The Five States of the Gyro: Charging, Shooting, Holding, Tossing and Bouncing (part 1/2)

Hey guys, I'm here to talk about some things pertaining to everyrob's favorite top/gyro/dreidel/beyblade. The gyro is a major component of ROB's arsenal and should often be the focus of your play with him. It is an extremely helpful and potent item that can confuse and frustrate many opponents. However for many just picking up the character, it can be a little difficult to know what to expect from the damn thing. For those people, I have created this comprehensive guide with the intent to educate the rising ROB mains (plus anyone that's generally curious) and hopefully correct some misinformation I see out there. Even for advanced players, I bet there's a thing or two here that could help you too.

For starters, If you are not already familiar with the techniques found in TheSMASHtyke's excellent guide, Upgrade: Learn R.O.B.'s Advanced Techniques, then I suggest you read it as I will use many of the terms defined in it.

A lot of what I will be laying out here is widely known or previously discovered techniques that I'm merely trying to centralize into a go-to guide. However, some of the things I go over are a little less known and hopefully enlighten all that take the time to read it.

Please note that I'll be using gyro/top interchangeably. Also note that this is written from the perspective of a ROB player. Other characters throw the gyro harder/softer or which leads to higher/lower bounce heights when thrown on the ground or at your feet with varying damages/timing that I will not cover. That said, there is probably a lot of good info in here for you to know in the matchup.

Finally, this was originally intended to be an all-inclusive guide but it ended up being absolutely huge so I've broken it up into two parts.


Introduction:

First thing to know about the gyro is that there are five "states" that a top can be in and two accompanying "behaviors".


States of the Gyro:
A gyro can be charged with , launched, picked up off the ground, caught when on the ground or in midair, held in-hand, thrown/dropped, and bounced.

• Charging: This is the state that ROB and the gyro enter when you first hit . During this time ROB spins the top up to 8 times. After that he puts it away and starts flashing. The next will always shoot the top. You can cancel a charge by hitting shield.
• Launched/Shot: A top that has been shot by ROB and is possibly still spinning on the stage. Has varying launch damage/distance/spin time depending on how many spins it received during charging.
• In-hand/Holding: A gyro that has been either picked up or caught.
• Tossed: When a top has been thrown or -dropped.
• Bouncing: A tossed top that is bouncing on the ground or at an enemy.

Behaviors of Gyros:
These are the sub-states that a launched, tossed or bouncing top can be in.

• Spinning: A top that is actively spinning, visibly denoted by a white "whirling" effect around the gyro. During this time the top is an active hitbox.
• Not Spinning/Stopped/Stationary: A top that is no longer spinning, visibly denoted by a lack of the white whirling effect previously mentioned. During this time the top is completely harmless.

Launched and Shot Gyros:

A launched gyro is one that has been shot from ROB's charging state by pressing or at full charge with . It has the possibility of landing on stage and slide or hop a couple times (possibly off platforms) and then settles into a spin for a set amount of time depending on how long it has been charged. Launching a gyro has significant lag that can be exploited. Fire with care!

Here are the properties of a launched gyro:

