Version 2.3.0 of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was released on March 9th, 2023. With this change came wave 4 of the Booster Course Pass including 8 new tracks, a new playable character, and a sleuth of statistic changes to characters, vehicle bodies, and tires. This post will cover all the changes that were made, some discussion about what each of the stats actually mean, and how you can use that to choose the combination you will use online.

What changed?

A common criticism of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is that if you were to play online you would be facing a room full of Waluigis. Before 2.3.0, Waluigi was by far the best character to use online because it allowed you to have a good balance of speed, weight, and acceleration. Over the last three waves of the Booster Course Pass, Nintendo has made significant balance changes which appear to have been done to address this criticism and level the playing field.

• In version 2.1.0, Nintendo made it so that having a larger weight was not as significant as it was before.
• In version 2.2.0, Nintendo added a new statistic that changed the time that you are invincible from damage after being hit. The worst invincibility value was given to Waluigi.
• In version 2.3.0, Nintendo increased the speed and mini-turbo stats of various characters, vehicle bodies, and tires by 0.25.

The changes in version 2.3.0 were the most significant and were enough to mean that Waluigi is no longer the best character to use. Because these buffs affect three different aspects of a combination, it means that some combinations have gotten much better. Someone using Mario, Standard Kart, and Standard Tires has now gotten an additional 0.25 Speed and 0.75 Mini-Turbo with this update.

Below is a brief summary of all the buffs that were made:

• All characters except Waluigi, Donkey Kong, Roy, Wario, Dry Bowser, Metal Mario, Pink Gold Peach, Bowser, Morton, and Mii (Heavy) received +0.25 Speed.
• Baby Mario, Baby Luigi, Dry Bones, Mii (Light), Toad, Shy Guy, Larry, Peach, Daisy, Yoshi, Mario, Ludwig, Mii (Medium), Luigi, and Iggy all received +0.25 Mini-Turbo.
• All bodies except Pipe Frame, Varmint, City Tripper, Biddybuggy, Mr. Scooty, Landship, Streetle, W 25 Silver Arrow, Standard Bike, Flame Rider, and Wild Wiggler received +0.25 Mini-Turbo.
• All tires except Roller, Azure Roller, Button, and Leaf received +0.25 Mini-Turbo.

All the parts that received buffs were ones that were not commonly used when playing online, and with these stat increases there are many more viable combinations that can be used.

What do the stats mean?

To help with explaining how to choose your combination, below is a summary of each statistic type and how it translates to gameplay. Each statistic has a value between 0.75 to 5.75, and can be viewed in-game by pressing the plus button when selecting your vehicle. Some of the statistics are not viewable in-game such as Mini-Turbo, Invincibility, and the Air, Water, and Anti-Gravity parts of the speed and handling stats. To see these hidden statistics you can use a site such as mk8dxbuilder.com or my MK8DX Combo Finder Tool.

Speed

Speed is the top speed that you can reach. It also affects your speed when in a mushroom or a mini-turbo. Each combination has 4 speed stats: Ground, Air, Water, and Anti-Gravity which affect your top speed in each of those conditions. When you are not at your top speed, the speed stat has no impact and instead your current speed will be determined solely by your acceleration. Turning in Mario Kart reduces your speed, which means that the more turns a track has, the less relevant the speed stat is. If you are using a character with low speed, you can overcome the speed limitations by maximising the amount of time you are in a mini-turbo.

Acceleration

Acceleration affects how quickly your speed increases. When you are at your top speed, acceleration has no impact. For the same reason, using a mushroom, entering a mini-turbo, or being in a star also means acceleration has no impact. If you are using a character with low acceleration, you will want to do very simple lines and drive straight as often as possible.

Weight

Weight affects how far you get pushed away when bumping into another player. Weight has no impact on time trials but is important in online play as bumps can be quite severe and cause you to miss item boxes or be pushed off the track.

Handling

Handling affects how fast you can turn. While drifting this changes how tight or wide you can make your drift. Just like the speed stat, handling is also represented using 4 different stats: Ground, Air, Water, and Anti-Gravity which affect your handling in each of those conditions. Having higher handling is very useful for online play where you need to be able to adapt to all sorts of scenarios such as adjusting your drift to avoid an item. It is also useful in TTs for tracks which have tight or wide turns.

Traction

Traction affects how much you slip on tracks with ice or sand on the road. This includes the ice on tracks like Sherbet Land and Snow Land, and the sand on Dry Dry Desert and Donut Plains. For tracks that have no ice or sand, traction has no effect.

Mini-Turbo

Mini-Turbo affects how quickly you are able to build up mini-turbos, and how long they last once you release them. For more information about how to calculate the time needed to accumulate an MT, refer to my drifting guide which goes into more detail.

Invincibility

Invincibility controls the amount of time you are invincible after getting hit by something. This has no impact on time trials, but can be useful in online play. As an example, if you were hit by a bomb, then an invincibility stat of 1 means you will be invincible for 0.97 seconds after recovering, while an invincibility stat of 5.75 will be invincible for 2.25 seconds after recovering.

