By Spike, Regular Contributor
As you may have seen, the Banjo, Terry, and Byleth bins have been discovered, and a handful of people are working on testing them before the late-March release. I started with Byleth, due to her being more interesting than the others to me, and I’ve got some findings to share.
We at Amiibo Doctor are not sharing or spreading the bins. I do not care if your kid/grandma/cousin’s thrice removed in-law’s dog’s pee spot’s plant growth is pining for them, bugging staff for them will only result in us getting annoyed and you being blacklisted.
First off, I’ve tested a few things with Byleth. My Byleth, Ashe, was trained primarily using the Gin Method, but I also did some testing for offstage, Neutral Special, and aerials. It’ll be a short article because I haven’t done super heavy testing, but here’s the list of findings.
- Byleth has a few built-in combos, and a couple interesting behaviors with up b. Notably down throw up air (as expected), but also a few with up b, which may or may not be hardcoded. I won’t detail them because mine doesn’t exhibit them and I’m not sure if they’re hardcoded yet, but if you view the footage on the Amiibo Doctor Youtube channel you should be able to see what I mean.
- Byleth isn’t especially great with Neutral Special. I’ve seen others use it, but it seems to be a “Use a lot or use not” type of move. Mine doesn’t use it in the vast majority of matches.
- Byleth has a variety of options when the opponent is offstage. Fastfalling neutral aerial appears to be part of the base AI, but offstage forward air can be taught rather easily and the AI is capable (though I don’t recommend) of using offstage downward air. I recommend not going with the offstage route, as Byleth can use side special, down smash, or (bizarrely) dash attack at ledge. Side special seems to be the best of the bunch, but down smash is also excellent- due to its hitboxes, an onstage Byleth can hit a recovering opponent with a smash attack quite easily. Forward smash is likely an option, but a less consistent one.
- Side special is an interesting case. I didn’t train my Byleth to spam it, but it’s notable that despite my using it she never uses it onstage except at ledge to hit recovering opponents.
- The amiibo isn’t great with up air usage. She does use it to kill airborne opponents, but seems to only do so for opponents that are fairly high up, choosing to wait and use up tilt on lower opponents, even if they would be killed by up air.
Byleth appears to be a solid B+ tier, but with potential to be higher.
At any rate, that’s all the interesting stuff I’ve got for you right now. Until next time, make sure to check out our other DLC amiibo content, and so long!
-Spike
Amiibo Doctor 