about the costs. At Level 1 apiece, Homing Boost and Quick Charge have a sum cost of 11 spaces, which is more than Reflect Barrier Level 3. Reflect Barrier Level 2, which has 2 charges each lasting 6 seconds compared to the 16 seconds per charge for both Homing Boost and Quick Charge, will already practically stop the 0-Death from that low a Level, because although Homing Boost has 2 charges at Level 1, Quick Charge has only ONE. Homing Boost and Quick Charge would be more likely to be higher Level, but this inevitably compromises Power Grid space, and to begin with, Super Armor gives Leo Cannon in general fits, not just the Back Shot, particularly when the Shots are worse against targets that don't flinch against them than the Rapids are, so Quick Charge becomes a compromise. Quick Charge even requires 2 extra spaces per Level in order to get extra charges, so the cost-effectiveness increase ends up diminished to aggravate Level 3+'s unconditional center space requirement.

I mentioned Reflect Barrier even though I doubt it alone would completely blunt the combination of Homing Boost and Quick Charge, because as I pointed out before, Reflect Barrier is popular thanks to its flexibility for its effect going beyond the call of alarm clocking Skyscraper and Magnus Clubs. Reflect Barrier makes use of the shooter genre by its very nature, deters attacks that don't armor up particularly blunting cavalry types, pulls cost effectiveness on Armor Powers other than Counter, has easy and convenient Power Grid shapes, AND uses reaction to stump many Powers on its own. I imagine that Reflect Barrier could get away with mixing in something like Playing Dead to shut down the combination. I know that's not going to be entirely cost-effective, true, but I don't doubt there are better ideas in the customization involvement to disrupt overstacking buff Powers, because really, that's just what these Fragile Speedster weapons resort to, whereas I'm actively just choosing between Super Armor and Counter for which buff to have active to shut down flinching abuse.

Really, if Reflect Barrier proves to suffice in addressing the reported 0-Death to viable effect, Leo Cannon suddenly becomes a lot tamer.

Eyetrack Orbitars
And here's the big one, which of course got commented on vanilla TV Tropes with the following: ''The Eyetrack orbitars are called cheap by many, and they're deserving of that title. These weapons have ludicrously good homing, so much so that shots often swerve back around and hit their target after they've missed. Add great range and decent shot movement speed on top of that, and you've got a weapon that is dangerously easy to use. This weapon is the ultimate crutch weapon- the amazing homing means you barely have to aim at all, and while the weapon takes a while to charge and has rather weak shots, dual shots that circle around enemies even when they miss, fire out rather fast, move fast, and travel far provide WAY too much power with no skill needed to use them.''

This weapon is infamous as pointed out above. The Shot Looping not only guarantees accuracy, but is enough to make sure that the Shots don't lose interest in tracking the person, and have the added bonus of 3 Pierce on each individual part, enough to allow for repeat hits that rack up damage that can only be mitigated by mercy invincibility that you would forfeit by using an Armor Power to stop the wretched flinching, although I want to say the defender when not having an Armor Power active just bounces back and "recovers" before getting hit again. It's capable of getting so bad that you can all too easily be stuck in a hopeless situation unless you abuse Evasion+ in all its brokenness.

However, what if I told you that Eyetrack Orbitars is the OTHER weapon that punctuates how broken Shot Range+ really is?

I mentioned briefly with Angel Bow that Shot Range+ is responsible for unwelcome ability of Shot Looping at mid-range. I also mentioned actively with Capricorn Club how lowered damage over distance is made more gradual by Shot Range+. Eyetrack Orbitars have the combination of both, and while the damage over distance reduction isn't as big with Eyetrack Orbitars having a max range damage multiplier of 66%, the Shot Looping more than makes up for it, because the extra hits conveniently also avoid being weakened further than they otherwise would be. Also, those hopeless situations I mentioned? Yes, they involve what else but mid-range looping, once again requiring homing increases to even happen.

I will say that I do have a video where I have beaten an actually hacked Eyetrack Orbitars setup with my armored Skyscraper Club setup, right over here. So I do have authority on mentioning how Eyetrack Orbitars becomes "cheap" and I CAN say that weapon modifiers are what become oppressive. When my general success story boils down strictly to me using an armored Skyscraper Club setup, there is definitely a problem, but conversely, when I can punch through with, again, the least mobile weapon type in the game that isn't Ancient Staff, something's allowing me to fight back and it wouldn't be Grid Reading when I confess to not having actually done that in the match, only managing coincidental tactics that would indicate how it would pay off.

Eyetrack Orbitars actually has other weaknesses, and in fact, those other weaknesses contradict the claims in the remarks on the vanilla TV Tropes comments. I will say that the range is at least above average, so vanilla TV Tropes did kind of get that right, but it's still exaggerated with the highest Range being Forward Shot at slightly more than 60 meters, and the Back Shot is instead a blocker shot so it wouldn't travel far. High shot velocity is a God awful lie, however, because the shots are slow, and where Angel could at least feasibly try a clash war via standard chargeup and Shot Cancel stats, Eyetrack Orbitars doesn't even get that much, instead having high enough chargeup time and bad Shot Cancel to show for it. I also recorded movement rates, and can determine that Eyetrack Orbitars is actually the least mobile Orbitars, including Guardian Orbitars, so it doesn't have good mobility-based control.

Again, if Shot Range+ and Shot Homing+ weren't an issue, Eyetrack Orbitars would have to take significantly more risks to manage effectiveness, because one Forward Shot loop under Homing Boost would barely complete for an additional hit when starting at around 40 meters of distance, and 2 would only complete with a starting distance of 20 meters, compared to Shot Range+ alone making these values about 70 for the former and a whopping 50 for the latter. Removing the weapon modifiers factor would tone this down by a lot when Eyetrack Orbitars with a hacked setup already can have to worry about the other guy punching through, and that potential point happening more globally would make it a lot more tame.

Gemini Orbitars
Now here is something that would deserve to stay banned, and whether or not it's still broken without weapon modifiers doesn't change how unimaginative the gameplay from Gemini Orbitars ultimately is. What puts Gemini Orbitars on the chopping block as it is, is how it can use Homing Boost or Shot Homing+ to have its Forward and Side Shots be literally undodgeable. Again. And this time, this happens not only by relentless tracking, not only within 50 meters of distance, not only with no multi-hit aspect complication to have an Armor Power gimp damage more strongly than usual, but also without Shot Range+.

Let's delve into the subject of kiting because it is a subject that I keep coming back to. It is obvious that as a Mighty Glacier/Melee Tornado hybrid, Skyscraper Club would make that an inevitable hot topic and that's why I would call it out, but this goes back to why I would main Skyscraper Club in the first place, and it's because games aren't nice to the Mighty Glacier in general, so I'd rather double check that Kid Icarus Uprising, which has the Power system in all its innovation, does have its head on straight about balancing them, because when creativity with the risk assessment is what checks them, that becomes a keeper. Kiting has little to risk assessment about it when it makes reaction far easier, because it nullifies Counter Play, something Extra Credits even called out in their episode about Counter Play. Stopping kiting requires calling out expected escape routes to effect, and if your character choice disallows that outright instead of simply demanding active reads, you can all too easily end up with matchups where free damage can be magnified by an infinite amount. It's why Black Hole becomes a big deal: it punctuates the Power system's importance to where it adds extra complexity with escapes, meaning that the Power system getting actively involved globally allows for sieging any defense into submission when used correctly.

Now the Spin Shot technique, while it does at least invite sophistication with the range attacks, is still capable of bolstering kiting. What happens is that Side Rapids/Shots, which are the go-to for burst mobility by strafing as indirectly taught by Great Reaper's eye laser, tend to have less power than the other Dash Rapids/Shot and also less range than the Forward Rapid/Shot at least. The Spin Shot technique allows the Forward Rapid/Shot to be mixed with the strafing movement, and for further kiting ability, it's worth noting that the Side Rapid/Shot can be substituted for the Back Rapid/Shot in case the latter is less capable of kiting with offensive effect within the same direction of shifting, which actually can happen. However, the Spin Shot is at least given a sense of skill to throw in, in addition to any reading having to be done with the Spin Shot to potentially disrupt said skill, and if the Back Shot has poor range, reactionary strafing movement suddenly has a complication to create an opportunity compromise if the Spin Shot is attempted.

Gemini Orbitars, however, marginalizes the skill required with the Spin Shot technique, and it's because of one reason: the natural homing on the Forward and Side Shots are simply high enough to allow fire and forget behavior.

A key mechanic with shooters is to aim where you want to fire and hope you are accurate enough to make your mark. Clubs get away with attenuating this to a degree by having unique weaknesses demanding player skill behind them, and even then they would want to consider aiming to set up traps or surprises. Homing weapons get complained about for not demanding skill from the user, though I find Homing Boost is fair enough in general because it's always using a chunky shape on the Power Grid to provide some ease in Grid Reading. Gemini Orbitars, however, doesn't have any such check, and although the unboosted shots AREN'T undodgeable, the homing allows for being liberal enough with aiming that just doing the Spin Shot at all makes it easy to force dodging and there would be the added bonus of being able to fire at various angles to disrupt any rhythm the dodging player may make use of. Attack power issues would stop being a problem and with the 50 meter hitting, Energy Charge wouldn't be too hard to maintain to aggravate things, and Quick Charge could also be used because Gemini Orbitars' chargeup is actually standard instead of the higher amount that Eyetrack Orbitars has.

The sad thing is when the closest thing shinparu remarks as a weakness for Gemini Orbitars being the unique sound of the Shots, which doesn't change their frequency, and I myself barely note projectile attack power issues because it's no more relevant when having the Shots move around opposing projectiles than the 3 Shot Cancel on the Forward and Side Shots is. I'm more focused on how degenerate Gemini Orbitars asks to become, because unlike Eyetrack Orbitars, Gemini Orbitars conveniently deals more damage over distance, and it has above average mobility too. It punishes the user for not only bothering with risk assessment, but also doing precision aiming. Attack power issues might make Gemini Orbitars seem innocuous, but unless somebody can prove that Gemini Orbitars has useful weaknesses, it deserves to be kept held in contempt.

Compact Arm
We have another weapon involving Shot Range+ being inane as ever, and it's one that showcases why Shot Range+ breaks Black Hole like a twig. Compact Arm is commonly known for its machine gun style Neutral Rapid, and Shot Range+ enables Compact Arm to stay not at so slightly above 30 meters where Black Hole could hope to smoke out Powers, but at 50 meters where breaking through even 10 meters just gets you shelled for no payoff. At that point, all bets are off with Shot Range+. It is not a passive counterbalanced well at all by only 35 Value.

