Original blog got too big.
Go read the first part first.
REDBEARD THE FATASS, PART TWO
Spells
Soldiers are easily your most important tools in each match, but NEVER neglect your spells.
Spells are essentially extra for both you and your units, ranging from a mixture of offense, defense, and utility, some being useful in multiple fields. Two assist you and your units while the other two hinder the opponent in various ways, giving you quite a few options for dealing with the opponent even without using your obscenely bad standards.
Again, selecting spells functions almost exactly the same as selecting units or resource management – use Side Special to open up a menu, move the control stick to select, tap the button to confirm your spell choice, yada yada whatever. There’s even a special animation for casting the spell where Redbeard proudly holds his ham shank in the air, leaving him nice and vulnerable for a moment’s time. The only difference here is that now, stuff costs mana to cast rather than gold… what a game changer~
Anyways, still not really going to balance numbers and all of that and I’ll just focus on use and intent, if you really want balance I mentioned before that mana can probably work really similar to the source game so look up the Swords and Soldiers encyclopedia if you want some of that juicy knowledge. If we’re all cool, I’d like to show you some ideas I got pretty hype thinking about.
Without further ado… bepis
Friendly Spell Targets:
The latter two abilities are ones I’ll explain when I get there, but the first two are assist-like spells that specifically benefit you and your soldiers. Thing is, however… they’re both single-target, meaning we have to sort out how you pick who it’s used on.
One option I’d like to go with is to… add another selection wheel (because we clearly can’t get enough of those). Basically since you can only have a set number of units out, perhaps their icon can appear in a wheel in order of oldest to youngest, and as such it’s just a matter of ing which unit is which and not panic-picking the wrong unit (if there’s multiple of the same unit, perhaps label them with a player-coloured number above their head and on the selection wheel). You’d open the wheel by holding the button, and to pick your option you’d simply release to confirm your choice.
I’m specifying that you have to hold to pick a unit because Redbeard also has the additional option to cast those two spells on himself, and to do that you should simply tap the button once you’ve selected your spell instead of holding like you do for the menu. This is all definitely something that’d be kind of a pain for an inexperienced player to learn, but it’s surprisingly smooth and fluid once you get used to it. And it’s not slow if you know where everything is – inputting Side B, moving the stick in a preset direction for your spell, and if you’re picking Redbeard for the target, all it is is a final button press; and even if not, it’s just an additional half-B-press, quick stick flick, then release B for desired target. I bet all of that would rarely take more than a second for someone who’s used to playing Redbeard.
Also, just as a heads up… both spells do not care where the target is on the stage, no matter where they are, no matter how far Redbeard is away from them, the spell will work. So you don’t need any additional worries while casting the spell, just open it up, select the target, and hope the opponent doesn’t shove something up your butt while doing it.
Anyways, spell time.
Heal:
Heal is… exactly what you think it is. It possibly works a LITTLE differently than what you’d expect, but healing is healing, the core purpose of it remains the same.
Upon using it, bright yellow rays of light descend from the sky onto the target, healing them over time rather than instantly (lasting for about 3 seconds in the source game, which isn’t bad here). AGAIN, exact balancing is kind of dependent on everything else, but in general… the point is that it can completely heal a unit to full health no matter how much damage it’s taken. Yeah, in Smash the soldiers wouldn’t directly have stamina, but they’d still be so easy and consistent to kill that they’d never live over a certain percentage.
How Heal works is that if you picked a lifeform it gradually heals whoever you’ve targeted for 20% over the course of 3 seconds - that’s enough to heal Berserkers, Axe Throwers, and Frost Hammers enough to basically reset them back to when you spawned them. As for Catapults, since their health is linked to yours, it instead resets the counter checking how much damage you’ve taken, essentially healing them. This healing process cannot be interrupted even if you hit the unit or Redbeard out of it (as long as the spell was cast), meaning that 20% will disappear no matter what.
And yes, you can cast this on Redbeard and heal 20% off of him. If that sounds broken to you, it’s really not – you’re spending time and resources to do it, and it’s so easy to hit Redbeard let alone combo him that the moment you lose neutral that 20% is going to almost immediately go away if not go into the negatives due to the opponent likely being able to chain multiple hits. So while it’s strong if you can do it multiple times, ultimately it’s only delaying the inevitable… Redbeard will probably die eventually.
