amiibo training guide for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

amiibo training guide for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

Time Stamp: February 10, 2024 12:00 PM

With the release of the Sora amiibo on the horizon, we’ve put together an in-depth amiibo training guide for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate that applies to every fighter in the game.

If you’re looking to raise a powerful amiibo to beat up your friends, we’ve got you covered. Before you start training a character, you’ll need to choose whether to give it Spirits or not. Spirits are character-augmenting equipment pieces that can boost Attack, Defense, and more. With a proper Spirit setup, you can turn an amiibo into a menace. That said, amiibo with Spirits are sometimes too powerful even for human opponents to beat. If you’d rather raise an amiibo that’s more fair to your friends, you can easily opt out of giving it Spirits altogether. Do note that once an amiibo has Spirits, they can’t be removed via natural means.

Spirit Recommendations

amiibo Training Guide Spiritsamiibo Training Guide Spirits

First up for our amiibo training guide is Spirits. If you do decide to give your amiibo Spirits, we’ve got some recommendations here for you. First, always feed your amiibo its final Spirit build before you even start training it. Spirits actually change an amiibo’s training data, meaning they’ll behave differently than how you trained them if you give them Spirits after training. This way, you can get your amiibo’s Spirit team all set up while ensuring that your training remains intact.

The absolute best Spirit effects to use on amiibo are Super Armor, Armor Knight, and Great Autoheal – but the best Spirit effect for your amiibo depends on the character you’re training. Super Armor, hence its name, gives your amiibo full super armor, meaning it won’t flinch when attacked. At higher percentages, this super armor will wear off. As a result, this bonus is best used on heavyweight fighters like Bowser or Ganondorf.

Armor Knight increases its user’s Attack by 1.15x and their Defense by a whopping 1.8x. It does incur a 0.7x speed penalty, but you can run a Move Speed Up bonus in the third slot to offset this somewhat. Armor Knight is the most applicable bonus, and it works well with just about any fighter. You can obtain Armor Knight via the Halberd Support Spirit, which you can obtain in Funky Kong’s Shop in World of Light.

Great Autoheal is the last of the major three bonuses, and it works well on just about every character except for Lucario. That being said, human players won’t have such a great time playing against an amiibo with this bonus. For some more fair bonus effects, try things like Physical Attack Up, Move Speed Up, and Air Defense Up. These bonuses apply to just about every character, too.

amiibo Training Guide and Tips

amiibo Training Guideamiibo Training Guide

Next up for our amiibo training guide is the actual training guide portion. It’s a little bit tough to come up with a training method that works for every single character, but we’ve gathered a bunch of helpful training tips that might not immediately be obvious to you.

  • Don’t charge smash attacks. When using them, just do so uncharged. If you charge them, your amiibo will do the same without any consideration for the timing – in other words, you might find them starting to charge smash attacks next to opponents who can act and intercept.
  • Don’t play off-stage too much. You’re trying to train your amiibo, not mercilessly defeat it. Generally speaking, amiibo aren’t very good at recovering. Ness is definitely the worst offender, as he leaves himself vulnerable to attack every single time. Unfortunately, you can’t change the way an amiibo recovers – some characters’ recovery AIs are just flawed. We’d only recommend teaching fighters to go off-stage if their recovery is long and simple. Examples of these are Kirby, Pikachu, Meta Knight, and Joker.
  • Don’t roll! One problem trainers often have is that their amiibo rolls too much. To help offset this, do your best to never roll once. At Level 50, amiibo will already dodge attacks when they can – teaching them to roll yourself just makes them take it a bit overboard.
  • Let your amiibo hit you. If you do nothing but pulverize your amiibo during matches, it will see that none of its attacks are working and become passive. As a result, you’ll want to actually let yourself get hit by some of its attacks. That’ll make it more aggressive towards opponents, which is probably the kind of behavior you want to see in your amiibo.
  • Don’t use too many aerials. It’s okay to use short hop aerials every once in a while, but don’t take them too far. If you do, you might find that your amiibo becomes too jumpy and forgoes its grounded moves. For some characters, this is okay – but for heavyweight fighters like Bowser, Incineroar, or Kazuya, this can spell doom.
  • Don’t feed it Spirits if you’ve already trained it. You can if you really want to, but like we mentioned before, Spirits alter an amiibo’s training data as soon as you give one to it. That means you should give your amiibo its complete Spirit team before you even start training it.
  • Only do a little bit of taunting. With a maxed-out taunt value, an amiibo will taunt almost every single time it launches you with an attack. That’s definitely funny, but make sure it’s what you want if that’s what you’re going for. Ideally, an amiibo would only taunt sometimes so that it doesn’t leave itself vulnerable for no reason.

As you can see, there are lots of ways to “mess up” an amiibo’s training. Mainly, doing too much of something can cause your amiibo to take that behavior to the next level and really start spamming. It’s important to note that several specific characters also have inherent spamming problems that can’t be completely removed – Mario tends to spam down air, Bowser tends to spam neutral air, and Terry tends to spam Crack Shoot. It’s impossible to go into every single character here, but amiibo training gets surprisingly deep.

How about you – will you be getting a Sora amiibo of your own? If so, will you be training him or just setting him up on a shelf? What are your opinions on amiibo training? Feel free to let us know if you have any questions about training certain characters below, too.

Sora’s amiibo releases on February 16 alongside Mario vs. Donkey Kong.

Time Stamp:

More from Nintendo Everything