Of course, Compact Arm exploits Walking Speed+ even more, because it turns out that Compact Arm doesn't get a penalty to walking mobility when using the Neutral Rapid. However, when Compact Arm's walking speed is 7m/s on singleplayer, likely 6.3s/s on multiplayer, I guarantee that would say more about Walking Speed+ than it would about Compact Arm, because unlike Flintlock Staff, Compact Arm actually deals less damage over distance and so can't punish counterkiting as harshly. As soon as that happens, it starts needing Powers, making me glad I am almost done with the Weapons half of this to go into detail of what the big deal with certain potentially exploitable Powers is.

I will be honest: I would be interested to know how weapons without blocker shots would combat Compact Arm, even if I suspect most weapons would just use the Neutral Shot keeping in mind that the Neutral Rapid has only 2 Shot Cancel and a read can guarantee a catch every once in a while. Of course, the Neutral Rapid bullets are still big for a Neutral Rapid, which is what makes them such a pain to dodge, and the homing, while not insane in terms of raw ability, can still be a shock from a Neutral Rapid. Not every weapon would want to pack Counter, although it's always an option for anything that can have a relaxed Power economy since Counter does also reduce damage by a minor amount and the shapes (Tetris T and then L shapes) are rather easy to handle. I do still bring up Powers regardless because Compact Arm has issues with burst damage, so safeguards against DPS would surely mitigate its effectiveness.

Compact Arm deserves the benefit of the doubt. Being the most mobile Arm wouldn't change that.

Taurus Arm
This was said on vanilla TV Tropes right below Magnus Club: ''The Taurus Arm is even worse. While it doesn't quite have the reach of the Magnus Club, it has more melee power than nearly any other weapon in the game, and rather high mobility to go with it.''

Does Taurus Arm deserve to go? Yes it does, actually. It is simply the only thing it creates before 9 AM, and all I am doing here is elaborating on the problems. Although Taurus Arm isn't as mobile as Brawler Claws or really any Claws weapon, it MORE than makes up for it with the obscene attack power on the melee attacks, even managing to hit harder than many Clubs, with the added bonus of having more running speed than Magnus Club and NONE of the weaknesses of a Club. Here's why the power works on Clubs: they're slow and clunky, and if a player is overcoming that with their own finesse, they deserve to hit hard. Taurus Arm is just brain-dead about this aspect, and it's even worse when the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that, and the clincher will boil down to actually characteristic reasons that actually could have worked out if, again, close range incentive was more global in a nuanced manner in KIU--one design strength I will give Super Smash Bros. credit for.

First up is the Melee Dash Attack. This wouldn't seem so bad with only base damage, because that much doesn't even achieve 2HKO. The problem is when ANY attack boost Power, including Energy Charge, would boost it enough to permit 2HKO through Super Armor without any attack boosts. The obvious solution would be to dodge it, except the Melee Dash Attack of Arms also has some disjoint in its favor by being wider on BOTH sides. Thankfully, the Melee Dash Attack is still predictable enough to make dodging it reliable, but there also must be reason to put Taurus Arm on the chopping block that wouldn't apply to Upperdash Arm, which is actually still more mobile and still hitting harder with the Melee Dash Attack.

The Melee Combo provides some of that reason. The full combo's damage output is slightly less than that of the Melee Dash Attack's, and of course 2H/CKOs through Super Armor with just maxed Energy Charge, never mind Trade-Off or especially Libra Sponge, the last of which when capped has the Melee Combo 1H/CKO a non-boosted Fighter. Taurus Arm has the mobility to set up a Combo with decent reliability as well, where the Clubs have to work for it and/or don't get over-the-top reward for as much. What pushes this into being excessive, though, is the Homing Melee mechanic, where the fighter when wanting to do a Melee Combo will move right toward their target in a burst of movement that provides intangibility until they get close enough to said target, and the trigger for this with Arms is liberal enough at 10 meters. You might notice that Taurus Arm is also the 3rd most mobile Arm, trailing only behind Compact and Upperdash Arms. The math should tell you everything you need to know about how messy this becomes, and it's telling when the next strongest melee from an Arm comes from Kraken Arm, which barely clears 75 base damage (barely 3HKOs base HP and iffy ability to even 4HKO through Super Armor) and is slower than the base of Crusher Arm, so the problem comes down to Taurus Arm.

Just in case you're not convinced because you think you can just declare a range war to make Taurus Arm submit, which didn't exactly work in an environment fond of keeping Shot Range+ legal, Taurus Arm has actual blocker shots. It's at least worth mention that none of them clear 30 base damage at all, not even the Forward Shot, so higher Shot Cancel projectiles won't get stopped, but the problem is managing higher Shot Cancel in the first place, because Taurus Arm has 6 Shot Cancel on its Dash Shots, making sure that only select attacks can punch through directly. It is a problem to need either Pudgy Palm's Back Shot or Guardian Orbitars' Dash Shots, both I'm pretty sure are close range blocker shots anyway, to overcome something that to begin with comes out of moderate charegup, and it means that Taurus Arm can pull some shot clash war until it eventually gets close and clobbers its foe.

If you ask me, I think Taurus Arm is supposed to be charging at people like a bull. Last I checked, however, I recall bullfighting to be an actual sport of making ol' El Toro look like a ninny. Correct me if I'm wrong, if I've been watching too many Bugs Bunny cartoons, but it doesn't matter when Taurus Arm still doesn't involve reasonable weaknesses for busting it down to size and it has me wondering why Kid Icarus Uprising didn't give the core gameplay more TLC to secure depth to both close and long range alike.

Powers
So now that the weapons are covered, it's time to go over the Powers. The weapons provide character choices, but the Powers give room for customization with thought on available activation abilities, and there aren't as many Powers as there are Weapons, so banning Powers unnecessarily ends up more compromising, though some may still end up justified. Most Power ban suggestions, however, end up being a case of tunnel vision. I will go over each of the Powers that are deemed broken by the majority.

Slip Shot
The perfect Power to start off with, vanilla TV Tropes has this simple summary: ''Slipshot power. The ability to shoot through walls is far more useful than it looks to be.''

There's more that vanilla TV Tropes does say, but it ends up going into Homing Boost, which I will cover, but Slip Shot needs its own points about it because there are flagrant pros and cons to its legality.

Naturally, I will cover the pro-ban side first, because it IS at least intuitive to understand. In a shooter, terrain cover is used as the great equalizer against DPS (damage per second for those who didn't get it), being placed to block off bullets and provide stress relief, potentially allowing for getting close unharmed, which any close range weapon will appreciate. Slip Shot, where it stands, allows for eliminating this very concept for the duration of 16 seconds per charge. Even without weapon modifiers, this is naturally a concept that will ultimately bug people who would be starting out. Slip Shot does at least warrant disclaimer to make its existence known to all and sundry for that alone, because Slip Shot can particularly exploit homing to cause frustration, and even at close range, Slip Shot could be used to make sure terrain can't be used to disrupt flanking attempts. Also worth pointing out is that the Slip Shot user can use terrain cover themselves and could get an advantage in projectile clashing this way, so it can create a defensive position too.

Of course, this also involves vitriol against the concept of terrain ignoring as a whole, with claims that it's innately flawed. One has to wonder, then, if the developers had an idea of what they were doing, but I think they do, given that they made this trait innate on the Neutral Shot of most Clubs, seems a problem but the Neutral Shot still has questionable velocity in general with Clubs, and of the 3 Clubs that get deemed broken, only one keeps the innate Slip Shot trait, and its Neutral Shot flowchart involves blatant favoritism with Shot Range+ to begin with as I outlined.

And don't worry, I have little doubt the developers are just as considerate of Slip Shot as a Power.

When it comes to competitive play, Slip Shot has actual problems with cost management. Slip Shot is actually one of the most expensive Powers in the game, at 10 spaces for Level 1; the only Powers to have equal or higher Level 1 costs are Playing Dead (which has the same space costs as Slip Shot), Trade-Off, and the Zodiac Powers, although Spite and Tempura Attack do use the Massage Chair shape at Level 1. Now, Slip Shot does need only 1 extra space per Level for a total of 1 charge per Level, but cost effectiveness is still going to hurt Slip Shot because it caps at Level 3, at which point the only Power that will cost more than Slip Shot other than the ones I mentioned is Transparency at Level 4, something I think is overcosted anyway.

I will elaborate on why cost-effectiveness matters, and it has everything to do with the Power system itself, particularly its day 1 appeal to me. See, I mentioned that the game has unconditional flinching within core gameplay, and yet I don't get frustrated with it where I would with other games, even though the Powers involve limited charges. What gives? Well, the Powers still can be activated to prove how drastic they can be, and Super Armor in particular comes to mind. This actually shifts the baseline to something more involved with activation abilities for a burst of effectiveness, with Super Armor being very much at just the right spot with costs to be treated as a staple Power in terms of balancing, namely that Super Armor isn't inexpensive enough to reliably counter standalone threats with cost effectiveness, but also isn't expensive enough to prevent anybody interested in disrupting that pesky unconditional flinching from fitting it in, even with the cumbersome Big U shape of Level 2. If anybody remains unconvinced, Counter has synergy with Skyscraper Club for some very solid siege potential on anybody who thinks not caring about burst damage is going to pay off.

This matters with Slip Shot because Super Armor conveniently also cuts damage taken by 30%, has a duration per charge of 20 seconds (longer than Slip Shot's 16), and only needs to be at Level 2 or above to avoid exceeding 4 spaces per charge, and this is going by Super Armor, not something else the opponent of the Slip Shot user could be doing in something more innovative. In effect, opponent response, which would be made reasonable by Slip Shot wanting enough initiative actively in its usage to be useful before distance closure would make terrain irrelevant, means that Slip Shot becomes its own attack penalty unless it's stacked with further buffs that would already be sponging as much, and remember: Slip Shot is expensive, so it can't have a convenient scapegoat for other Powers so easily, although Energy Charge would try hard enough. Also helping is that Reflect Barrier is popular and it costs less in general for its ability to counter-stall if the terrain advantage bolstered clashing is milked.

This brings up the other fatal flaw of Slip Shot to make sure the cost does matter well before involving all 36 spaces on the Power Grid: the general Power Grid shape. It wouldn't seem like much, being L shapes where one of the 2 parts always stretches fully along a side and the other at least comes close at Level 1. Level 2 just adds that extra space to make sure the perpendicular stretch out is complete, so you might not believe me that that apparent bit of OCD could be relevant.