• Whichever direction you're facing when you shoot the top is the direction that the enemy will be knocked back regardless of where the top touches them. This is rarely evident in competitive play as you basically need a wall for the effect to be starkly obvious, however you can see the behavior in this ancient video by Mister Eric.
• It moves randomly from left to right dealing 1-5% damage depending on how fast it is still spinning.
• If an enemy walks into, falls onto, or does a neutral getup into a launched spinning gyro, they will not be knocked back according to the direction ROB is facing. Instead, they will be hit away from the center of the top.
  • TIP: This means that you can launch a top to land right about at the edge of the stage and hope that it doesn't randomly move too far away or off the stage. If these conditions are met, an enemy doing a neutral getup will be knocked towards you for an upsmash. This in turn covers if they roll. This is also applicable when an enemy is forced to get-up and they choose a normal getup/roll inwards and if you just happen to notice that an opponent is likely going to hit the top. This can be a little inconsistent as it relies on the randomness of the top but it's still fun/cool.
• After a few seconds, depending on the charge level, it will stop spinning but continue to turn as it runs out of momentum. At this point it won't move left or right anymore and becomes harmless. It can now be more easily picked up by enemies.
• Eventually it stops turning completely and then immediately vanishes.
• The moment a top vanishes, a new one can start to be charged. Tops can disappear a few ways:
  • timing out
  • hitting an opponent's shield
  • touching a side or bottom blast-zone
  • hitting a sufficiently strong attack
  • due to 3-Hop Rule (explained in Bouncing Gyros)
• A launched gyro can also stop spinning if after settling into a spin, it falls off the stage or a platform. For however long the top falls, it is harmless unless it hits solid ground where it will finish out the rest of its timed spin.
• When a gyro hits a wall, it is a wall hit which will bounce off the wall and remain an active hitbox.
• When a gyro hits an enemy, it is an enemy hit which will cause it to rebound and pop up slightly. At this point it enters a bouncing state similar to the one to be described later. During this time the enemy you hit can no longer be hurt by the top until it bounces on the ground and settles into it's normal spin.
• It deals the most damage if it hits the enemy before hopping on the ground, typically between 8-13% depending on the velocity of the top. (Both the x-and y-coordinate vectors have some influence on this equation, it seems as a mid-battlefield gyro throw does ~10% but a full distance one does ~11%.) Each successive hop before hitting the enemy greatly reduces the damage dealt.
• If the top hits no obstructions, it will never lose horizontal velocity. However, it does accelerate downwards at all times unless it has reached terminal velocity.

Holding your Gyro:

Having any item in-hand immediately makes your character more dangerous as it opens up many new options. This is why you might hear that many item characters such as Peach, Toon Link, Diddy and ROB have high potential or are just plain good. It doesn't hurt ROB that the gyro happens to be one of the best items in the game. Here I'll be detailing the properties of a held gyro as well as methods to pick it up/catch it.

Here are the properties of an in-hand gyro:

IMPORTANT!
All gyros in-hand (when thrown) are identical, deal the same amount of damage and behave exactly the same regardless of:

• how long it had been charged
• how long it has remained active on the field
• how long it had been spinning
• how many times it had bounced
• which surface it rebounded off
• whether it is reflected and re-caught

THEY ARE ALL THE SAME!

• If you are hit with a gyro in-hand, there is a random chance that you will drop the gyro into a non-spinning harmless state that follows the 3-hop rule (explained later) and disappears quickly.

Here are the properties of picking up a gyro:

• When you are grounded a gyro can be picked up when within range by:
  • hitting A aka jabbing
  • attempting a d-tilt, f-tilt or jab (you'll actually forego attacking completely to pick it up)
  • doing a dash attack
  • during your jumpsquat with:
    • an aerial (offensive option)
    • an air-dodge (defensive option)
    • a grab (keep your options open option)
  • teching either in-place or rolling (picks it up at the start of the roll)
  • at the end of a foxtrot by grabbing (and other weird times where you're sliding near it)
• You will NOT pick up the gyro even when within range by:
  • doing a special move
  • doing a smash attack
  • doing an up-tilt
  • grabbing when standing, walking or dashing
• It is possible to attempt to pick up the top and in the time of you reaching down to grab it, it disappears, leaving you empty-handed and slightly open for that moment. You can mostly easily observe this by throwing it down and then doing an upsmash as quickly as possible, buffer an input and on the first actionable frame, 49, you will see him reach down but pick up nothing. If that's a little too quick for you, try it with a dsmash.
• It is also possible to fail to pick up a top by sliding/skidding past it. In this case, the input to grab the top was made when it was within range of ROB, however in the 2-3 frame window that it takes to reach down, ROB was no longer in range and comes up empty-handed.

An airborne or grounded gyro can be caught in the air when within range by:

• air-dodging
• performing an aerial (different aerials have different windows to catch the top)
• grabbing (much tighter window but it's completely lag-less giving you more options).