Eventually.
The interesting thing about Heal is that it’s good as a post-encounter first aid kit for yourself or your units (either reverting some damage the opponent’s dealt to you, or making sure a good soldier stays in the fight for longer without spending gold)… but it’s also good as a precaution. Three seconds isn’t that long, but if you or one of your soldiers is going into a fight and you want to make it harder for the opponent in case you lose, a legitimate strategy would be to pop Heal on the desired target a moment before or even as they get hit, which either prevents the opponent from finishing them off or possibly forces them to waste more time killing you/the soldier when they could have already been dealing with the others by that point.
Redbeard’s a character who gets better over time when he isn’t interrupted, and Heal is a really strong option for giving yourself more time.
There’s also the perpetual question of whether you should prioritize healing yourself or your units when both are hurt. If you heal yourself you’re reversing more permanent damage, but you’d still have to spend gold and waste time bringing in another soldier when the neglected one dies, and if (and when) it does die, you’re left wide open. But if you heal your soldier, while you are staying strong for longer and keeping the pressure on the opponent, you aren’t using the powers that could help you out and keep Redbeard alive (and Redbeard is always the most important member of the troop), and to do it you’d have to spend more time and mana later to do it to yourself.
Rage:
Rage is interesting because of the purpose it served in the source game – it was good at multiple things, and both sort of translate to Smash in a weird way.
In Swords & Soldiers, using Rage on a unit causes them to become, well, enraged, which makes them rush forward in a cartoony fight cloud with various arms and weapons poking out every now and then. This rage cloud zooms forward significantly faster than any unit in the game, and ends after either 3 seconds have ed or the cloud hits something. In the case it hits something, it’ll deal a decent amount of burst damage and (if the victim is a unit) knocks them away for a moment.
But the thing about Rage is that it’s contagious to other units; whenever that rage cloud touches a non-Catapult friendly unit, they’ll get caught up in it too, increasing the size of the cloud, bringing everyone within it along at the same speed, and increasing the burst damage on hit substantially. If you had enough soldiers nearby in the source game, one good use of Rage could one-shot literally anything.
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In Smash, regarding use on units, I think this system works decently well without much tinkering. As you may already expect, if you use this on a unit, they’ll enter the Rage state and rush forward (probably at really high speed, like Fox run speed at the slowest), and also automatically applying the effect to any friendly unit it touches. If they hit an opponent, bad things happen on a scale proportionate to how many soldiers were in it: one soldier is unpleasant but not that bad, two is something you should watch out for but won’t ruin your day… but three and onwards is where the opponent is basically dead if they’re unfortunate enough to get hit. And just like how regular soldiers work, if the cloud reaches the ledge, they’ll simply turn around and head in the opposite direction (but while regular soldiers have a short turnaround animation before they return to moving, the cloud INSTANTLY switches directions… watch out).
All units in Rage mode have full super armor – you can’t see their models at all, but the hitboxes stay there, meaning they can take damage… but you can’t flinch them out of it. Grabs also don’t really work since the hitbox thickly covers the units inside, and if there’s more than one person inside, grabbing one won’t interrupt the cloud and you’ll still get hit.
First thing to mention is that Catapults are again unaffected, especially since they’re in the background anyways… they’re good, but if you’re going for Rage plays, they won’t assist the team that much other than with their regular thing. Second, the duration doesn’t extend when another unit enters the cloud, it doesn’t matter whether a unit s Frame 1 or the very last frame that the cloud is active, the cloud always lasts for exactly 3 seconds. And once the rage ends, units instantly return to their default state of moving around and trying to hit anything within range.
However, use on Redbeard is a different story. Normally, if you use Rage on a soldier, even if Redbeard touches the cloud he won’t enter rage like the others, to prevent players from unwillingly entering the cloud if they don’t want to. But that doesn’t mean you can’t enter the cloud yourself.
