A Quick Rundown on the Stale Moves Mechanic

If you are a competitive player, chances are you know about stale moves. This mechanic reduces the damage of a move the more you use it.

More specifically, the game keeps a list of 9 move slots. If you use a move, that move goes into one of those slots. The more slots one move occupies in the cue, the weaker it will be. If a move is not in the cue at all, it will have a small 1.05x damage bonus applied to it, with all the KB increases that apply. A Completely stale move will only do 52.9% of the move's original "base" damage (for example, mario upsmash base damage = 14%. Fresh it does 14.7%, completely stale, 7.41%).

Now in Brawl, move staling affected both the damage and the KB the same, and thus move staling was a much more noticable and exploitable feature of the game. In smash 4 it doesn't affect KB quite as much (about 30% less), but a reduction in damage will still mean a reduction in KB.

Below are some graphs I made of Mario's Upsmash, and how the stale mechanic affects it.

As you can see, staling most affects a move early on, with subsequent uses reducing damage less and less.

Now since staling is a % based phenomenon, the more base damage a move has, the more damage it will lose. The more damage it loses, the weaker it becomes. So heavy damaging moves like bowser Fsmash will be affected by staling more than low damaging moves like Marth Upthrow. Ever wonder why Ryu's back air is so strong, yet it never seems to kill? This is why.

Below is the chart I created comparing staling across three moves, one high damage, one medium damage, and one low damage. Take a look and see how each are affected. This could make you pick different options in the future when in battle.

Thanks,

WOOD

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