Actually, the full row and column cost at Level 2 and above is relevant, by fully blocking off ANY Power requiring a full line. The list of Powers that have that, other than Slip Shot itself, are as follows:


 * Super Speed
 * Mega Laser
 * Explosive Flame L3+
 * Reflect Barrier L4
 * Autoreticle L2+
 * Random Effect L4
 * Power Thief
 * Virus
 * Bumblebee
 * Aries Armor
 * Trade-Off
 * Double Item L4
 * Fortune's Jukebox L2+

This seems jumbled together, but most of these Powers (aside from Fortune's Jukebox) would be disruptive to a weapon type working to a fault with close range burst damage. Of course, some of these are just plain close range threats themselves, notably Virus and Power Thief, but the design practice in general goes into covering them. What does matter for Slip Shot L2+ for multiple charges to get past somebody surviving the initial round of attacking is at the very least blocking off Super Speed, Reflect Barrier at Level 4, leveled up Autoreticle, and Bumblebee. I will go into Bumblebee on its own entry, but as to the other two Super Speed being blocked off cuts out its having more cost effectiveness at max Level than Warp and Angelic Missile do, so it becomes useful to have even one Super Speed usage involve significant ramifications. Reflect Barrier, meanwhile, wouldn't be capable of 4 charges if Slip Shot is around at all because of the double row cost, although 3 would still be significant to get around. And as for Autoreticle, it has its duration difference per charge between Levels be a whopping 6 seconds, so somebody attentive to the information on the bottom screen would be able to determine which between it and Slip Shot would be Level 1 on this obvious combination mentioned on the multiplayer tips video of old.

That's another thing about the guaranteed full row and column cost: the practice of Grid Reading. This practice is for figuring out what sort of Powers and resulting weaknesses the opponent has, a way to make sure you know how to address what you're up against. I came up with it as a way to safeguard against ways to throw off Black Hole, of course, but it does help for other, more subtle purposes as Slip Shot displays. Blocking line powers is the obvious point, but I have also wanted to look into interaction with the center 4 spaces, inspired by the point about how Chess has the players wanting to control the center spaces, to combat the chunkier Powers, and Slip Shot by all indications makes that easier because compared to in a 6x6 area having 4 center spaces, the remaining 5x5 area would have only one. That can provide some surprising results, though I would want to get into as much once I cover other Powers where that still becomes relevant. The main point is that Grid Reading, while it does require mental work in a fast paced game, would also discourage opponents from allowing distance to become too open to be able to keep causing pressure to end the intel management that can become more of a welcome threat than they'd like. Suddenly, how those projectiles work matters a lot more because every single one that gets dodged means more damage taken, even if it wouldn't show up on the lifebar until the projectile user realizes that bulky hammer is at arm's length having found its way through the entire collection of smoke and mirrors, and when Slip Shot is at least being weakened by Super Armor, this becomes a far more reasonable scenario.

Another anti-ban point of mine with Slip Shot is the point that Slip Shot itself can be a siege tool to call out anybody being too exploitive of the terrain cover against something that isn't a weapon like Poseidon Cannon. Although there are weapons that would have complications with Slip Shot despite issues with hunting ability, such as Ball Cannon, overall, Slip Shot would discourage players from involving gameplay that isn't kinetic. People would want to attack into each other more often, and honestly, I think the imbalances are from, of course, weapon modifiers getting involved. I will grant that hyper tracking projectiles would become more actually impossible to dodge just because walls can't be used to make the shots die out, but Leo Cannon's Back Shot explodes unconditionally, Predator Cannon's if it's even undodgeable has Slip Shot work against it by having the shots die out by lifespan, and Gemini Orbitars' Shots are too busted to allow it anyway. Compact Arm might be concerning with the Neutral Rapid, but the range and homing wouldn't be good enough to make getting past terrain cover relevant. Otherwise, Slip Shot only "unintroduces" terrain cover because attack power is inflated. On the concept of an activation ability, even when it's some buff that relatively lasts a while, suddenly dealing 1/4 to 1/3 damage to people who aren't me in my usage of defensive power modifiers to try to blunt that mess, on top of the reduced general stats, is a VERY sharp drop in capability.

Slip Shot is intimidating, but just worth a disclaimer, not a full-on ban.

Homing Boost
While not on the common banlist, Homing Boost does get sort of mentioned in vanilla TV Tropes, though in a sort of sbubullet point right below Slip Shot: ''Homing boost in general, namely on what are usually Painfully Slow Projectiles. Example: the Black Club has a very slow charge shot, but it lasts longer than any other in the game and already has decent homing itself. With a Homing boost modifier, those gigantic black blocks are suddenly doing U-turns after hitting/missing you so they can come back to hit you again.''

Looking into Black Club, the homing is actually doing some of what it is implied to do with just Homing Boost, though not to the exaggerated degree that vanilla TV Tropes remarks, because the U-Turn is around, but not to the tight degree they suggest. I will say that there's some leg room in trying to read strafing attempts against the Forward Shot, though. However, Black Club has only the same mobility as Ore Club, which isn't much to begin with, and the shot velocity on the Dash Shots is lower than even that of Skyscraper Club's while the chargeup time is the second highest of any weapon in the game. Black Club does have versatility, but its focus on that is where homing increases won't make it broken when Forward Shot would need Slip Shot to not get halted by terrain.

Homing Boost itself is a significant cost Power. It costs 7 spaces at minimum, though each extra Level requires only 1 extra space for a maximum of 9 and Homing Boost itself provides 2 charges plus an additional 1 for each extra Level, each charge lasting 16 seconds by the way. The L1 shape is the Male Box, which already flanks a center space when placed in the corner and not facing a closer side where it would immediately create a wasted space if it does that. L2 has the Female Box, which unconditionally uses a center space, though not one of the spaces right next to it, so direct combination with the Male Box can happen for a 3x5 rectangle. As for L3, the Massage Chair can avoid expending a center space by being placed in a corner, but ends up wasting the involved corner space by doing so, though that inconvenience is marginalized when in combination with something like Slip Shot L3, and the Massage Chair also stretches 4 spaces wide as well so it does at least pressure 2 center spaces.

Regardless, Homing Boost is decently expensive for what can just as easily be just an accuracy crutch, although there are a few possibilities such as getting past light defilade or accommodating explosion attacks, and Homing Boost has a bit more cost effectiveness than Super Armor in general. Still, the thing about Black Hole being a consistent threat is that raw power is given more importance, and Homing Boost, as an offensive buff relating to simply hitting, doesn't provide either a direct power boost or the ability to stave Black Hole. Black Hole additionally discourages overstacking more influential offensive buffs on the Power Grid like what is more bound to be done with Homing Boost, because doing so results in having less room for anything that could defend against it, and simply having superior Shot Cancel merely forces a bit more tactics with the close range burst damage followup. Meanwhile, other setups probably could just try to set up a projectile clash war or parry dodge the shots to marginalize Homing Boost's effectiveness, practically leaving the Homing Boost user down 7 to 9 spaces on the Power Grid because I need reiterate: Powers are primarily about burst effect.

I may as well go into Quick Charge, which I personally find significantly more concerning, although I do suppose I'm of course more used to using Skyscraper Club and that would give me some bias. Quick Charge actually does contribute to damage output by adding more charged projectiles outright, and unlike Energy Charge, Quick Charge can't be removed by the user being hit, simply being based on its 16 second duration per charge. It costs 2 less spaces than Super Armor at the same Level with the same charge counts, and since it involves Shots, using Counter in response isn't necessarily going to be a good idea, so surviving, never mind managing efficient Grid Reading, could be a bit of a bother. However, Quick Charge does end up with a bit of a blind spot: Dash Shots take longer to start the recharge than Neutral Shots do that Quick Charge doesn't help with. This makes Quick Charge more friendly with DPS than with burst damage attempts, when as I said before, burst effect is more desirable when managing Power usage. This also means that the 2 spaces per additional level on a Power with a low base cost becomes relevant because it's heightened by attenuating the cost effectiveness improvement rate, making sure that Quick Charge is forced to be accounted for actively, particularly when its upper 2 Levels unconditionally use a center space. I will say that Quick Charge L4, Homing Boost L3, and Slip Shot L3 can fit on the same Power Grid, but then all that could be added for any semblance of tag protection would be Sky Jump L1. You can see what sort of problems crop up fast when spamming these Powers. I investigated a perfect fit involving Quick Charge, Energy Charge, and Bumblebee, and this happened.

I may as well point out how weapon modifiers are just striking yet again, because weapons with higher Value actually have proportionally accelerated Power regen. Actually, it's not even quite proportional, because there's actually a bit of bias toward having higher Value, actually in a messy effort to prevent convenient min-maxing with weapons just below 300 Value, and Homing Boost just happens to regenerate a charge on every death with a weapon having its Value anywhere above 250, where a Value 100 weapon will need THREE deaths to recover a charge of Homing Boost. This seems like an innocuous problem, but there IS a Power that does bring up how bothersome it can really get.

Aries Armor
Vanilla TV Tropes has an entry on Aries Armor, naturally: ''Aries Armor. It provides a ridiculous defense power boost and immunity to stunning and launching, literally turning a player into The Juggernaut.''

Aries Armor can seem a little passive for a 11 space Power that has only 1 charge for all 4 of its Levels. All it manages is being a version of Super Armor that simply cuts the damage further, and apparently it's also supposed to provide status protection, but I don't see that help enough even against the statusing attempts, so it becomes cost-ineffective if you want a defensive power setup. Aries Armor even has its minimal duration be 16 seconds, which is rather mediocre to say the least, though at least it would be able to last 22 seconds at Level 4....which costs 17 spaces, more than literally any other Power in the game.

Where Aries Armor has something that what else but weapon modifier involvement turns into particular aggravation is that it exploits the game's division defense involvement.

Elaborating on what division defense entails, it's about how it would seem like a simple idea for big number management, even though subtraction would be taught first to kids before division, but the problem lies in how it also ruins burst damage. Multiply 128 by 2/5; that's about how much Skyscraper Club's Forward Shot would deal at point blank to somebody under Aries Armor at Level ONE. Yes, Aries Armor also conveniently cuts damage even further at higher Levels, all the way to 25% at Level 4. Building on this, I mentioned before how Super Armor being a staple Power shifts the baseline, and I can point out how that can involve turnabout to provide the positive side of division defense, that catching somebody without it would effectively be multiplied bonus damage. However, this also provides my further point about Aries Armor's insane defense boost: Tiger Claws has a base damage of 56 on the full Melee Combo, and can be multiplied by 7/10 from Super Armor, which has indisputable cost effectiveness against Aries Armor, to get a result of 39.2, but this is still slightly more than 3/10 of 128, which Aries Armor L3 gimps Skyscraper Club's Forward Shot down to. It really highlights how division defense doesn't have any direct equalizers, not when it ends up promoting low-key attack flowchart if that's not addressed.