If you cast Rage on Redbeard, he’ll enter the state himself, rushing forward at high speeds and either waiting it out for the 3 seconds or booting any poor sap he touches into space. Not only does he also pick up any of his own soldiers along the way like the other version, but his is also by itself stronger than the usual cloud (roughly 1.25X) meaning that victims of his cloud are even worse off, not to mention the ludicrously hard to set up but probably instant-kill maximum size cloud that has 5 people in it.
And he can use it in the air too, turning it into a recovery move of sorts (it’ll drastically increase his momentum forward but gravity remains a thing). Not a good one since he’s stuck in it for 3 seconds, it’s super predictable where he’s going to go, if he misses the stage/ledge he’s guaranteed to die, and if an opponent willingly gets hit by it he’ll get cancelled and become pretty easy to gimp again… but it’s an option.
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Rage is a tool that I guess you have. It has its uses.
For one, it groups all of your units together assuming they’re all on the same platform (and you should be putting them all on the main part of the stage anyways). They’ll desync shortly afterwards but for those few moments, you’ll have all of your additional firepower in one super tough to crack nut since they’ll probably all back each other up decently well (berserkers approaching while Axe Throwers are already pestering you). But that’s just a small tactic you can do with it. The real kicker is turning the stage into a giant death trap for 3 seconds.
With multiple units inside of it, the rage cloud becomes GIGANTIC, like 3-4 people in it results in a cloud that’s significantly taller than the lower Battlefield platforms and is even wider. While it won’t break shields or instantly delete the opponent, that’s still a gigantic problem for your opponent to deal with, and given how quickly Rage can become active and dangerous (like within 20-30 frames quickly), that’s a serious problem for the opponent if they can’t easily deal with it. Jumping over it becomes nearly essential since every other option has a potential counter, and even jumping leaves you vulnerable to the horde as well as Redbeard (regardless of his crap attacks).
And while it isn’t a great option (it’s super laggy when Redbeard’s in the cloud and pretty unsafe on shields), using it on Redbeard can be pretty similar to Wonderwing as a really strong hard-to-interrupt punish/approach option to pull out every now and then, especially if you have units between you and your opponent. Throughout my years of playing Smash, no matter how good the opponent is, dumb stuff always has a chance of working, sometimes a high chance if it’s just that unexpected… and a Rage-filled Redbeard is very dumb stuff indeed.
Simply put, the opponent HAS to respect Rage and what it can do, at nearly all times due to how hard it can be to see coming (even though Redbeard has to flick through a menu first, 1, it’s really quick if you’re experienced with him and 2, he could always juke you out and make you think he’s picking a different spell), and due to how strong it can be. While it is noticeably more expensive than Heal, takes more time to recharge, and is far easier to punish if things go wrong, Rage has the potential to become one of your key spells and an essential tool for winning.
Lightning:
These next two spells will be a lot easier to explain, so you don’t have to keep dealing with my usual nonsense each and every time. Lightning in particular is possibly the least complicated spell you have. Essentially, as one of the two “attacking” spells, Lightning doesn’t work the same way as Heal or Rage does – instead of needing to pick a target, Lightning strikes automatically the moment you select it. And from there, it’s super basic.
Even the source material is super basic; you pick the spell, pick the target, and BAM – damage. No more time needed to explain that.
Lightning is literally just a nearly unavoidable attack that deals a large chunk of damage but doesn’t deal any knockback or even flinch. When Redbeard raises his mighty ham shank to the sky and finishes casting it, lightning instantly strikes whichever opponent is furthest away from you on the stage – it has infinite range, meaning that no matter where you are, if Redbeard casts Lightning, the only way you can avoid getting hit is to either time a dodge or hold your shield. And if you do get hit, while you won’t flinch from it, you’ll take about 15% immediately (maybe even 20% if it needs to be stronger), which is never something to scoff at.
This move is about as self-explanatory as it gets. While it isn’t quite “free”, it’s so easy to land that it’s almost free damage, and even if the opponent avoids it, suddenly forcing them to shield or dodge is still really powerful (if they airdodge towards you, simply smack them, otherwise there’s a solid chance they’ll go somewhere super predictable and/or dodge straight into one of your soldiers). And again, 15-20% is a lot for such an easy move to land, meaning the opponent really needs to watch out for it.
