Trope Workshop:Assailable Buster

Description: Competitive Balance has standard archetypes, such as the Glass Cannon, Stone Wall, Fragile Speedster, Mighty Glacier, Melee Tornado, and Frail Sniper. But sometimes, to manage depth, a game has to delve deeper into the rabbit hole.

The Assailable Buster is an odd breed: they are designed to counter the Stone Wall. Where every character has at least one, preferably two or more, Armor-Piercing Attacks, this guy is an armor-busting character. Even the sturdiest of opposition surely will want to consider evasion against their casual attacks. Of course, if they themselves consider more than that without careful forethought, don't be surprised if they find themselves more sorry for it than usual.

This can seem to be innately Fake Balance by turning the character select screen into match decision by rock-paper-scissors. However, Tropes Are Tools so the character tends to have at least one compensating weakness that allows the Stone Wall to actually attack them just as effectively as they would get attacked. Typically the weakness(es) vary/varies: they could be fragile, slow, limited to close range, physically inept or even hard to maintain.

This is a Trope Workshop page, still under consideration for creation. Help out by editing the current page, or leave a comment on the Talk page. Trope Workshop Guidelines

Examples of Assailable Buster include:

• Super Smash Bros 4 has several examples:
  • Ganondorf, a Mighty Glacier/Melee Tornado hybrid
  • Little Mac, Captain Falcon, and Roy, all 3 being Glass Cannon/Melee Tornado hybrids and Skill Gate Characters
  • Ness and Robin, both Squishy Wizards
  • Ryu, naturally Difficult But Awesome and a subtle Glass Cannon
• In the Kirby games, the Bomb ability is great at sniping durable bosses, but isn't very good at dealing with aerial or background bosses and has problems traversing a stage
• A few Pokémon examples:
  • The second-generation metagame suffered from a rash of players using a combo known as "Skarmbliss". "Skarm" was Skarmory, a Pokémon with very high physical Defense plus a Steel type who was, unlike Shuckle, actually usable, while "Bliss" was Blissey, a newly-introduced Chansey evolution with even higher HP and even more insane Special Defense. The two Pokémon conveniently just happened to have weaknesses that complemented each other, made even worse by the fact that, prior to Generation IV, a move's type determined whether it was physical or special.
    
    You wanted to smack the Normal-type Blissey's ass with a Fighting move, pounding on that near rock bottom physical Defense in the process? Watch the opponent switch to Skarmory and laugh the move off. So then you wanted to prey on the Steel/Flying-type Skarmory's low Special Defense with its only two weaknesses, Fire and Electric? Prepare to scream as the opponent switched back to Blissey and shrugged off that move you swore would be a OHKO. Combine all this with the fact that both Pokémon had access to Roar and Toxic (the former of which was upgraded in Generation II to actually be useful in battles), Skarmory had Spikes and Whirlwind, and Blissey had Softboiled, and they could easily stall whole teams to death.
    
    Generation III introduced Blaziken, a Pokémon that was Fire and Fighting-type, had equal Attack and Special Attack and a good movepool, and thus enabled you to defeat Skarmbliss with just one Pokémon. The previously-useless Magneton also gained the Magnet Pull ability, which allowed it to stop Steel types from switching out, thus enabling it to easily beat Skarmory with its STAB Electric moves and thus making it useful. However, Blaziken and Magneton weren't exactly very useful outside of this niche, both having poor Defenses and Speed and the latter also having a bad movepool. That would change in later generations, though.
  • In Generations IV and V, the Dragon type became hideously broken. Generation VI introduced the Fairy type to fix this, as well as give a weakness to Sableye and Spiritomb, who previously had none. But very few Fairy types are useful outside of this niche (it doesn't help that among the Pokémon that became Fairy type are those that previously sat in the lowest tiers of competitive play and still haven't improved much, like Wigglytuff and Granbull).