About landing a soft hit, make sure you release down on the joystick
before inputing nair, if you don't, you will always fast fall, which will trigger a hard hit. If that doesn't solve the problem, try the following.
It's really all about grinding out the spacing. You need to find the specific spot on one character where the lock works, then start to try on the rest of the cast. Here's what i recommend :
1. Try the lock against
Focus only on landing a soft hit nair. This should be easy since sonic's distance for a soft nair requires no drift (by drift, i mean floating away after the footstool).
Side note : if you only want to get one loop to lock, most meta characters
don't require any drift at all (i.e.
, etc.).
This can be used to, say, lock them once at the edge
into perfect pivot tennis racket to kill at around 70
2. Try against more characters
3. Incorparate the turnip catch
Now that you're familiar with the soft hit distance, you know you have to hit a a certain spot for it to land. Trying to fit a turnip catch into this, you'll sometimes (depending on the character) need to adjust your float trajectory to accomodate. Go back to trying agaisnt
. While just cancelling the float and nairing after the footstool will lock, you have to drift back a little bit to catch a turnip. Every char has a float pattern to ensure the lock against them (against
, for example, you need to drift away, then forward again for maximum consistency), get to know them.
4. Lab
Getting comfortable doing this against every char takes a
long time, and you'll eventually need to know the wierder patterns (i.e.
etc.), so know that you're in for long hours of training mode...
Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions :^)