The obvious solution would be to stall out the Aries Armor use, because Aries Armor doesn't provide any boosts outside the defensive power involvement. This works, for one charge. Once again, I bring up how higher Value causes Powers to regenerate faster, and although Aries Armor has the lowest regeneration rate of any Power that isn't Heavenly Light, Angelic Missile, or any of the Powers that don't regenerate at all, it doesn't matter when any weapon with its Value clearing 274 still recovers the singular charge on respawn without fail. Combine with how the high Value weapon inevitably has stat bloat that would tear other setups to shreds and it becomes a particular monster on Light VS Dark, because you can end up with a repeatedly kamikaze attacker that picks on hapless teammates to ridiculous effect, and that's if they're by their lonesome, not supported by some range abuse setup teammate to make things worse, and making them the Angel still has you run afoul of their stall potential too, so once again, something that would take 3 deaths to regenerate with a V100 weapon involves unwelcome levels of frustration because of sudden and definitely excessive regeneration ease.

If anything, though, Aries Armor just tries to build upon what is already around on the user. A couple of uses of Super Speed to escape and it's guaranteed that the Aries Armor charge will be shaken off if it's not being used to do something like call out Counter. Further worth noting is that Aries Armor does in fact have a weakness: its Power Grid shapes always require a full row and column.

We are back to the easy Grid Reading design decision that I pointed out with Slip Shot, but this time, Power Thief and Virus are the cause of this, because those two are capable of being anti-armor Powers. Virus is obvious via the placed beacon repeatedly applying Weaken, so much so that Effect Recovery is practically useless, though it also helps that it additionally applies Paralyze which is more subtle, but attack Powers like Meteor Shower can capitalize upon the Paralyze involvement. Power Thief is more subtle about anti-armor though, but what it does is apply a buff where landing any melee strike directly takes a charge of a random Power with the chance for each Power being based on the percentage of the used space for the Power. On my setup, this is a 7/18 chance of an Armor Power charge being taken, 1/6 for Black Hole (as an added note, Black Hole also has casting animation intangibility, but just losing one of the 2 charges hurts quite a bit anyway), 1/4 for Super Speed, and 1/12 for Jump Glide; any of these would be significantly inconvenient to make being poked troublesome, but I did just mention that Counter could be punished by Aries Armor, didn't I? I wouldn't exactly have to fear that if I were to see that claw crane icon. Suffice to say that Power Thief does require its user to think like a rogue to manage effectiveness with it, true to character.

Aries Armor itself would not be able to carry around Slip Shot at all, nor would it have Mega Laser, so sniping potential gets reduced. This makes sure that it would be more likely to be on a mobile melee setup that would not need Super Speed in the first place, which means kiting and lateral movement would be more controlled with Aries Armor. Now of course, the 5x5 area does still happen to be around and not every Power that mobile melee can exploit requires a full line. However, we can get into the Powers that can be big offenders.

Libra Sponge
Yet again from vanilla TV Tropes: ''(Aries Armor) becomes marginally worse when used in conjunction with Libra Sponge, which uses taken damage to buff the user's attack power. Having Aries Armor on with this means that the abuse taken to proc Libra Sponge becomes Scratch Damage, and being unstunnable means there's no way to stop the user's now ungodly powerful attacks short of clashing weapons. Oh, and these powers are refreshed upon death. There's a reason both Aries Armor and Libra Sponge are banned in official Nintendo tournaments.''

Actually, first off, I should note now that I remember about this detail that the ONE official Nintendo tournament also had a farcical rule where all matches would be Light VS Dark and only the Angel player of the winning team, and nobody else, would get to advance, a VERY exploitable rule demanding counterintuitive behavior and general selfishness. We should NOT take stock in what Nintendo was saying at the time.

That said, the combination of Aries Armor and Libra Sponge had been popular for a reason, but once again, weapon modifiers are to blame. Remember how bad it was that Aries Armor abused division defense on top of having multiple charges because of Power regen inflation? Well, Libra Sponge is here to aggravate that. When the user takes damage, the Libra Sponge provides a stronger attack boost based on the base damage taken in duration. Yes, that's right, base damage. I recall from my tests some time back that Aries Armor doesn't reduce the multiplier increase at all, and it's worth further mention that Libra Sponge has the full multiplier cap at 2.7, the Level simply influencing how much each point of base damage increases the multiplier from the base of 1, but I also recall Skyscraper Club Neutral Shot has the cap get hit instantly with a point blank hit for Libra Sponge Level 1. This time, we can multiply Tiger Claws' 39.2 against Super Armor by 2.7 and get 105.84, which would come close enough to 2HKO. Yeah, I think we can see where I suffered Claws 2HKOing me through superlative defensive power modifiers, and the best part is when Libra Sponge supported by Aries Armor will get hidden by the Aries Armor, so your only chance of seeing it for sure in time is a lucky glance on the bottom screen to see the talk bubble with Libra Sponge's icon, which can be exploited by Libra Sponge being used second because if you're fighting a melee setup, you are unlikely to want to bother with the bottom screen to begin with. Libra Sponge lasting 24 seconds, longer than Aries Armor at max Level, does not matter when you'd be dead before the Aries Armor itself wears out if you even consider fighting the combination head on.

In a 1V1, again the solution is to run away and watch the other guy's Power Grid completely flounder with only 13 spaces of anything else left. But in an LVD, that hapless teammate abuse that I mentioned? Yes, it gets worse. Also, Libra Sponge AGAIN has inflated Power regen, this time requiring only 233 Value as if that matters as long as the charge comes back at all. And AGAIN a V100 weapon needs 3 deaths to recover the Libra Sponge charge. See how ridiculous this gets?

Of course, without these abuses, Libra Sponge has the additional problem of having only 1 charge at any Level, while costing a minimum of 12 spaces. The shapes involved with Libra Sponge's first 2 Levels have a bit of convenience as I will get into, but even there, 23 spaces for a single set of about 20 seconds worth of buffs isn't exactly the best mileage, and the "Libra/Aries" combination already has the problem that either Power by its lonesome is going to justify using Super Speed or some other stall Power. Even Brawler Claws can't run as fast under base mobility as Skyscraper Club under Super Speed, so the melee can be nipped in the bud. That's if escape is necessary in the first place as well, because Libra Sponge, while capable of enough threat value to likely not have a hard time causing problems when buff stacking at all, is useless beyond the knockback immunity it provides by itself if the user doesn't get damaged, which the opponent can still control in general, and Libra Sponge doesn't even reduce damage taken, something Counter at least does by 10%, so the Libra Sponge user's counterattack being dodged means that the whole thing can be rendered useless regardless beyond some overly expensive redundant protection against Black Hole.

Chalk Libra Sponge up as yet another Power that makes me wish Kid Icarus Uprising wasn't full of empty seats.

Trade-Off
I would want to cover the final Zodiac Power here instead, just to call out an asinine remark on vanilla TV Tropes' page about its usage, but Trade-Off relates to that one well enough anyway, so I may as well get it out of the way and start off with the quote about it: ''Trade-Off far from implies Equivalent Exchange. Sure, you're reduced to minimal health, but you're not going to care, not when you get flat invincibility along with the ridiculous offense and movement boosts for twenty seconds.''

Honestly, the vanilla TV Tropes page on KIU's Game Breaker has ultimately outdated information. Anyway, I may as well start off with the advantages of Trade-Off because as you can guess from that plan of attack, I have become increasingly anti-ban toward Trade-Off as a whole, including Level 4 as I will get into. For those wondering, Trade-Off upon use does convert all HP except a minimal amount into the Trade-Off buff by adding to its duration, albeit with duration minimizing to 2/5 of the max HP duration, which is around 15 seconds at L1 and around 21 seconds at L4. The boosts provided in duration are a damage multiplier of 2, with 0.06 added for each additional Level; a mobility multiplier of 1.35, with 0.05 also added per further Level; and invincibility to damage and knockback. These benefits, if not for the HP loss, would be near objectively better than what is provided by the combination of Aries Armor and Libra Sponge. Aries Armor's insane defense boost would at least not stop damage, but Trade-Off does stop it altogether and involves a mobility boost; and while Libra Sponge still has a higher damage multiplier capacity, it has to really work for it where Trade-Off gets its high enough value immediately with no further strings attached.

The safety net in randoms is that at least Trade-Off has only 1 charge regardless of Level and is never able to regenerate in a match, so there's no chance of it being able to be used on every stock with a V300 weapon like what happens with most Powers, most notably Aries Armor. However, Trade-Off still manages enough power to pull an exploitive strategy in LVD where it gets used to destroy the opposing Angel sickeningly fast to finish the match while the rest of the Power Grid gets dedicated to causing plenty of problems during the pre-Angel phase. Although an Angel with stall potential Powers would at least stagger the Trade-Off used in this way, this is still at best dependent on whoever becomes the Angel in the first place, and when Glass Cannon setup abuses become frequent, the probability of that happening doesn't look good.

The singular charge in total also brings up how Trade-Off is the epitome of weapon modifiers' power creep. Yet again, I point out Powers involving a burst effect. Weapon modifiers naturally magnify that burst effect by a lot. Trade-Off getting used by a V300 weapon allows it to deal what theoretically "should be" (and in practice is additionally even more than) 3 times as much damage as what would be dealt by a V100 also using Trade-Off. The V100 weapon really has nothing to make up for the loss of singular moment tempo, because the extra lives will definitely get burned down too easily by the overabundance of V300 tempo.

Thankfully, I can get started on the disadvantages. Trade-Off, of course, bids the user's HP on the given attack succeeding. As soon as it expires, the user will be down to minimal HP where chip damage will finish them off. It doesn't seem like much, however, but then you may notice that Trade-Off, like Aries Armor, unconditionally requires a full row and column, which means not only that Trade-Off can't mix in Slip Shot or Mega Laser to accommodate any easy range combat ability, but the Trade-Off user can't mix in Bumblebee to guard against Mega Laser sniping or a Heavenly Light rush once the duration is out, granted that not every setup will have those 2 Powers or good Rapids, but a sound degree of reliability in clipping off that gimped health does help in keeping it under control.

