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Applications of the shieldstun desynch (Nanpult out of shield!)

Kyu Puff

Smash Champion
Joined
Feb 22, 2007
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2,258
Location
Massachusetts
This trick is kind of buried in the General Chat thread, so I'll start by quoting two relevant posts:

Some of you already know about this from Twitter, Twitch, or talking to me elsewhere, but I haven't made a post about it yet and I think it's pretty useful in some circumstances:

A lot of the time when ICs are synced and have the same shield size, an enemy's attack will hit both ICs' shields at the same time. Popo and Nana hence exit shieldstun at the same time. Since Nana reads inputs 6 frames late, this means that if I input a command within 6 frames of shieldstun ending, Popo will ignore it since he's still in shieldstun, but Nana will receive it after exiting shieldstun and hence act on it. There are a lot of things you can do out of this, but the most useful one to me seems to be telling Nana to jump and blizzard while Popo continues shielding. Ice block instead of blizzard seems better in some circumstances, as well, like when you're confident the enemy will stay near the ground and not throw out a move that will clank with the ice block, or when you don't have a guaranteed punishment OoS and the enemy is outside of blizzard range.

More explicitly, the main application I see of this is to punish or reverse the pressure caused by high damage moves that ICs have a difficult time retaliating against out of shield. For example, Falcon kneeing a shield over and over can be punished with this; it can also be used to retaliate after Ganon fairs your shield, which can be a pretty threatening situation, especially when you're cornered. You can even squeeze a blizzard between two Marth fairs, but the timing for that is pretty strict and much more difficult on your end than Marth's.

In a lot of ways, this is like doing belay OoS -> blizzard after an attack hits your shield, but other than being more difficult than that, it's essentially strictly better. For one thing, doing belay OoS requires inputting the belay after Popo's shieldstun ends, meaning Nana isn't going to jump and start a blizzard (or whatever else you might want to do) at least 6 frames later. With this shieldstun desynch, you can have Nana jumping up to 6 frames before that. Aside from that, the solo belay animation is terribly laggy, and you generally can't expect to get any sort of punishment off of the blizzard (or ice block/etc). With the shieldstun desynch, you can have Popo act OoS as soon as you want him to. To give a sloppy example of this desynch in action, here's an instance of me using it at TNE (the time being 8:16 if the timestamp doesn't work for you). I hit down after shieldstun ended and hence accidentally spot-dodged, and reacted poorly after that as well, but I hope that clip suggests how this can actually be useful.

The last thing I'll say about this is that the timing varies a ton depending on the move, and also a bit on the move's staleness. When a move hits your shield, you first go through hitlag (almost always just a function of move damage) and then go through shieldstun (purely a function of move damage), so the time you exit shieldstun tends to vary a lot depending on the damage of the move hitting your shield. This means that the 6 frame window in which you want to tell Nana to jump occurs in pretty different places depending on what hits your shield, so it's really hard to do this on a whim. I recommend learning the timing for specific high-damage moves which are difficult to punish OoS, such as the aforementioned knees and Ganon fairs. There are plenty of other examples across the cast.
And if you people think a frame 6 window is too small then I have a solution for you.

So, as most of you probably know, you can make Nana do a light shield while Popo stands in a normal shield (by some known as a "double shield"). This is done by simply doing a (light) shield without pressing the shoulder buttons (L/R) all the way down. Now, when a light shield is hit it causes more shield stun than when a normal shield is hit. So when doing the double shield trick Nana will be in more shield stun than Popo when both of them are hit by the same attack which means Popo can act OoS before Nana. However, in order to do the shield stun desync we want Popo to be in more hit shield stun than Nana so that we can control Nana without our inputs affect Popo. Doing this trick, therefore, in some way takes us farther away from our goal.

Fortunately, it's possible to do a reverse double shield so that Popo stands in a light shield while Nana shields normally. Because Popo will be in shield stun longer than Nana when hit this technic makes it quite easy to make her jump OoS without affecting Popo. Here is how the trick is done

1. Do a normal light shield with L/R.
2. Press the shoulder button you didn't use for your light shield all the way down (still holding the other shoulder button)
3. Release the shoulder button you just pressed (still holding the other shoulder button)

Now Nana is set to do a normal shield by default while Popo stands in a light shield. You might not see it at first, but if you keep holding down the shoulder button then you'll notice: Nana's shield breaks before Popo's.

Other stuff:
- Because Popo is hit while light shielding he will be pushed farther away when hit than normally. Nana is "magnetically pulled" by Popo so when she jumps OoS she will be pulled back towards Popo while doing a blizzard/ice shot/whatever

- Light shields are bigger than normal shields which means that in some cases only Popo's shield will be hit by an incoming attack. Because Nana's shield isn't hit by this attack she can jump OoS without having to be in shield stun at any time (in some cases you might even be able to punish your opponent while he's in hit stun caused by his own attack).

- Because light shields are bigger than normal shields Popo's shield will usually be hit before Nana's shield. Remember that you want to do your jump input 6 frames before Nana's shield stun ends, not Popo's. Therefore, notice when Nana's shield is hit.

- The timing for when Popo can move OoS depends on how "light" his shield was when hit. You can control the size of the shield by pressing the button more or less down. This doesn't affect Nana once she's doing the normal shield by default.