But it comes with issues you already know from that initial description – the fact that it doesn’t flinch is huge. If the opponent runs forward and doesn’t get interrupted by his soldiers, Redbeard is stuck completely helpless for the entire duration of the casting animation, leaving him wide open to pretty much anything the opponent has that can hit him in time. And if there aren’t many soldiers in the way or the opponent is fast, the distance from the opponent where Redbeard can safely cast Lightning becomes so far away that it’s sometimes impossible to strike them down with Thor’s wrath without getting punished for it.
As such, it’s best used in two situations – either when there’s plenty of space and soldiers between you and the enemy to slow them down enough for you to safely smite them, or when a soldier has launched them and you can freely snipe them without any fear of repercussions. Otherwise, while that amount of damage nearly unavoidable is still pretty good, it’s likely not worth the damage and possibly stock-loss your opponent will deal to you.
Snow Storm:
Snow Storm is the final (regular) spell, and while it’s the (second) most expensive and hardest to use, that price is absolutely worth it.
In the source game, SS is a very powerful crowd-control AOE that can help you win battles that are otherwise noticeably against you in odds. Any more is just spoiling the fun, so I’ll explain it as we go along.
Similar to Lightning, it doesn’t require selecting a specific target, although unlike Lightning it doesn’t automatically target the opponent. Instead, Snow Storm always appears in two set locations relative to Redbeard: either a roll’s distance in front of him, or significantly further away (about 1/2 of FD), kind of similar to Palutena’s Explosive Flame. These distances can be picked between depending on whether you tap (short range) or hold the button (long range) to select the spell.
As for what happens when it’s used, Snow Storm is, well, a snow storm – using the move creates a dark, decently wide cloud hovering above the stage (about halfway between the lower and higher platforms on Battlefield, although this could be adjusted). Once it’s spawned, after a short moment, a harsh blizzard will appear underneath the cloud (picture a rectangle reaching the floor where Redbeard would be… yep), lasting for about 4-5 seconds (possibly more if we need to balance it further). And it is a really bad idea to let yourself get caught in it.
While it doesn’t do any damage or knockback, getting caught under the cloud freezes you in place and leaves you completely helpless until it stops. And when I say freeze, I don’t mean the stupid status effect that encases you in ice and is kind of lame, I mean the Shadow’s Assist Trophy kind of freeze where your character completely stops moving and is unable to do anything. And I don’t need to tell you that that is an EXTREMELY powerful ability to have on command, regardless of how expensive it is to cast.
Snow Storm is potentially Redbeard’s second most powerful tool out of his entire arsenal given what it’s capable of doing. Frost Hammers are powerful enough for their potential to let you just delete a stock if they sneak in a hit, but with Snowstorm, that’s not just a weak melee unit doing that, that is an entire goddamn massive rectangle covering a large chunk of the stage threatening to do that. And the thing is, it’s not that hard to avoid normally – Redbeard blatantly has to open up his menu first and select it, then the cloud appears in the location and hesitates for a moment, and by then you can easily get out of the way… and even if you need to move around it, as long as your jumps don’t suck (or you have a good invincible/teleport move to get through it), it’s not that difficult to clear.
…But that’s the thing. Redbeard is all about forcing your opponent to juggle a ton of things at once, and throwing Snow Storm into the mix on top of ALL of the other shit your foe has to worry about is almost cruel. Sure they can “just jump over it lol”, but doing so leaves them blatantly predictable and vulnerable to anything you have planned for them on the ground, not to mention that Axe Throwers and ESPECIALLY Catapults will have a field day sniping them out of the sky if they don’t watch out. And of course, sniping them yourself with Lightning is borderline free at that point as well.
In most cases, all the opponent can wisely do is just respect Snow Storm’s area of death and just not go that way, and that is huge; being able to force them to only stick within one section of the stage is hilariously strong for you, whether it’s building up your resources for free or capitalizing on it by charging forward for a decisive strike while they’re on the back foot.