Now, of course, Trade-Off still would most likely go on a melee setup with moderate mobility. There could be some potential of mindless melee, particularly when there's also a mobility boost involved, which is where I get worried by the Level 4 mobility boost of +50%. This would naturally be stacking with the attack power boost and the invincibility, and it doesn't help that Trade-Off is difficult enough to Grid Read having only duration as the Level improvement, for little payoff with only one extra space per Level being needed even if it could be compatible with a range setup. I have, however, looked into the higher mobility values on multiplayer to determine that the highest base running speed outside any Claws is from Ninja Palm at 11.7m/s. Considering that Skyscraper Club is what has its Super Speed movement be 18m/s, this means that escaping Trade-Off by anything that isn't Claws is consistently reliable, making Trade-Off so much more predictable by weapon type. Claws could use it, and they would forfeit Power Thief and Virus in the process.

I should at least mention that there are possible 1HKOs with base weapons, not even some 0-Death combos that Super Armor shuts down, but outright 1HKOs and some even punching through Super Armor's 30% damage cut, and it's all made possible with the attack boost Powers. I can even cite how the attack boost Powers can even combine potentially KO off of only 20 base damage, though it'd be more of a fool's mate scenario, because yes, Trade-Off, Energy Charge, and Libra Sponge all can fit onto the same Power Grid. However, this has quite the restriction: Libra Sponge has to be Level 1 because otherwise the center space gets used up and Libra Sponge doesn't use any shapes that would fit with Energy Charge L3 in the 5x5 area; Energy Charge also has to be Level 1 because Level 2 and above is simply too wide for Libra Sponge Level 1; Trade-Off gets restricted to Level 3 because Energy Charge blocks off the Level 4's extra space if Libra Sponge is even in the same corner as Trade-Off, so there's a bit of drop in mobility, damage, and duration; and even if Trade-Off is set to Level 1, because the empty spaces become too scattered, literally nothing else would be able to fit. It's gimmicky to say the least, and even considering 2 attack Powers has its own ramfications:


 * Trade-Off + Libra Sponge (base damage KO requirement of about 38, Super Armor makes this about 55) - Libra Sponge is useless if the user doesn't get hit, which the opponent has no reason to cause to somebody under Trade-Off.
 * Energy Charge + Libra Sponge (base damage KO requirement of about 46, Super Armor makes this about 65) - this alone is where the entire combination falls apart, because there would be a forced order of operations by needing to use Libra Sponge first for obvious reasons. Libra Sponge can just as easily be escaped too because it costs so much.
 * Trade-Off + Energy Charge (base damage KO requirement of about 56, Super Armor makes this about 80) - now this does have the advantage of potentially involving auxiliary Powers a bit better, but Energy Charge does itself have drawbacks, first that it uses the center space in the 5x5 area unless it's Level 3, which has its own compromising shape and space requirement as I'll get into soon enough; and second that Energy Charge has the highest shown buff priority and thus can't be hidden from a glance on the bottom screen. Energy Charge doesn't even get protected by Trade-Off, only Bumblebee, which can't be around on this setup, so the Trade-Off user just provides reason to actually attack in the duration even if it could be just clipping attempts.

Trade-Off is another Power that deserves a disclaimer after all the problems it has caused in the past, but once the weapon modifier abuse is halted, it stops being too much of a problem. There is, of course, one related Power worth bringing up and I can get to it now.

Pisces Heal
So first off, I do have something to say about vanilla TV Tropes' ever so enlightened comment: Throw the Pisces Heal on top of (Libra Sponge and Aries Armor), make sure you save it for when you're bordering on elimination, and your opponents can kiss their sorry (butts) goodbye.

Interestingly, while I'm hearing Cross Examination music in the midst of reading this, my bottom screen currently shows a cluster of shapes that involve the L shape 6 spaces long on both parts in orange, a chunky evened out L shape in yellow, a very chunky backwards L shape again in yellow, a 3x4 rectangle in teal, a staircase shape again in teal, and two castle shapes and two 4x4 squares, each having one in yellow and the other in teal, with the instructions being to fit in one of each color in the 6x6 square area. Excuse me, I'm going to press the X button real quick.

OBJECTION! *music stops*

Vanilla TV Tropes, you say that you can fit Pisces Heal onto the combination of Aries Armor and Libra Sponge. Well, here's what I have to say: Aries Armor forces anything else into a 5x5 area with its L shape that requires a full row and column without condition. You might say "so?" like that couldn't possibly be relevant, but then I'll just point out that Pisces Heal immediately uses up the center space of that 5x5 area regardless of Level, rotation, or positioning. That right there eliminates any Libra Sponge level other than Level 1, forcing it to be the chunky evened out L shape, something that would force any chunky Powers further to Libra and Aries to be stuck in a 3x3 area...except Pisces Heal is too wide for that too. It is literally impossible to fit in all 3 Zodiac Powers in the same Power Grid. And after having the nerve to ban people just for grammar errors, you make such a bold claim that you even include profanity in the unedited comment in your overconfidence. Vanilla TV Tropes, you have failed miserably to do your research.

So now that I have deconstructed vanilla TV Tropes' nonsense of the day, I can get back on what really happens with Pisces Heal, because it still gets on the common banlist. What Pisces Heal does is apply a sort of auto-revival buff where the user regenerates a given amount of HP based on the level of Pisces Heal. The reason Pisces Heal gets considered broken is because it has 2 charges of this regardless of its Level, although like Trade-Off, Pisces Heal never regains any charges in a match, though just the effect of healing does inherently favor higher Value regardless, even if the saying "easy come, easy go" could still apply with as much.

Once again, though, Pisces Heal has weaknesses. I mentioned how Pisces Heal has unconditional occupation of one of the center spaces on the Power Grid. In fact, Level 2 is the only one that doesn't unconditionally uses multiple center spaces, and this causes the addition of the Massage Chair shape (Homing Boost L3) to compromise any further expensive Powers when it can't fit with Slip Shot and will have the Missing Corners Box (Warp L2) and Female Box (Energy Charge L1 or Quick Charge L3) both force Pisces Heal to be L1. This makes the combination short-circuit the offensive capability of a range setup just for a couple of very expensive panic button presses, if that.

Further worth mention is the comparison to Libra Sponge, because of course Pisces Heal gets used in combination with Trade-Off, as a way to heal off the HP loss incurred by using Trade-Off in an effort to eliminate that drawback that keeps Trade-Off from being an overall stronger version of Aries Armor and Libra Sponge. What becomes worth mention, however, is that Libra Sponge has more convenient shapes at Levels 1 and 2, since L1 doesn't use the center space of the effective 5x5 area, allowing the Female Box shape to be placed, and L2 avoids being too wide on both sides to let the Massage Chair shape in, granted that it still wouldn't happen if Aries Armor is itself L2. It's probably a minor advantage for Libra Sponge/Aries Armor over Trade-Off/Pisces Heal, but it does indicate that the developers would have caught on to these 2 combinations at some point and held faith that somebody would have come along and expose their weaknesses.

Now naturally, mindless mobile melee could still arguably happen. Do I think so? Not really. Pisces Heal, for its high cost, just effectively adds on extra HP. Although this is capable of annoyance, it still doesn't provide any drastic advantages like the knockback immunity provided by Trade-Off or the Armor Powers, so it merely potentially allows the user to afford a few extra mistakes. Computer-controlled bots on multiplayer can be obnoxious with it via convenient perfect timing, but will inevitably lack the human player creativity. And actually, that's the important point: that Pisces Heal is still a buff Power, one that doesn't genuinely add momentum. Although it lasts 24 seconds, counter-stalling is a possibility if you're not confident about getting past the healing, but even if the counter-stalling doesn't happen, Pisces Heal still expends Power space to do something that skill can definitely get around, and more likely than not, the user is going to be somebody scared enough to have it around in the first place.

I also recall Pisces Heal on multiplayer heals 100 HP plus an additional 20 per Level. If this is correct, there is actually convenient magic numbers with Skyscraper Club because of this, because the Forward Shot hitting after the auto-revival would remove all of the restored health for Levels 1 and 2, and there would be no guarantees with Levels 3 or 4 because the Neutral Shot would still remove the 160 HP maximum in 2 hits. This is another thing about Pisces Heal: psychology. It would get used as soon as the player expects they could be finished off by the next attack, so base damage does get a subtle yet useful boost against Pisces Heal when as I indicated, flowchart attacking is a very real possibility to knock off the Pisces Heal health. In my case, it even helps that Black Hole is only 6 spaces for something that the likely involved matchup makes significantly less necessary, so I can afford to use it just to hit with followup Neutral Shots rather than followup Forward Shots. No doubt other weapon types could still pull some semblance of creativity to get around it, and this isn't even getting into how some weapons that use multi-hit attacks, such as Babel Club, would even erode some of the HP that does get provided by the auto-revival.

There is an additional point provided by the YouTube user with the Japanese name "parute" in Hiragana, as can be read here in my thread providing inquiry about common banlist Powers: Pisces Heal has high priority on being the displayed buff on the bottom screen. While your mileage may vary on the buff priority (I think Super Armor is needlessly low, though I find the bigger problem being the lack of something like a shield graphic on Super Armor and Counter using orange and blue color palettes respectively to provide more tactical warning about them for good feedback in fighting against them--Super Armor and Counter simultaneously could even be having the palette be a violet hue), what we have does help with Pisces Heal, as only Energy Charge, Trade-Off, and Aries Armor have higher priority, so Pisces Heal is bound to be visible enough, making it easier to bring about countermeasures. This also brings up that even if Libra Sponge also had higher priority (it doesn't; I thought it did at the time), Trade-Off and Pisces Heal together can't fit in Energy Charge or Libra Sponge anyway. Its only option of multiple attack boost Powers is Energy Charge + Libra Sponge, which speaks for itself and has the added bonus of forcing Libra Sponge to be L2 (otherwise, Energy Charge interferes with Pisces Heal), Pisces Heal to be L1 (for basically the same reason), and Energy Charge to be L1 because of the VERY forced way Pisces Heal and Libra Sponge have to be placed to even allow for as much, with the added bonus that this can't even fit in anything further when one of the remaining 3 spaces is immediately wasted by Energy Charge.

There's your summary: Pisces Heal gimps the user's own offense for expensive attempted leg room with mistakes. It's shocking enough, but not the banworthy threat that people would think it to be.

Brief Invincibility
(PHEW) So I can take a break from Powers that, despite being undoubtedly sufficiently perturbing for disclaimer demand, are ultimately overblown, and I can do that with a Power that actually does deserve its ban. I would need it after the inane remark by vanilla TV Tropes that all 3 Zodiac Powers could be fit together on the same Power Grid.

