The following is an archived post from the Amiibo Dojo. It has been uploaded to the Exion Vault for referential purposes and retains its original publication date; some of the post’s links may not function currently or exist at all.
Welcome! There are a lot of you out there who train your amiibo without equipment. There are also a lot of you who believe equipment is overpowered and/or stupid. However, I disagree. I’ve got a whole article ready to persuade you to think otherwise. Ready? Let the rant...er, I mean, educative post begin!
Why I stopped training vanilla amiibo
Now, before you say “Pfft. You’ve probably never even tried vanilla.” I have. I was a strict vanilla-only trainer in early 2015, and let me tell you, it was frustrating. I wanted aggressive, stylish fighters who could pull off sweet combos and then end with a taunt. I tried, and tried, and always failed. I’d train an amiibo to Level 50, be unsatisfied, and reset. Over. And over. And over again. It never ended.
What does training an aggressive amiibo have to do with equipment? Well, almost all of you who train vanilla characters probably want a disrespectful, aggressive amiibo who taunts and uses fifty-move combos (that’s an exaggeration, but still). At the end of the day, amiibo are just AI – AI that isn’t at all programmed to be disrespectful or aggressive. Acting in such a way consistently is something that’s beyond what the AI can do.
What equipment can do for your amiibo
I’ve found that feeding your amiibo equipment gives training sessions much more structure. There’s a more clear way forward – you generally want your amiibo to become one with its bonus effects and use them to its advantage. Equipment adds an extra layer of strategy to the metagame and makes it stand out from competitive Smash, which I really like.
Here’s something interesting: for a long time, I was trying to get my vanilla Pac-Man to use his Bonus Fruits properly, but no matter what, he’d always throw the cherry and nothing else. It was only after I fed him equipment that he picked up on the proper way to use them. Does this mean anything? Not necessarily, but I know one thing for sure: amiibo with equipment learn much differently from vanilla amiibo. I still can’t pinpoint exactly how this is; research on the matter is still ongoing.
Amiibo with equipment are also significantly easier to train than vanilla characters. Vanilla amiibo have nothing to rely on except for their character’s attributes, which, in the case of fighters like Pac-Man and Fox (whose AI is bad), leads to them being nothing but dead weight. Equipment gives every amiibo a shot at becoming a champion.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, you’ve got to take my word for it. Equipment makes training a lot more fun.. I started out in the same mindset as you might be in now – I wanted a sparring partner who was aggressive and stylish so I myself could become better at playing Super Smash Bros. I learned the hard way that, first, amiibo can’t even be trained to be consistently aggressive, and second, that the best way to practice your skills are against human players.
If you bought an amiibo as a sparring partner, and really don’t want to get into the metagame, that’s fine. In fact, I have a vanilla Villager amiibo who I fight with sometimes. But if you want to create a champion, equipment is the way to go, and I can help you – for an introduction to feeding your amiibo, click here (note: link defunct). If you have any questions whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to post on the Amiibo Dojo Forums (no account necessary), fill out the Amiibo Dojo contact form, or email me directly at amiibocloud@gmail.com. Thanks for reading. Happy training!