And despite how strong this all is, it’s still pretty balanced: Redbeard is even more vulnerable than usual while casting it, and of course, the sheer expense of casting it can greatly hinder or even cripple your spell usage for the next while.
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Overall, spells are either absurdly powerful in the right situations or borderline useless/a direct hinderance in the wrong situations (pretty much all of the wrong situations being when the opponent is close enough to Redbeard to punish him hard for breathing). Heal wastes your opponent’s time and gives you more to work with, Rage is good for mobility, memes, and fear, Lightning is good for easy damage, and Snow Storm is good for stage control and also fear.
And hey, you’ve finally gotten through all of the units and (main) spells. There are only two more major things to talk about, and once we’re done with those… this longass blog will finally be over.
And these last two things are rather interesting discussion topics, since my answers for each are kind of hazy and not perfect. Not implying that my other choices were perfect, but you get what I mean.
To start the end, let’s discuss towers, and a couple of issues I have with them.
Towers (and my issues with them):
Towers are purchased with gold like units are, but act quite differently in the source game. Each map has a finite amount of spots set in specific locations, and those are the only things you can build a tower on (taking some time to build from the ground up before becoming fully functional, and absolutely possible for the opponent to destroy them right there and then). Towers never move, block all units until they are destroyed, and boast a ton of health, making them more like walls with added utility than anything else. Additionally, each tower does something different depending on the faction building them (even though both Aztec and Vikings are designed around damage).
When Redbeard/Blackbeard builds a tower, by itself it acts as little more than a glorified wall, not doing anything normally. However, Axe Throwers have the special ability to man the towers – the first Axe Thrower that reaches an unmanned tower sits on top of it and never comes back down until he’s killed or the tower breaks… which also kills him. While up there, his axes gain both a range and a strength boost, making a Viking tower extremely dangerous for small groups of enemies and still good for cutting through larger groups until it goes down.
The thing about towers though is that while we technically have a solution for my problems, I don’t really like it… and without it, the problems are too big to work around.
Towers are big, and their sole purpose is to act as a wall the opponent has to spend a lot of time and effort breaking through (with the damage being a helpful bonus). If we put them in the playing field, while that’d be fun and interesting for Redbeard to play around… that’s too much for the opponent to deal with. That’s like a permanent Snow Storm that they always have to jump around ‘lest they want to spend the time doing what’s probably 40+% to it just to take down one… and even if the tower goes down, no harm has been done to Redbeard, and he can probably just make another one in short order.
We can’t shrink them because towers are supposed to be big and in the way (making them short and easy to avoid is lame and uninteresting), and we can’t make them easy to take down because they’re already stationary targets that take a lot of gold to make, are super easy to destroy during the building process, and it again goes against the intended purpose of being a struggle to break through. Yet if we don’t do these things, once Redbeard gets the upper hand and keeps it for like a maximum of 8 seconds, suddenly he’s got this incredibly good shield to hide behind and make more soldiers with.
That’s not even mentioning the nightmare to deal with that is an Axe Thrower on a tower sitting in the middle of the stage and just endlessly peppering the opponent with nearly unavoidable damage, racking it up so quickly that the opponent is FORCED to focus on it, allowing Redbeard and his 3 other troops to just control everything.
That’s not fun anymore. That sucks. I would despise fighting Redbeard to an irredeemable point if I had to deal with that bullshit each match.
Now, as I said, we technically have a solution to this. After all, Catapults hang out in the background and are destroyable by hitting Redbeard himself, supplying like how they’re supposed to and working just fine due to that… “Why can’t towers be in the background too? Just link them to Redbeard too and buff their health, that’ll work fine.”
No.
Catapults work well with that mechanic because the entire point of them is that they’re backline – if you’re attacking a Catapult, by that point you’ve killed every other enemy in that squadron because otherwise they’d all be in front defending the Catapult. And what better way to represent getting to the backlines by attacking Redbeard himself? So I’d argue that’s good use of that mechanic.
But what’s the point of a tower again? A tower’s purpose is to block enemy progression/attacks, soak up a ton of damage, and generally act as a wall. By putting it in the background, it fails to block enemies (it’s not in the way in the first place), it fails to absorb damage (by attacking it you’re inherently simultaneously attacking Redbeard, who’s the most critical member of the troop… so not absorbing damage at all), and it fails to act as a wall. So 0/3, automatic F, expulsion from school.