So Brief Invincibility has a simple effect: invincibility to damage and knockback for 3 seconds, living up to the name well. Too well, in fact. To be sure, it doesn't protect Energy Charge, nor does it protect against statuses, as if Effect Recovery is hard to carry around. However, that's where the blind spots really end.

Now Brief Invincibility is proclaimed banned strictly with Effect Duration+. I tested Effect Duration+ and can see that it boosts the duration of Powers, interestingly including Super Speed, by only 33.34%. I don't know where that extra second makes a difference with each charge, but I doubt it does, and even 4 seconds altogether, never mind that those get spread out between charges, still wouldn't allow for stalling out buffs involving busted shenanigans. The most I can see is regen rate inflation from weapon modifier involvement, but even then, I wouldn't exactly expect maybe 3 extra charges, assuming Brief Invincibility to be at max Level and the weapon to be V300+ with TWO deaths, to make Effect Duration+ suddenly inflate Brief Invincibility to some asinine level.

Brief Invincibility warrants its ban on the count of being brain-dead in general while being a panic button Power.

Let's delve into the nature of panic button Powers. These Powers provide some momentary invulnerability to thwart the burst damage effort. The duration of the invulnerability, effective or otherwise, can be variable, though if all you care about is Skycraper Club using Black Hole into Forward Shot, the duration wouldn't matter there, as long as the panic button is used for that singleton effort. There's a reason why I would mix in Jump Glide and Super Speed, but these, also, can be used as cost-effective panic buttons, so it still would help to put up with the core gameplay to smoke out this mess. Still, thankfully, the Neutral Shot still has a velocity of 40m/s and a forward reach of 8m, so while it still won't be the best at testing reaction time (16m of distance is still not a lot), it can at least bolster the idea of psyching out the other guy into moving into a bad position or just twitching their panic buttons. Going through a decent number of them becomes fine at that point, though it would help to have them at minimum either avoid excessive cost-effectiveness that would permit excessive stall and actual disregard to mistakes with the positioning that something like Skyscraper Club has to be alert with itself, or actually provide some semblance of good gameplay to justify as much.

Brief Invincibility does NEITHER. It adds no good gameplay and it has excessive cost-effectiveness as a panic button without any Counter Play to be had.

Let's elaborate on how cost-effective Brief Invincibility is. It has 1+L charges for 4+L spaces. It caps at L3, but that's still 7 spaces for 4 charges. Super Speed by contrast requires 9 spaces for 5 charges, and although there's an additional charge from Super Speed, Super Speed also requires a full line off the bat, giving away its inability to mix in Slip Shot, so forcing it out could still be worth a Black Hole charge of all things, though that can be easier said than done, but either way, Super Speed doesn't have the advantage with panic button Power cost effectiveness. There are a few potential safeguards against Black Hole that require fewer spaces per charge than Brief Invincibility, but aside from Celestial Fireworks in its own inane imbalance, those safeguards have their own blind spots: Jump Glide has forced forward momentum in its initial direction with a maximum directional control velocity unaffected by weapon type, so being shot in mid air could happen; Interference (which uses the casting animation intangibility) can't be recasted until the beacon goes away, which takes a good amount of time; Counter does practically nothing else to Skyscraper Club to useful effect and can't guard against tags by other methods; Land Mine also needs the mine being used up to be recasted and also counts as a Blue Attack Power (often a strength in general, but basically, Land Mine and Intereference can't be simultaneously active, blunting cost effectiveness abuses); and even Darkness with the same charge and space count formulas as Brief Invincibility while capping 1 Level higher at least has halfway viable Power Grid shape mnemonics and the L4 shape of the Big U being decently awkward for fitting stuff in, while just having the casting animation intangibility to even try to pull abuses.

Brief Invincibility simply provides the invincibility without any semblance of unhindered mobility, whereas the the casting animation Powers at least expend half of the intangibility on the casting animation before any mobility can be done at all, just that it can chain into other panic buttons easily. This is an easy comparison to Angelic Missile, which does also stop the followup for long enough because getup options are so versatile, but at least it forces simple missile movement into a state of lying down that the Ukemi can't even be used to stop, has to actually be technical about what it does next to avoid losing too much position when offense is practically gimped, and gets only 2 charges at its Level that requires 7 spaces, and at the point where it needs to be at Level 4 for 10 spaces to have 5 charges, this brings up how easily Brief Invincibility can add on another inexpensive panic button like Interference. Further not helping is that Brief Invincibility has no consistency in its shapes beyond the space cost difference: the L shape has nothing to do with the Roof shape or the Missing Corners Box, and those two also have nothing to do with each other. Darkness doesn't have the clearest patterns, but at least they can be decently memorized. Brief Invincibility's shapes are just seemingly random for their own sake.

Does Brief Invincibility make the gameplay better to at least justify this? Uh, no. Ignoring how Brief Invincibility even prevents any attempt at offensive followup, thereby ruining kinetic gameplay, there's also the issue that brain-dead melee rushing can happen more easily. Aries Armor and Trade-Off require a full row and column for involving that potential mess. Brief Invincibility doesn't come close to having its own check, and so has this condemning indictment against its balance. Just in case that's not the final nail in the coffin, Brief Invincibility undoubtedly mocks Reflect Barrier, since shot reflection won't be an issue due to the invincibility, the barrier won't cause the knockback, and anybody who stays around hoping to use the barrier is an easy target for melee, and on top of that, Reflect Barrier can only have 4 charges at L4 for 12 spaces via a 2x6 rectangle immediately contradicting Slip Shot, whereas Brief Invincibility needs only 7 spaces. Mocking a popular Power like Reflect Barrier might have been okay if the other factors were reasonable, but they aren't.

Brief Invincibility is one Power that deserves to be kept banned.

Lightweight/Transparency
So back to business as usual, and well, vanilla TV Tropes doesn't know when to when to shut its mouth which it would need to learn when it inserts its foot, but here you go if you're interested: ''In Multiplayer, the combination of Lightweight, Transparency, and a weapon with good melee damage is highly effective and very difficult to counter. Transparency ensures that the player will have no difficulty getting to within melee range and will almost certainly be at high health at the start of the duel, while Lightweight's speed boost and stamina loss negation allows the player to cover ridiculous amounts of ground before Transparency runs out, which means that the defense decrease is nearly completely negligible, with the exception of area of effect attacks. With a decent melee-oriented weapon, such as clubs, arms, or claws, it's entirely possible to pull off a Total Party Kill within SECONDS of the match beginning. Worst of all, this combination becomes Hero Killer incarnate for Light vs. Dark mode, since this tactic allows the player to sneak up on the enemy's angel and wipe out at least half of their health before they even know that he's there unless the angel goes Properly Paranoid with defensive buffs. Even then, however, players using this tactic get to refill both powers at the start of every life, while the angel cannot, meaning that this technique will not stop, ever until the angel is dead. And even if the player using this tactic dies at the wrong time and becomes an angel himself, likely robbing him of his good melee weapon, he can STILL use both tactics to evade enemy fire long enough for his teammates to finish the job.''

This serves as my bottom screen item this time around. In that video, I didn't even use Counter and I still threw off the combination they claimed was capable of destroying everything ridiculously fast. Transparency only messes with the opponents' sight, not anything independent of that. It still gets outmaneuvered by mindgames and that's when I don't use Counter to laugh off the rush attempt. And how cute, this whole thing brings up about the Angel getting mauled by a V300 weapon doing this, when the Angel gets mauled by a V300 weapon even existing because of the power creep. No. Just...no.

This is really more about covering Lightweight, which actually IS busted on its own regardless, and thus deserves to be banned as well. This would be outside the consideration of reports that Lightweight gets Lag Armor, where the player would not take the hit due to connection issues, because I feel that the problem could always be shaky connection handling, particularly when Nintendo was recently reported to have been using dated servers for their networks that they would be replacing. Lightweight has some genuinely overpowered stuff involved that weapon modifiers aren't entirely responsible for, so let's get right to it.

The obvious complaint is Lightweight having disproportionate stat improvements. For 12+4L seconds, it multiplies movement speed by 180% and stamina expenditure by 45%. Even disregarding the marginalization of reason to use Tirelessness, the mobility increase is still going to be VERY versatile, allowing for easier evasion, distance coverage, and even potential flanking ability. I will point out that, funnily enough, the Lightweight boost doesn't bolster Super Speed, but it's powerful enough that it wouldn't need to, and though the developers did include a defense penalty, it hasn't proven an incredible help against all the kiting ability involved. I want to say it increases damage taken by 20%, although I've been told it's by 50%, but it wouldn't matter as I will get into.

One particularly obnoxious thing about Lightweight is how it mocks Black Hole. Black Hole still requires predicting of where the opponent moves, but Lightweight makes that so much harder, and even worse, Lightweight can actually allow for breaking the vacuum velocity, additionally forcing Black Hole to be placed with pinpoint accuracy to stand a chance of managing its effectiveness. 18m/s, which is managed by only 10m/s, will easily break Black Hole Level 1 and render it useless, and since the benefits of higher level Black Hole are so obtuse and minuscule enough, it's unlikely those higher Levels would be used even out of necessity even if the Grid shapes also weren't involving their own inconvenience. Faster weapons will not even care about max level Black Hole, because those would still be able to run fast enough to break that level of vacuum effect anyway. This is further aggravation toward how Lightweight also disrupts other tagging methods to begin with.

Grid Reading also suffers a bit. While the duration difference between Levels is 4 seconds making clarification of Lightweight's Level so much easier, there's only 1 space of difference between Levels, and it wouldn't change how Lightweight at max Level would be capable of a full minute worth of stalling, with boosted mobility to do things like encircle snipers more easily. Level 4 doesn't even use a center space directly, so something like Energy Charge isn't that highly hindered in the involvement of Powers requiring a full line cost.

Now to be sure, I do feel that Lightweight can still be fought back against, at least by its lonesome, but what pushes it over the edge is the involvement of Trade-Off. With Trade-Off, Lightweight's defense penalty no longer has a chance of checking it, and the mobility boost is at minimum a whopping 243% and can be as high as 270%. My point about Black Hole being mocked is made redundant by Trade-Off providing knockback immunity in its own duration anyway, not to mention the innate distance closure disincentive, but that's the least of my concerns, because even 7.5m/s suddenly becomes able to keep up with Super Speed and shut out its ability to escape the rampage. Lightweight would be a reasonable fit with Pisces Heal too, granted that Lightweight and Pisces Heal would end up with a Level sum of 3 and Trade-Off would waste 2 spaces by being L4 as opposed to L3 allowing a perfect fit add-on of Sky Jump L1, but the convenience would still be abundant. It really goes to show how Lightweight could have been put under control by having an offense penalty to force the player to care about their action economy, which Lightweight's aid toward is at least not direct, but that doesn't happen.

