While this season did not have official tier designations, thanks to a smash statistician and fellow PGstats.com contributor Barnard’s Loop, we have a list of tournaments that could be potential tier equivalents, and will be utilizing the tournaments below to determine our data:
As with the previous analyses in this series, C-Tier tournaments, the lowest ranked tournament, will be represented through the top 8 placements. Next up the scale would be B-Tiers, where we will take the top 16 placements, and then for A-Tiers, we will take the top 32. Finally for S-Tiers, the tournaments with the highest accolades and tournament entrants, we will be taking the results of the top 64.
A player must win a single game with a character for the result to count. If a player pulls out a character in a set but does not win a single game with that character, then the character is not counted. Also consider that character data is dependent on data recording from tournament and event runners and may be incomplete. Let's take a look at the results.
The image above showcases each character’s “placement percentage.” A placement percentage signifies a percentage out of all counted tournament results for the Post Lockdown time period in which a character successfully placed, based on the rules laid down earlier. As you can see, of the 82 unique characters in the game, 40 accounted for at least 1.0% of results, which is one less than half of the roster.
ROB tops the roster for the third season in a row, and the first time offline, with 4.64% of the total results. Also in the top 10 we see a surge of results for characters such as Roy, Diddy, Joker, and Pikachu with two of them making the top 10 for the first time.
This is also the first offline season for every character in Fighter Pass 2. Min Min drops out of the top 10 from WWRv7, but still makes great results her first season offline, making top 15 in the cast. Steve has a harsher drop off from online, going from 5th in WWRv7 to 17th this season, but still has a very respectable season and cements himself as a popular character in the meta.
Sephiroth remains about the same rank from his offline appearance, still having a very high secondary usage in the offline scene. Pyra and Mythra were very close to breaking into the top 10 on their first season in the game, and successfully did so in their first offline season, peaking at 6th.
Both Kazuya and Sora have their very first seasons in the competitive scene. Kazuya just makes over the 1% margin in his first season. Sora came close to the 1% mark, but did not have enough time since release to gain the results to do so.
Here we see the biggest changes between the last online season and the first offline season in 1.5 years. Here we see the characters who suffered the most from online play have a resurgence, and the characters who excelled more during online play have some falling out.
For the characters who had the strongest resurgence, there is none other than Peach and Daisy. The character rose up 53 spots in the roster’s ranking and had an overall increase of 1.70% from their pitiful 0.26% in WWRv7. This is largely due to players such as MuteAce and LingLing charging ahead with the princesses’ meta.
Other characters who had very strong rises from the online scene are Mega Man, Captain Falcon, and Fox. There are also characters who already had strong presences in the online meta that did better in the return to offline. Roy is among the most prominent cases, rising up to the number 2 spot and featuring the highest increase in percentage.
For the characters who had the hardest drop offs, Ike had it by far the worst. Ike was in the top 10 during the WWRv7 meta, but fell incredibly hard in both rank and percentage. The person who contributed the highest to Ike’s results in the Post-Lockdown season was Goblin, who used Ikenomics occasionally as a secondary.
Other notable characters who fell off from the last online season are Donkey Kong, Kirby, and Mr. Game & Watch. Cloud is another interesting case of a character who had a large percentage and playerbase drop off, falling from the Top 5, but he still had enough offline representation to stick in the Post-Lockdown Top 20.
Due to this being the first offline season since 2020, we have the opportunity to also compare changes from the last offline meta. Here we see the biggest changes between the PGRUv2 season, with the addition of the 2 months of PGRU season in 2020, which included the S-Tiers Genesis 7 and Frostbite 2020.
During the online seasons, we saw an increase in results for characters such as Sonic, Bayonetta, and Samus. Come the Post Lockdown season, these characters stuck around and have had pretty large increases since the last time offline tournaments were played. Sonic has proven to be such a strong character that he maintained his top 10 status from the online seasons.
Diddy Kong was a character who saw an increase in results by the end of PGRUv2, and did not get to truly show off his potential in the meta until this season, also making a top 10 debut and becoming seen as a true threat. Other characters that seen a surge in high-level representation are Mii Brawler, who has become a strong secondary for some top players, Pikachu, Sheik, and Roy.