TECHNICALLY you could have an active tower sort of function like half of K. Rool’s belly armor, where while it’s up 50% (or more) of the damage dealt to Redbeard instead goes to the tower’s health… but come on, that’s incredibly stupid. You can’t convince me that isn’t a stupid mechanic.
As such, while towers are an interesting discussion piece and something I love in the source game… putting it in Smash without a stroke of genius design and balance tweaking just doesn’t work. And I won’t bother wasting my time trying to do that, because I heavily doubt I can.
And finally… the ultimate spell, to wrap things up.
Hammer of Thor:
I’ve HEAVILY hinted at this throughout the blog, I’ve even posted a picture of the selection icon for it, but I’ve saved it for last because it’s really cool.
Hopefully.
…I mean, it’s a giant hammer, how is that not cool?
Alright, so, as I’ve mentioned before, all three factions have an ultimate spell, something that costs a ton of mana and goes on cooldown for eternity, but is a HUGE deal when used. And the Viking’s ultimate spell is the Hammer of Thor.
In the source game, HoT had two functions that worked well with each other, giving it the most utility of the three ultimates. Upon activation and picking a location to dump it (nearly identical to Snow Storm in the source material), a short cutscene plays of Thor and his rubber ducky noticing his favorite team needs help before throwing down his mighty hammer, which creates a huge AOE of death upon landing, killing almost any unit instantly through the impact alone along with followup lightning zaps in case they lived. After that’s over, the hammer then remains there, acting like a slightly weaker tower for the Vikings who summoned him until it’s destroyed.
if the hammer isn’t destroyed by the time you can do it again, you can somehow have multiple hammers out on the field… don’t ask how that works
Fun thing is though, that gives us a couple of options, and despite having some of the problems that the aforementioned towers have, is far easier to work with and balance.
First of all though, we need to get something mostly obvious but really important out of the way – this thing is super expensive to cast – it costs at least 4 times as much as even Snowstorm in the source game (which is already pretty expensive), and to reach that amount you pretty much have to swear off using spells for that entire time. And once you do use it, since cooldowns are a thing I keep forgetting to mention in this blog, this move has a LONG cooldown, like you can’t use it for at least 2 minutes afterwards (as a reference, Waft goes from empty to fully charged 10 seconds quicker).
Due to this… we’re balancing this like it’s a mini Final Smash. And that means this thing is going to be stronk as hell.
Stronk intentionally spelt with a K bekause I kan.
Option #1 is to keep it as faithful to the source material as possible, and I feel like I have an at least alright solution to the tower problem.
Let’s say you select the hammer and have enough mana to cover it… I’m heavily tempted to make Up B a dedicated “OH MIGHTY THOR ABOVE PLEASE SMITE THESE FUCKERS” button (you’d have to double-tap to confirm to avoid accidental presses), but regardless of how it’s implemented, the desired effect happens. One of two things could happen: either the game temporarily freezes like a Final Smash as Redbeard plays the summoning animation, or a drastically shortened version of the original cutscene plays before the stage gets nuked.
Regardless of exactly what happens beforehand, the summoned hammer comes crashing down from the sky to land a set distance away from Redbeard (either always in the same set distance, or possibly modified like Snow Storm’s implementation), only stopping if it hits a main platform and ignoring any soft/non-solid platforms. Once it lands, it creates a huge hitbox (as tall as the hammer head and goes slightly further sideways due to the shockwave), dealing a lot of damage (at least 25%), killing opponents who get hit by it pretty early, and being really hard to avoid, but not being a free shield break on top of that (it deals a lot of shield damage but rarely breaks if ever).
Once that’s over, going with the tower idea, the hammer will remain there for a certain amount of time, again being reliant on exact balance but I’d say somewhere between 10 to 15 seconds, acting as a decently-sized wall for your opponent to deal with temporarily. During that time, while it doesn’t attack by itself, it will automatically counterattack any opponent within its range (about the same as an Axe Thrower’s on both sides) if they either touch it or try to attack it, said counterattack is basically just an instantaneous unavoidable electric zap for minimal damage (again, kind of like Axe Throwers). Once the 10 seconds are up, Thor decides he’s helped enough for the time being and his hammer goes back up into the sky, hitboxless on the way up.
