Nintendo is Trying to Kill Competitive Amiibo, but Indirectly

by Doc, Owner, Founder, “Aliens” guy

I think Nintendo is trying to kill competitive amiibo. I’m not happy that I came to that conclusion, and I would prefer to have not had that thought, but it sure looks to me like that’s the case.

We’ve been labbing out the 10.0 amiibo AI patch and finding out several things. First, amiibo can now dodge Incineroar’s Alolan Whip a bit better. It’s nowhere near enough of a nerf for Incineroar to not be banworthy, but it does mean that amiibo have a shot against him now. That’s one top tier that got a nerf.

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Then, it turns out that Mii Gunner now can’t Missile spam. It’s not possible, to the best of our research, to teach Mii Gunner to use their most broken playstyle. Now, teaching a Mii Gunner to missile spam only results in one that’ll use a few missiles, and then full jump -> Forward air. That’s the exact opposite of the intended Missile spam playstyle, where Mii Gunner is only using Missiles until the opponent gets close, at which point they’ll force them off with a smash attack.

To make matters worse, they’ll occasionally throw in full jumps and smash attacks for seemingly no reason whatsoever. This basically invalidates any hope of a Missile spam Mii Gunner, and probably the other playstyle variants of Mii Gunner as well.

In 9.0, we discovered that Link now has a Boomerang -> Bow -> Dash attack chain in his AI, and that it activates whenever he lands a hit with Boomerang. Well, as it would happen, Boomerang spam Link is optimal. So now if you’re going to try to train an optimal Link that sticks to the holy Trinity of Boomerang, you have to accept that it’s going to be an inoptimal Link because he’ll sometimes use Bow (one of his worst moves) as a follow-up.

There’s three top tiers that got an AI change that removed their ability to be optimal.

I think, and I’ve expounded on this further in this video, that Nintendo is looking at what we’re doing and trying to remove the strategies that we’re training our amiibo around. They’re seeing that X character has an unobvious broken strategy (Mii Gunner missile spam, for example) and they’re removing its ability to function.