So yeah, let's keep Lightweight banned and deemed a Game Breaker.

Playing Dead
Vanilla TV Tropes didn't have much to say about Playing Dead, just putting it as part of "the invincibility combo", which naturally included Brief Invincibility. Gosh its information is outdated. However, Playing Dead is still deemed capable of too much stall. To be sure, the user can stay in place for the full 16 seconds per charge at Level 3 if they want to and the opponent can't do anything to make them do otherwise and can't stop any Neutral Rapid chaining once it starts. But is this the extent of the argument? Let's look into this. Also, disregard weapon modifier involvement, because Playing Dead doesn't even recharge within 2 deaths on a V100 weapon, go figure.

First off, let's overview the actions the Playing Dead user can take without forfeiting the duration: aiming, Neutral Rapid, Neutral Shot, any Power activation other than Super Speed or Angelic Missile, and movement during (BUT NOT BEFORE) Jump Powers. I will get Jump Glide using that last part to its advantage out of the way, because I have looked into how much mobility is involved from it: without the momentum of the basic movement, each jump provides a movement capacity of about 20 meters in multiplayer. Now Jump Glide does have 5 charges at any Level, on top of how it recovers charges with high enough speed for higher Level Jump Glide to be put under consideration, so Jump Glide usage can stack enough to permit decent mobility with Playing Dead, but it's still a Power at all, and I will get into the ramifications there. My general point is how Playing Dead does end up with limited overall offense because of the compromises it has to make with melee attacks or any Dash Rapids/Shots.

This is on top of Playing Dead being expensive in the first place, with the same space costs as Slip Shot. The Power Grid shapes are different, being chunky in general instead of requiring a full row and column, but they do still help in preventing the user from just putting in tempo offense Powers for disrupting Counter as the response Armor Power (another reason Homing Boost becomes limited in its abuses: having to be bolstered by something that can disrupt things like Counter), since Playing Dead is still limited to 2 charges regardless of Level, allowing Super Armor cost effectiveness against Playing Dead alone, let alone when Playing Dead mixes in support. To elaborate on what happens, Playing Dead could consider Energy Charge to really disrupt Counter with just the Neutral Rapid, or Quick Charge for easy Neutral Shots, though the latter would be having less DPS tempo and would be at risk of being stopped by dodge rhythm. Either, however, would have the issue that Neutral Shots generally have less range and homing, so escape or shelter would compromise Playing Dead's offense. Slip Shot could still be used to deter the latter, but at that point, issues with the Power Grid start coming into play.

The thing is, Playing Dead has a base duration of 10 seconds per charge, increasing by 3 per Level. It becomes easy to determine which Level it has, and this doesn't seem significant because the space difference between Levels is only 1, but Playing Dead has some inconvenient shapes. Level 2 uses 2 center spaces, so it immediately contradicts the combination of Slip Shot and Energy Charge, though Level 3 doesn't use any center spaces at all, so the combination still gets allowed there, but at a cost. On the combination of Playing Dead/Energy Charge/Slip Shot, Energy Charge would already be forced to be Level 1 regardless of Playing Dead's Level because of shape inconveniences with the later Levels, and this would BARELY allow Jump Glide if Playing Dead is Level 1. If Playing Dead is Level 3, the only thing that would get to fit in would be Interference L1, and that would be with Slip Shot being Level 1 itself. You see why I can't take Compact Arm with a Playing Dead setup being deemed broken on its own merits seriously, not when moments like this (profanity warning with the video) happens showing how counter-stall still staggers it even with Shot Range+ involvement.

As for Quick Charge, since Quick Charge L3 also uses the Female Box, a stall abuse setup would likely have Quick Charge at Level 2, and though Jump Glide would fit here, it would likely resort to predictable behavior that would gimp the entire mess.

So stall can be answered when weapon modifiers aren't busy enabling it. And as another anti-ban reason, I do wish to bring up Strategem #32 on the 36 Strategems: The Empty Fort Strategy: When the enemy is superior in numbers and your situation is such that you expect to be overrun at any moment, then drop all pretense of military preparedness and act calmly so that the enemy will think you have hidden reserves and want to trap them into the fort.

I actually think Playing Dead could make use of this, by deliberately doing movement that forfeits the duration at any point before the 10 second duration would be up, a way to hide Playing Dead's Level. Granted, Playing Dead is already expensive and the space count difference between Levels is only 1, but I also pointed out myself how much of a pain the Level 2 shape becomes. However, creativity is what I would want to encourage, and the idea of being experimental does have the weakness that the user wouldn't be familiar with their own tactics, but it does have its strength that other players would also not have familiarity. Here, I can point out that the L2 Playing Dead shape would still allow a chunky Power when Slip Shot isn't interfering with as much, and would even allow Reflect Barrier L3 when it is accommodated with Slip Shot. Playing Dead can invite a lot of psychological warfare, but at that point, it just improves the gameplay instead of diminishing it.

Bumblebee
My handling of this becomes a case of the best laid plans, considering I recall Bumblebee coming before Playing Dead on the Category and I think Playing Dead has better potential for inciting good gameplay for Bumblebee, so I can't even say "best for last" with this. However, I can at least mention that I'm surprised vanilla TV Tropes didn't even have a token mention of Bumblebee's abuses with min-maxed weapons or other problems such as Lightweight. I would expect that to even manage that, but when they throw about easily contradicted information like the idea that all 3 Zodiac Powers can fit on the same Power Grid, I guess it wouldn't be so weird, just annoying. Still, Bumblebee is the poster child Power of showcasing why I can be sure the problem IS weapon modifiers, not Power themselves.

Bumblebee is commonly the go-to exploitation Power with Evasion+, because Evasion+ has its only attempt at a blind spot be burst damage, which is already better handled by Counter because that doesn't eliminate other options, isn't a passive effect, and actually introduces weaknesses, whereas Evasion+ costs only 30 Value to potentially pull indefinite intangibility unless the opponent manages specific behavior either needing weapon choice or ends up being counterintuitive. There are MANY problems with Evasion+ because of what that invalidates, such that being dodging when using it has too low a bar or else even something like Gemini Orbitars wouldn't be worth any complaint, but I am of course here to talk about Bumblebee and why THAT isn't the problem everybody thinks it is.

It's worth pointing out first a blind spot that Bumblebee does have, that the auto-dodges can't be set off outside any state where doing a parry dodge can be inputted for. It's simply an automated version of the parry dodge, and I'm not even sure how the Bumblebee auto-dodge involvement affects Parry Chargeup, if it does at all. It probably doesn't, because I can be sure the regular dodge moves don't even break 10m, but my tests using the 20m circle on the Practice Range on multiplayer (using Confuse Attack) suggests that the distance covered by the Bumblebee is 25m (mobility seems to make a difference, but by a negligible amount), which of course would even break Black Hole with a single one of the auto-dodges, at least in general. The disappearance caused by the auto-dodge trigger also lasts 13/30 of a second during which the user is naturally intangible the entire time and the user can act immediately out of it, so that can complicate matters.

Still, this can get the user hit directly if they deviate from walking and using Neutral attacks or dodge moves, which actually makes sure that Bumblebee isn't entirely foolproof about the popular idea of using it to protect Energy Charge. Of course, Walking Speed+ also makes it much easier to avoid said deviation, but then again, Walking Speed+ is already the most broken weapon modifier aside from Evasion+ even before Bumblebee gets involved with it. Just think: Bumblebee is deemed broken because the 2 most broken weapon modifiers in the game on their own merits despite what the two wolves against a lamb think happen to make it into a nightmare. Even without that, though, this can still result in character bias, but fortunately, Bumblebee does in fact have punishable weaknesses.

I will first cover the full line cost that Bumblebee unconditionally has, as that's actually the less useful one. This immediately contradicts Aries Armor and Trade-Off, although the bigger concern is range setup abuse when I already went over extra defenses being merely extra durability for mobile melee, though range setups too get covered by how Slip Shot gets restricted to Level 1 and thus crumbles. This makes sure that terrain cover keeps Bumblebee under control to allow for playing defense against it, good thing considering Bumblebee has its user able to act literally immediately upon reappearing and the disappearance lasts 13/30 of a second. It is worth noting that Bumblebee does require a 2x6 rectangle for Level 3 to have 3 charges, although contradicting Slip Shot at all is kind of redundant, but a mix-in with, natch, Energy Charge will have it cause Reflect Barrier Level 3+ to be unable to fit, so it could be a bit helpful at least.

Either way, though, I have used this to my advantage against Evasion+ setups, though when people think stages like Windy Wasteland should be legal, that's more a problem with what they could be thinking to be allowing open stages where you can't punish Bumblebee by making use of a feature expected with the shooter genre, than it is any problem with Bumblebee itself.

Bumblebee mercifully has ANOTHER weakness, a more tactical one that is definitely helpful: the auto-dodge itself has forced clockwise movement around the owner of the attack that sets it off. This makes the movement actually predictable, opening up the Bumblebee user to a followup because the disappearance time is still significantly past standard reaction time. If the user is not mindful of their positioning, they could find themselves losing both auto-dodges just to immediately lose the Energy Charge as well. Mega Laser can capitalize upon this, and even Black Hole goes back to avoid being hard countered, such that I have even used it just to knock off the Energy Charge use, against an Evasion+ setup no less, and on Rail Temple at that. The opponent could be watchful of what is to their left, but predictability begets more predictability, and the Bumblebee user could find themselves having their escape attempt being closed off by reads.

Bumblebee's full line requirement is still because it effectively cancels out the damage of a singleton hit, a reason you would think I would be just as enraged by Bumblebee instead of Evasion+ as everybody else when I still main Skyscraper Club, but I'm recognizing when the burst damage blunting is so much better balanced than an attempt at DPS stopping. It shows when I'm barely caring about the 90 second default duration, which if anything can work AGAINST Bumblebee's own support.