Other differences

Aside from stats, there are a few other things that separate different combinations apart from each other:

• Hitbox
  • The hitbox of a combination can vary even if they have identical stats.
  • Having a larger hitbox means you don't have to drift as wide to get a coin and you can hang more over an edge without falling off.
  • Having a smaller hitbox means you can avoid items easier and you can get closer to a wall without bumping it.
• Drifting Style
  • Every vehicle body is one of 4 types: Kart (e.g. Biddybuggy), Standard Bike (e.g. Mr. Scooty), Sport Bike (e.g. Yoshi Bike), and ATV (e.g. Wild Wiggler).
  • Sport bikes (commonly known as inward bikes) are the most notably different, however the other three types have very subtle differences in how they drift.
  • The differences between the outward drifting vehicle types are difficult to explain, but their turning circles when drifting vary slightly. Standard bikes have the most noticeable difference as when you start a drift it tends to go out very wide compared to karts and ATVs.
• Popularity
  • If you are playing in a competitive match in a team, you will want to identify easily which players are on your team and which players are not. If everyone is using the same character, then you can only do this by communicating with your team in a call or by keeping track of all the player names around you.
  • If you are playing as a character that no-one else is playing as, then it means all the people on the other teams can easily tell you are an enemy, but it also means that your teammates can easily tell who you are and can see where you are on the mini-map which can be useful when figuring out when to use lightning.

Ground, Anti-Gravity, Air, and Water components

Speed and handling is split into four components based on the terrain you are driving on. I calculated the percentage of time across all tracks that is spent driving on each type of terrain and came up with the following distribution:

• Ground: 72.5%
• Anti-Gravity: 19.5%
• Air: 5.7%
• Water: 2.3%

What this tells us is that ground is the most important stat to look at, followed by anti-gravity, while air and water have very little importance and it means you can safely ignore those stats unless you know you are playing on a track with lots of air time and lots of underwater driving.

It's important to note that if the underwater driving is on an anti-gravity section, the anti-gravity component of the stat takes precedence. This means that tracks like Water Park do not take advantage of the water component at all, despite most of the track being underwater.

How to choose a combination

Rather than choosing one combination and sticking with it, your combination should change and evolve over time according to your playstyle.

• If you are getting bumped around too much, try a combination with higher weight.
• If you are struggling to get the mini-turbos you want, try a combination with higher mini-turbo.
• If you are doing better on tracks that have lots of turns and worse on tracks that have less turns, try a combination with higher speed and less acceleration.
• If you find that you are getting hit by too many items and struggle to catch up, use a combination with higher acceleration or invincibility.

When you make these kinds of changes, you are going to have to make a trade-off and get a worse stat in some other place. If you want more speed, you will likely have to sacrifice your acceleration. Experiment using time trials and online play to see if these sacrifices are worth it. Sometimes to use a combination that has higher acceleration and lower speed, you need to learn new lines to take advantage of that. To learn new lines, I would recommend reading my blog post on how to learn lines.

How to find new combinations to experiment with

Knowing that you want more of a stat is one thing, but finding such a combination while minimising the number of sacrifices you have to make is much harder. Currently there are 43 characters (with 5 more on the way), 41 vehicle bodies, 22 tires, and 15 gliders to choose from meaning 649,440 possible combinations to choose from. Trying every one of these combinations is impractical, so I have made a tool that lets you search for combinations with the stats that you want. The tool is a table of all the combinations and their values, and each column has filter options to help with finding the combination with the statistics you want. You can also download the data as a CSV to explore it using Excel or Google Sheets if you prefer.

To run a quick example, say that you are currently using Waluigi, Wild Wiggler, Roller, and Cloud Glider and you want something with more acceleration, and you are willing to sacrifice some speed and weight to get it. We know this combination has a speed of 3.5, acceleration of 4.25, and a weight of 3. Using the tool, we can find all combinations with an acceleration ≥ 4.5, speed ≥ 3.25, and weight ≥ 2.75. After applying these filters, we can see there are 16 combinations that fit the criteria which we can look through and choose the best one. If we don't like these options, then we know we need to sacrifice more and we could change it to show all combinations with speed ≥ 3 instead.

What are some good combinations to try out?

Below you can find some good example combinations to try out. For each combination, Roller and Cloud Glider is used as they generally provide the best statistics, but Leaf Tires and Plane Glider are worth trying out as well. The table is sorted in descending order by acceleration. You should choose the combination by how much you balance acceleration and mini-turbo against speed.

If you are new to the game and are not sure which to try out first, Luigi with Biddybuggy would be a good starting place. Waluigi with Wild Wiggler is included in the table for reference, however it is mostly outclassed by Waluigi with Teddy Buggy, so that would be a good first combination to try while experimenting if that is what you used previously.