Out of all the characters in Smash Ultimate, Inkling had it by far the worst in loss of meta relevancy. Inkling failed to achieve above 1% of results for the first time offline, and has seen a large drop off in both placement percentage and player base size. The character did receive some buffs in the final patch, but we have yet to see the character fulfill the potential many saw in them upon Ultimate's release.
Pokemon Trainer also saw a large drop off in the meta. High-level representatives of the character left in droves: Tweek dropped them; moxi, Ned, and HIKARU relegated them to secondary usage; and Wishes is no longer entering many large events. It remains to be seen if this will be a permanent drop, though, as we have seen some glimmers of hope, with players such as Atelier and Quidd starting to fill in the gaps of the former top reps.
Other characters who saw decreases in relevance across the board are Pichu, Lucina, and Joker. You will notice a large number of characters who were considered potential top tiers in PGRUv2 had the largest drop offs in percentage in player base size. This can mainly be attributed to the addition of strong characters from Fighter Pass 2, whether due to top players switching from these characters to the new DLC, or from players simply dropping out of the scene.
As stated earlier, 40 characters were able to reach up to 1.0% for their season placement percentage, which is 1 less than half of the roster. This was the first time we had 6 characters in the meta defining section. Across the board, the percentages of characters are much closer than before, and the characters in the top 5 are not as prevalent as the top 5 during the WWR seasons. Overall, the diversity of the characters in the meta has never been as diverse as it is now. Even characters in the lowest quintile have seen exceptional results. It truly is difficult to count out a majority of the roster in the competitive meta.
Here we see a breakdown of the results in each equivalent tier, including which characters have the highest amount of results, and their peak performances in each tier. Each tier had a variety of different peaks, where the only character who was able to claim 1st in every tier was Byleth. If you have not been keeping up with the current scene, MkLeo has been championing Byleth, and has claimed victories in the S-, A-, and B-tier. Yei was the other Byleth to achieve a victory in the C-tier category, albeit using many secondaries.
ROB once again dominates a large portion of each tier, with B-tier being the only one where ROB did not take 1st. Surprisingly, he only reached 8th. Roy, Wolf, Palutena and Snake are the only other characters to make the top 10 in each category. For some oddities, Diddy Kong, Joker, and Pikachu are top 10 characters who only made top 10 in 1 tournament tier. A large variety of characters outside of the top 10 were able to achieve higher results in different tiers, such as Peach, Min Min, Olimar, Steve, Chrom, Lucina, Bayonetta, Ness. and Mario, yet more proof of the diversity of the current metagame.
This chart showcases the correlation between a character's placement percentage and the amount of players who have contributed to that character's results. Historically, there have been some pretty large outliers on these graphs, but for this season, there are only a few.
The graph is split into four sectors. The characters below the center line have their results tied to certain players' consistent performances. The players above the line, in contrast, are much more reliant on the quantity of players who achieve results with the character.
Above the line, we see characters such as Wolf, Joker, Diddy Kong, Mario, and Sora all lying quite far above the line. Sora in particular continues the trend of new DLC characters in a season having a larger player base proportion to the results. Wolf has by far the highest amount of players who have achieved results, with almost 40 players. Joker is a character who has suffered from lacking top representation post lockdown, but still has a flurry of players and secondary users making Joker a well represented character.
Below the line, ROB, Palutena, Sonic, Peach, Olimar, Lucina, and Bowser Jr. sit well below the average line. During the WWR seasons, Sonic had more pro-oriented results, and that trend continues here. Kazuya is one of the few DLC characters that do not follow the trend of having more quantity oriented results, which may be due to Kazuya's radically different mechanics from the typical character.
Lastly, this showcases the players who have contributed the largest amount of results in this season.
There you have it, folks. The Post Lockdown era may be Smash Ultimate’s most diverse competitive meta yet. Will this continue when the next PGRU season starts? That is a question we will answer next time!