AWKWARD ZOMBIE

Please don't assume I'm lying when I'm wrong. I'm not dishonest, just stupid.

To add to this, if you use Samus' uair but come in from an angle, priority won't matter and you'll be more likely to land every hit. You could argue that nair or fair are better options, but at low percents uair gives you much better options to combo. Samus should win just about any trade against a Cloud from below, provided the angle isn't too shallow.

Samus may be a garbage character, but her uair is one of the best moves in the game.

samus isn't bad by any means it's just some of her matchups are fucking ludicrous. against characters who have a hard time approaching against projectiles, like ganondorf and most of the FE cast, she does pretty well. her aerials are very strong and really useful, and she's got some decent throw combos.

it's just against anyone with a reflect she gets hyper-wrecked

As an avid Samus user in Sm4sh, can confirm. She's fun, too, which is what I was looking for when I picked her up.

I can confirm that Samus is super fun to play as a combat non-projectile character, just because all her moves are satisfying to land, especially the spike and bomb shenanigans.

I don't know if you keep up with the Smash Bros community but Samus is just about universally accepted as third~ worst in the game (ignoring Mii fighters), and is almost never ranked higher than bottom ten. I love playing as her, and she's my main without any doubt, but you can't say she's not a bad character.

And reflectors aren't nearly that much of a problem, aside from the odd ones like Palutena and the Pits who can deflect melee attacks. Samus' projectiles aren't nearly her best tools; they're good for spacing and punishes. Giving up a bit of spacing doesn't cripple Samus (any more than she already is) and if you're using the charge shot in a way it's consistently getting sent back to you, you're using it wrong. Like EEXRaptor said, Samus works fine as a non-projectile character. Her ranged options aren't good enough to be the focus of her playstyle.

Honestly, if you're trying to play Samus as a projectile character, I'd say you're playing her badly. In my experience, even Megaman doesn't stick with projectiles 24/7 - he just uses them way more than anyone else in the game, seeing as they make up most of his kit.

Yeah, as great as Megaman's ranged options are (he's my secondary for sure) you're still going to spend most of a match up close. Slide, fair, utilt, etc are all going to be a lot more important than any of the specials. That said, he's a lot more projectile-focused than Samus, since lemons are such a convenient way to create distance. The best tool Samus has for that is dropping a bomb and backing off a bit herself, which is pretty sad.

Side smash is great though, if you've got a good setup going.

yyyees i can, it's actually very easy

what is considered "good" and "bad" in a competitive format is so beyond useless to even think about right now. the game's been out for only just over a year at this point, and we've had decent balance changes, new characters, and new stages thrown into the mix. whatever is considered "good" or "bad" right now is so liable and able to be changed that it's completely insane to even try.

we haven't really had enough time to even begin to figure out a lot of this shit, and it's been changed constantly since then. saying any character is flat out "bad" is worthless because in three months someone could show up and wreck house and show everyone how to use the character and completely change the game at this point.

if it was like, say, melee, then it's a little different. melee has had what, 15 years now? next year, melee will be old enough to drive in california. people generally understand what's going on with it. kirby's matchups suck. they've sucked for a while. they've sucked for so long and nobody has shown up who could really change that, and after 15 years of shitty matchups it seems likely that he might just be a bad character. even then, could be wrong, but unlikely. nobody has even tried with pichu for 15 years.

smash 4 has had just over a year, and within that year, we have already seen the rise and fall of several characters, the biggest of which being rosalina who went from a ludicrously stupid powerhouse to just kind of okay maybe if she has a luma as people figured out how the game worked and what the matchup was like.

samus isn't bad, and there really isn't even close to enough proof to say she is. her matchups kind of fall short but that's only for now, and nobody has any idea how it'll be moving forward.

I doubt Samus will rise much without some sort of buff though. Even the melee tier lists don't have any substantial changes like that besides maybe Jigglypuff, and she was at least low-mid tier to start with.

I say this as a Ganon side main :'(.

This isn't Melee where we were basically bashing a stone on another stone to figure out what works and what's good. We have a better idea of what we're looking for in a Smash game and unless some significant advanced techniques/ glitches are found Samus will probably remain bottom 10-15 for the life of the game. She's pretty terrible, her hitboxes suck, her frame data is abysmal, she's bad.

That being said, unless you plan on going to tourneys or something, it doesn't matter if your main character is objectively bad or not. I play Ganon knowing he's a crap character. He's just fun to play with against friends, and getting a nice spike with his dair or landing an uptilt/warlock punch on For Glory is always fun. I imagine playing Samus is the same way, I just don't play her. I think she's one of the few characters I've bodaciously not touched in Sm4sh.

Hey, some people do well for themselves in tournaments using not-good characters. Kage won a set in Smash 4 using Ganondorf a few days ago! Granted, against Lucina, who isn't top tier by any means… But yknow! Just because a character is on the lower end of the tier list doesn't mean they can't win. The thing to consider is whether or not the tiers are dense or spread. Some games have VERY dense tier lists, such as Hokuto no Ken where even the worst characters in the game (Mamiya, Shin, Jagi) can and do win matches and tournaments, because being weak in relation to the strongest characters doesn't make them weak overall.
Smash has a lot more characters and has historically had very spread tiers, though, and I don't think Smash 4 will be an exception. I do think though that the weakest characters in Smash 4 will be better (in relation to the rest of the cast) than the weakest characters in Brawl.

Keep in mind aswell, with a larger roster it becomes even harder to be able to train to counter every single weakness of every single opponent. A lot of tournament goers are going to train against known threats and spend more time working on countering more commonly seen opponents than the niche or low-tier ones. An ill-prepared tourney goer might even forego training against low tier opponents because of the odds of them showing up or an idea that they already know they can take their opponent.

A low tier character user, however, has an advantage in knowing the strengths and weaknesses of their own character and doing their best to cover those weaknesses against their opponents. It's hard to do, but if you are a great player and you know how the other characters operate and can consistently bait and punish slip ups, you will have better odds than the tier list assumes. You make up for the character's weakness with your own strength and your opponent's weakness.

There are a lot of people too wrapped up in tiers and tourney play who follow the tier list because they perceive it's the only way to win, competitive or otherwise. The difference is that a good player doesn't necessarily need to follow the tiers because they have the skills to back up their choice in character. Something that someone who just picks up a top tier character and expects to win with less effort won't be able to pull off.

I have a friend that's a pretty casual player, but he lives by the tier list. He was legitimately surprised when I beat him with pre-buff Marth while he was playing Sheik. I thought that was pretty funny. He SD'd a lot by trying to bouncing fish me off the stage. So yea, while tiers do matter, the amount of practice you put in with a character is arguably more important, especially in a non-competitive setting.

It's always fun when you see lower tier characters in a tourney. I remember recently someone got pretty far in a tournament with Game & Watch. I can't remember the player (pretty sure he was Japanese) or the tournament, but I'm pretty sure it was shortly after the first tier list released in February.