Nerf

In fighting games and other competitive games, a nerf is when certain attributes of characters are changed for the worse to make the game more balanced. Top tier and high tier characters tend to be the ones that get nerfed (unless you're King Dedede). Nerfs can occur from one game to the next or via balance patches. For example, because of how overpowered he was in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Meta Knight was heavily nerfed for Smash 4, because Brawl could not receive patches. On the other side of the coin, characters like Sheik, Diddy Kong, and Bayonetta were heavily nerfed in balance patches, since the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS were both capable of receiving them.