Petrify Attack/Freeze Attack
These two Powers aren't on an official banlist, but they are worth bringing up, along with Eggplant Attack and Tempura Attack, especially when Petrify/Freeze do get listed on vanilla TV Tropes. For freezing: ''Freezing. While under this status ailment, you are at the complete and utter mercy of everything gunning for you. Unless it's a Light vs. Dark match wherein a teammate rushes to your aid in time, you are dead, end of story. (Heck), while we're at it, we might as well mention that it's possible to make Clubs with a Freezing mod. It's worse for the opponent if you're using Claws. The Claws have the highest amount of hits per Melee Combo, at 5, which means that a Claws with a Freeze modifier will freeze if it hits the melee combo.''

And for petrification: ''Petrify to a lesser extent, since that at least gives you a defense boost while Taken for Granite; Freezing does not. And considering the power of whatever you're being hit with, even that defense boost might not save you.''

I need to clarify first that infliction of Freeze or Petrify in general is actually based on base damage, around 46 with Petrify and 48 with Freeze needed for both with the involved statuses' Powers. Claws generally manage that base damage reliably with their melee attacks because they're focused on melee, and they're of course mobile about it as well. As to the Clubs using Freezing, they have to hit their target first. This was once said by a character considered to be an idiot, although I did myself point out that he's more of a combat specialist. His point holds together too; even though I definitely get Skyscraper Club together by being technical and sturdy, I still use significant accommodation of speed within my Power choice (Super Speed especially) to mitigate the disadvantage. Adding Freezing ability becomes a gamble at that point.

That said, although weapon modifiers involve attack boosts that completely aggravate the immobilization aspect, the statuses themselves are still something I'm on the fence about. The reason is that response to being placed under them is remarkably binary and sketchy. There are only about 2 solutions to removing either status before their long enough natural duration ends: repeatedly input for Aiming, which is likely to be the Touch Screen and even without the point of potentially damaging it still goes into button mashing; or using Effect Recovery. I think Effect Recovery would itself be worth looking over to make sure it doesn't shut down status usage, though when weapons like Phosphora Bow and Great Reaper Palm do at least exist to potentially overwhelm Effect Recovery, there would be a little hope, but the real concern is statusing being rendered useless used by weapons that don't innately apply it, because too much Power economy having to be used to punch through Effect Recovery would not be a good sign of Effect Recovery. If Effect Recovery has to be banned, Freeze Attack and Petrify Attack should definitely be put on the chopping block, and Eggplant Attack and Tempura Attack, since I recall Eggplant and Tempura still block off dodge moves as well as Power usage other than Effect Recovery, would additionally need review to end the hollow gameplay.

I would be up for further discussion and tests about these Powers to better review them, and Random Effect while we're at it.

Random
Another Power that gets banned for good reason, though this does go beyond the self-explanatory point that Random can roll a Power like Lightweight. Random can also roll a Power meant to be balanced by Power Grid shapes, such as Slip Shot. The counterbalance is that it can roll Trade-Off or Spite, but this just means that Random can all too easily turn matches into luck. Random is also using L shapes that don't even require a full line at any Level. Yeah, there just isn't much to be said about Random beyond how it leaves me wondering why Fortune's Jukebox and Random don't use basically each other's shapes instead. (Yes, I know Fortune's Jukebox caps at Level 2. Work with me here.)

Celestial Fireworks
Why this is never considered for banning by the majority of people is beyond me. For those who don't get it, Celestial Fireworks is a short range fireworks attack that deals 10 damage. Okay, so it's not a problem despite my apparent complaints, it deserves to have the 5 charges for only 4 spaces and 10 charges for 7 spaces at the low capacity of Level 2. It even has that casting animation that immobilizes the user momentarily and just provides 82 frames of intangibility and can be acted out of on frame 42.

......actually, yes, you read right, and that's where my complaints stem from, the same aspect that causes Celestial Fireworks to become sickeningly popular amongst min-maxers: the ridiculously easy panic button. Let me put this out there: every other panic button Power is still a Power, not only requiring extra space on the Power Grid, but also having limited charge counts that ensure that they can't be twitched on repeat occasion or they will be used up for minimal payoff. Celestial Fireworks, however, is a special case, because it CAN be twitched on repeat occasion to prevent the other guy from learning the rest of the player's Power Grid, all because the casting animation intangibility doesn't have decay involvement for how high it is. It's honestly a cold comfort that Evasion+ doesn't make things worse directly, because the free ability to shut down the general validity of the Power system is just grossly powerful. I have to laugh at Celestial Fireworks being so overnerfed in Smash 4 that I'm snorting milk out my nose at how the mighty have fallen. (The big insult is that Palutena's Up Smash, which is on the same character, would be better in general for anti-air too.)

Particularly disgusting is that Level ONE has a whopping 5 charges. Okay, the Jump Powers have that, except the Jump Powers would be complete gambits as panic buttons, being thrown out expecting damage to not be fully avoidable even when it could be and still quite possibly taking damage in mid-jump. Other than those and Celestial Fireworks, the only other Powers to have 5 charges are Effect Recovery, Super Speed, Angelic Missile, Warp, Land Mine, and Darkness, all at max level and definitely not at Level 1. My point is that this makes Grid Reading against Celestial Fireworks a complete farce right away because it's impossible to tell if it's Level 2 until at least SIX charges have been used to disprove the usage of Level 1's Tetris Z shape. The only guarantee is that at least Celestial Fireworks still is more cost-effective at Level 2 where it uses the 7 space Missing Corners Box shape, but by that point, the panic button spam has proven itself absurd.

And by the way, Celestial Fireworks has THE highest Power regen rates of ANY Power, recovering all 5 or 10 charges on a V300+ weapon. Even a V100 weapon after only one death recovers 1 charge at L1 and THREE charges at L2. Seriously, in Smash 4, even if Customs were allowed in For Glory, WHEN would Palutena seriously consider using Celestial Fireworks at least 14 times?

Did I forget to mention that Celestial Fireworks can even chain right into other things with the leftover intangibility? What's worse is that the intangibility allows for using a Power in the middle of an opponent's Interference field, so Interference won't even disrupt that possible Warp cast, only the Celestial Fireworks cast if Interference can even be whipped out first in its mediocre influence radius. Yes, that's right: Celestial Fireworks mocks maps control. Interference charges would still be precious, but when their capability for some offense combination ends up being shut out by this nightmare, you see how Celestial Fireworks drags things out.

If you think Celestial Fireworks has a viable weakness as a panic button, think again. The only one it has is that it can't be recasted until the fireworks attack is completed, actually 3 seconds after the start of the initial cast. Interference, which is the next most cost-effective panic button that isn't Jump Glide with its own compromising movement, has a FAR longer cooldown by duration, so Celestial Fireworks loses that excuse when Interference even caps its cost effectiveness at 4 charges for 5 spaces, whereas Celestial Fireworks already floors at 5 charges for 4 spaces.

Really, Celestial Fireworks can be the cornerstone of a panic button spam setup, because it can hide anything else all too easily. Suddenly, things like Super Speed and Bumblebee requiring a full line means a lot less when the raw power setup using technical gameplay to get going has to catch the other guy so many more times that it leads to VERY unfavorable repetition demanding matches where 90% of the gameplay involve not working with buff Powers other than Bumblebee, which itself gets protected by an immediate response Celestial Fireworks to shaft ability to snipe off the Energy Charge even without the attack having transcendent Shot Cancel as an insult to injury.

On the plus side, at least Celestial Fireworks can't pull some other form of degenerate gameplay like brain-dead melee rushes. On the minus side, what it can pull is already more than degenerate enough.

One final Game Breaker entry
This is for finishing the deconstruction of the Game Breaker page of KIU on vanilla TV Tropes, though ironically, I actually would agree with having the entry if weapon modifiers in general weren't so jacked up as to eliminate the chances of the entry standing out. However, if you are interested, this would be the entry: ''The Power Attack modifier is a Glass Cannon example. Having Power Attack +4 (the highest possible) on a weapon usually means you won't get much in the way of stats and other modifiers, but the trade off is that it doubles the strength of Powers like Mega Laser, Explosive Flame, Meteor Shower, Land Mine, and so on. What were once panic buttons become lethal surprise attacks, and the modifier on a weapon with decent damage and/or an innate Speed boost makes for a good one-two punch KO for whatever survives the Power spam. Granted, you have to die to get your Powers refreshed after using them all up, but done right you should be gaining more than you're losing.''

I can actually agree with Power ATK+ being excessively powerful at least, and I can add my own points to raise: Powers also conveniently fully ignores Overall DEF+, so only Health+ helps to try to blunt this nonsense. Mega Laser still gets inflated to 12.6 damage per hit, compared to the meager 120 HP increase from Health+, so Power ATK+ still gets you killed by it ridiculously fast, and when it results in Mega Laser spam to ridiculous effect, suddenly the 75 Value from Power ATK+ as well as the full line cost of Mega Laser complete with the 2x6 rectangle requirement for Mega Laser L4 is of no help. And by the way, you might think I am just tanking the shots instead of instinctively dodging out of the way of the stationary direction laser that still could have eroded my durability for free at all, period, which would have required me to ever be managing stupidity unbecoming of me after this video from 2009. Just...no. Inventing nonsensical excuses wouldn't change that somebody on the other side of the fence would have been the one posting that entry.

The clincher is when Power ATK+ is STILL tame compared to modifiers like Evasion+, Shot Range+, and the Speed+ modifiers. It's ultimately a random modifier to be the sole one to list in the midst of all the problems weapon modifiers involve, so vanilla TV Tropes deserves scrutiny for calling out only Power ATK+. However, it DOES punctuate that weapon modifiers are just a mess that promote min-maxing, grinding, and memorization over actual combat skills, genuine innovation with available tools, and healthy interaction with opponents.

Closing
This took the span of several days to write up and handle research for, in the midst of which, somebody else with whom I have been on friendly terms had declared his own public challenge to nasty characters from troll nest sites for what they did to him and I am wishing to reinforce it, but I had to get this done first to avoid losing this.

You can see that Kid Icarus Uprising does have some ideas for innovative and kinetic gameplay that unfortunately get squashed by ban list mishandling and the game's own imbalances with the more key problems that I outline, and that does become problematic when those ideas are too good to deserve being dealt that issue. The game is almost 9 years old at this point and having its control issues well known, something I myself can at least say that the game does deserve Gyro Controls, though I'm still able to manage well enough despite being a natural southpaw to have come up with this. At the very worst, even street performances could at least be trying something hoping for a little luck. Even creating the red links that I do could get something going going.

I wouldn't be surprised if this would still prove futile, what with how popular the likes of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is and how people are fond of combos to where they'd want gameplay to be overcentralized around it. However, we'd have to at least give it our best shot and hope that the community could possibly stop being their own worst enemies.