It's interesting looking at all the different opinions of Shadow. Some say he needs buffing in some areas, some say he's fine the way he is. I really don't know what to do @.@ I think it's really about knowing his playstyle. Although his smashes are not that much stronger than Sonic's smashes in terms of knockback (more damage though, but slower), he (unlike Sonic) has two effective meteor smashes to use (F Air and D Air). Here're some handy things to know about Shadow:
- He has quite a few moves that can demolish shields, the most prominent one being his Chaos Rift. 2/3 Chaos Rifts are automatic shield breakers, allowing you to follow up with a fully charged D Smash or F Smash to land the finishing blow fairly early
- If you can gain some spacing between you and your opponent, make sure to use the Weapon Spawn taunt. Even the grenade does a decent 11%.
- Remember that both his Side B and Down B can be cancelled into his Up B, assisting his overall recovery significantly.
He may not be as fast as Sonic on some fronts, but he makes up for that with decent priority, great range and decent power.
Weapon spawn is really only good against computers, humans aren't so dumb to wait, and he doesn't have any attacks that can send enemies away quickly and he's not that fast so he can't really run away from characters and make enough distance, I don't find myself using it ever against a human player
Chaos Rift is good but I don't use it often because of it's lag time if you miss, it's just easy to sidestep behind him and attack, I wouldn't change this attack I'm just saying it's not a move to throw out often
Side B to Up B recovery does help, but it has to be canceled fairly early from what I've tried so it's not like an insane recovery boost, but it's fine
His priority is fine
His range is iffy, some attacks like side-tilt should have more range, that swiping graphic should have a hitbox, otherwise your have to be right next to the opponent to get it to hit, if you extended the range it could be a great poking move, but as it is now with it's small range it's useless
And other than that his arms and legs and overall body is short so I'm not sure what you mean by good range when comparing him to other characters like marth, shiek, link, ike, even ganondorf and c. falcon
His power is fine for the most part, the problem is pulling off his powerful moves, it's nearly impossible with the startup lag on all his smashes, the thing is that you can notice him about to do a smash attack, and then there's a lag time before he throws out the attack, think about other characters how when you smash the c-stick, an attack is thrown out right away, the attack itself may not be fast but there's no real startup time(except for very powerful characters like Bowser and Ganon but Shadow's not that strong) and it's weaker, but the way you have it now, Shadow clearly choreographs his move, then has startup lag even on 0% charge then he throws it out, against a human player, it's impossible to hit with any of his smashes unless you set it up with hitlag which is only possible with codesets like Brawl+ and even then it's incredibly difficult
In short, he doesn't have any powerful attacks that are reliable, which is why I find it so hard to kill opponents, especially human players, all his smash attacks are useless because of the startup lag even on 0% charge, Shadow's not powerful enough to justify this startup lag, what you should do is for 0% charge have there be very little startup lag, think like shiek's downsmash so you can have a reliable window to hit with these moves
It's fun to use him, but it's frustrating if you want to win