Option #2 is to scrap the tower idea altogether and go all in on the Final Smash aspect – instead of the additional tower function, Thor’s hammer crashes down and is almost immediately pulled back up afterwards. And since it isn’t a tower, we can buff the hitbox… instincts tell me that something like a 35-40% hitbox that kills anyone who isn’t below ~60-70% would be pretty fun (although it still doesn’t break shields). In exchange, you’re spending all of that mana just for that one hitbox, and you better make it count.
Thankfully, there isn’t much else to say about Thor’s hammer, the point of it would be a high-commit option that takes a lot of time and resources to use but in exchange is blatantly a game-ender if you successfully pull it off. Both versions would be insanely strong and pair excellently with Redbeard’s playstyle and kit, and ngl I’d be laughing my ass off if I got to use this in the game official.
…And that’s his kit. We’re done.
Final Thoughts/Conclusion:
HOLY SHIT did I not expect this to get this long. Fun fact, my previous longest moveset was that OC moveset I made back in January, which was 14,000+ words long. This is 15,000+. The moveset guide in full was ~13,000, by the way…
what the actual hell is wrong with me
I don’t want to waste any more of your time explaining stuff you already know and don’t want to hear, but in case you’ve lost any of the information I’ve dumped on you and want a brief summary, here’s a recap.
Redbeard is a summoning/resource management character who entirely relies on his tools to get by, and starts off most matches as a pathetically weak character, but begins to shine brighter and brighter when given time to gather resources and make himself stronger through both upgrades and building his army. His variety of soldiers in his arsenal compose of various degrees of versatility and specialization, allowing him to custom-tailor his stage control against any type of foe (such as plenty of melee soldiers if the enemy has to get close, or plenty of ranged troops if the opponent plays with space).
All of this is complimented by his variety of spells, which allow him to buff himself and his allies in offensive or defensive ways, as well as place plenty of pressure on his enemies with direct hard-to-avoid damage or large AOE hinderances. And if you give him too much room, he can always rely on what is essentially a Final Smash without a Smash Ball to truly screw you over.
Redbeard is at his weakest when his opponent is able to prevent him from snowballing, as by himself his absolutely terrible standards and not-super-helpful spells (when only used on himself) make him hilariously easy pickings, and when dealt with individually, every single one of his tools can be dismantled quickly without too much effort. And even at his absolute strongest, even the mightiest empires can fall if they make one too many mistakes.
But when he does get things up and running, and can successfully keep the opponent out for long enough to do his thing, Redbeard can turn into a monster who demands constant careful play from the opponent and endless pressure, unless they’re willing to deal with seemingly unlimited hordes and insanely strong stage control otherwise.
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And that’s the end of this moveset. Finally.
Um… not much to update this time around. University started and I’m getting back into the groove of things, so I wanted to get this out of the way before I needed to focus on anything actually important. I still have plenty of ideas sitting on the bench, each of which I’m excited to get to… but given how ridiculous this blog is and how uni is far more important, I might need to take a break for a bit.
That “bit” could be anywhere between a week and a month, idk.
Regardless, this was a bit of an experimental moveset given how differently I wrote it – I probably could have shortened this blog to possibly even half its length if I optimized it and only stuck with set-in-stone ideas, but frankly I wanted to talk about as many aspects of each idea as I could… and this blog could either be better or worse because of it.
Due to that, would be GREATLY helpful for this, since I can’t tell myself – is this blog good because of the additional thoughts and tangents, or is it too bloated and is worse off because of the extra fat? Even something as simple as a yes or no regarding whether this blog is good or not would go a long way, so please, if you want to say something, go right ahead.
And on that note… that’s about all I’ve got. Sorry for this absolute unit of a blog, I hope it wasn’t too tiring to read.
I wish you all a wonderful day. Or night, depending on when you read this.
Comments (1)
I like the fat man holding a ham