- Controller rumble ON might make it easier to judge shield stun making this even easier (can't test this because I don't have any controller with rumble:/).


I haven't tested this much against other people, but I think it might be useful.
The shieldstun desynch is difficult to perform because it requires knowledge of when shieldstun will end for the particular move that is hitting your shield. However, as Tomber notes, if a move hits only Popo's shield, the timing is more forgiving--you can input commands for Nana at any time for the duration of Popo's shieldstun.

One application of this, using the reverse double shield trick, is to combat projectiles. Normally when you double shield a projectile, it breaks on Nana's shield, so Popo can quickly wavedash out with no shieldstun. This isn't very useful, as Nana gets left behind and all you've really done is taken shield damage. If you reverse the double shield, Popo endures the shieldstun, which creates an opportunity to easily desynch into Ice Block or Blizzard with Nana.

Attacking through projectiles has been around for a while, but it's generally only useful against weak projectiles like Falco's laser; if you're moving horizontally, the ICs become staggered and the projectile only inflicts hitstun on one of them, allowing the other to move around without being interrupted. Common applications include jumping at Falco with an aerial Blizzard, so that Popo's Blizzard is cancelled by the laser but Nana's persists, or wavedashing through the laser with a finisher like f-smash.

The shieldstun desynch allows you to do the same thing, but without actually being hit by the projectile. This is useful against projectiles that inflict a lot of damage or knockback. Samus's missiles, for example, knock you back far enough that if you get hit once or twice, Nana becomes separated. Instead, you can run up to a missile, reverse double shield it, and proceed to pressure the opponent with Nana. The biggest downside is that if you rely on shielding strong projectiles, you can take a significant amount of shield damage and open yourself up to being poked.

Here is an example of using the shieldstun desynch to Blizzard out of shield:


You can perform jumping Blizzard or even a Nanapult, depending on your momentum when the projectile hits you. If you shield stop (shield during the initial dash animation, causing you to stop immediately), you will only be able to jump in place or slightly drift forward. If you slide in your shield (for example, because you had entered the full running animation), you can perform a Nanapult.

I can see this being useful against any single hit projectile, but especially missiles and pills (possibly bombs, but we haven't tested yet). It could also help when you get stuck in shield against Falco's lasers and don't have enough space to create the momentum you need to break through them in the usual fashion.
 
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Fly_Amanita

Master of Caribou
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Aug 24, 2007
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Using shield-stun desynchs more in general has been on my mind lately. An example I posted on Twitter about a month ago was to run forward, block a Fox laser, tell Nana to jump, and do an ice block while Popo keeps shielding. It could be a nice way of mounting a means of reversing pressure against a laser camping Fox while not taking damage. You can also do similar things against Falco laser approaches, although I think I still like stuff like squall OoS into the laser more for that purpose.

I only mentioned high damage moves in that old post, but low damage moves, especially those that are safe on shield, have been on my mind a lot as well. One convenient thing is shield-stun desynchs are extremely easy against low damage moves on account of them inducing short hitlag and shield-stun.
 
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DerfMidWest

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SOFA#941
Its funny, Ive actually been working on these lately.
Im a huge fan of spacing so it only hits one shield as well. This tends to happen a lot with things like marth's spaced dtilt, which I think shield stun desync->blizzard is incredible against (or Ice block if they try to dash away, which most marths will).
A friend on mine is also going to help me practice these against peach's FC fair on shield, which I think is another common situation where this has a lot of aplication.

Overall, this is the most interesting desync to me right now. I see a lot of situations ICs have trouble handling where this desync really has a lot of potential.
 

Smasher89

Smash Lord
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Yea, practicing the shieldstun laser desynch was one of the first things i noticed thats actually possible to practice with the 20xx hack (i should really get that some way or another). Before that i didnt realize that the laser both gives more stun and pushback when shielded.
Peach fair sounds interesting, since if we can punish that, ICs might move up the tierlist.
 

DerfMidWest

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SOFA#941
What are some of the other applications people are starting to use shield stun desynchs on?
I'm starting to use these on like... everything.
I really like it against marth's DD dtilt, since if he misspaces you can shield grab, and if he spaces at max range he only hits popo, the ice block OoS -> popo wd grab or something is really solid.

These things are just incredible because it opens up the ability to punish or even flip the pressure in a lot of situations where ICs often have more trouble.
 

SHIP

Smash Apprentice
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Dec 21, 2013
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So how the hell does one go about practising this without the 20XX hackpack or a friend to help you? Ive tried some crazy things in order to try to get around the logistics of operating two controllers at once but so far it's pretty impossible.
 

IC-Rambler

Smash Cadet
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Mar 21, 2015
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So how the hell does one go about practising this without the 20XX hackpack or a friend to help you? Ive tried some crazy things in order to try to get around the logistics of operating two controllers at once but so far it's pretty impossible.
I've found that one way to practice this by yourself is with the cars on Onett. They probably have a bit more shieldstun then falco's lasers, however. Plus they're also good for practicing DI and techs.
 

DerfMidWest

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SOFA#941
So how the hell does one go about practising this without the 20XX hackpack or a friend to help you? Ive tried some crazy things in order to try to get around the logistics of operating two controllers at once but so far it's pretty impossible.
20XX is the easiest way, but Ive just been practicing against lvl 1 computers, desyncing off of like jabs on my shield and stuff like that

And just using it n real play
 
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