Different moves have varying ranges where you can pick up the top. For instance grabbing the top means it has to be very close to your hand while an airdodge makes you intangible so the window is larger. Fair tends to catch it better than nair because you don't expose as much hurtbox as nair does. A dash attack is often the easiest way to pick it up/catch it but also leaves you the most open.


Tossing your Gyro:

Throwing your gyro is one of the most vital parts of ROB's game and should be incorporated often. There's a lot I can get into for specific gyro setups but I think Metalex's videos in this thread do a much better job than I ever could. There's some really complicated stuff in there so if you're new, try to focus on the easy things first. Note that a grounded down throw will often be referred to "throwing at your feet" even though ROB's doesn't have feet.

Here are the properties of tossing/throwing a gyro:

• You can throw the top in all four directions, either hard/fast or soft/slow depending on whether you smash the control stick or just tilt the control stick.
  • A -stick set to smashes with always yield hard throws whether grounded or airborne. Oddly enough when -stick is set to tilts, a grounded throw will result in a soft throw but an airborne throw will result in a hard throw. You can still get a soft airborne throw with a diagonal input but only in the direction you are facing.
    • This means that if you jump-cancel toss with Tilt Stick, you will get slightly different results than if it were set to smashes.
• A falling top has a terminal velocity about equal to ROB's actual fall speed. It attains terminal velocity very quickly, so much so that a top thrown downward slowly is almost indistinguishable to one thrown fast, almost always dealing 7%.
• When throwing the top in any other direction, you throw it considerably faster when grounded than airborne (typically translates to 2% less damage for airborne throws at mid-range).
  • TIP: This relates to everyone/dittos as throwing the top upwards to keep it away from an enemy ROB, you sometimes hear "you should double jump and throw it upwards." This is flat-out wrong! The top will actually stay in the air longer from a grounded smash up-throw than that of an airborne one thus keeping it out of ROB's hands for the longest possible time. This is true even if you double jump first! So please, don't compromise your stage control by burning your double jump and throwing the gyro up only for it to come back down faster.
• When you have positioned yourself at the very edge of the ledge with your back facing the blastzone, you can throw the top at your feet when someone is snapping the ledge and if you time it just right, get a 2-frame punish.
• When throwing a top at your feet, the animation is such that ROB turns and throws the top slightly behind himself to the ground but still hits the ground at his center. This is hardly ever useful to know except in one very special circumstance. Normally when you are on the ledge the top will bounce off the ground with a very narrow window for a two frame punish. Well, on Omega Guar Plain, the ledges are curved ever so slightly such that the top doesn't bounce, it just keeps falling straight down. This extends the window for the 2-frame punish greatly and will seriously throw almost anyone off-guard with a stage spike. Works best against up-B's without hitboxes.

Here are the properties of -dropping your top:

• If you are not in hitstun or haven't just finished an airdodge, then you can Z-drop your top.
• If you are in hitstun or just airdodged, you will throw it normally instead.
• The top comes out very very quickly. This can be helpful for getting out of low percentage almost-combos like Sheik's fair strings.
  
• You cannot Z-drop when you are in your Up-B. Instead it will be a normal throw forward. If you need to get out of your Up-B and want to keep the top, you can try down throwing it down, and fastfall recatch it with grab or and aerial.
• Z-dropping the top sends the opponent at more of a downward angle (but still laterally) than a thrown one does.

Bouncing Gyros:

After a gyro has been tossed, if it hits the stage it will enter the bouncing state. Bouncing tops are incredibly useful for setups to rack up damage, confirm kills and play mindgames with your opponent. Many of the techniques found in the aforementioned Metalex video apply here as well.

Here are the properties of a bouncing top:

• Like launched tops, whichever direction you are facing when you throw the top is the direction that the enemy will go regardless of where the top touches them.
  • This is the central reason for bouncing your top as the knockback of the gyro plus the knowledge of where they'll go leads to all sorts of punishes.
• No matter the distance traveled or velocity upon impact of the ground, a bouncing gyro will hop three times (progressively lower, about a third as high as the previous bounce) off the ground before disappearing on the fourth hit. I will call this the 3-Hop Rule. It remains an active hitbox during this duration.
• If it were to hit a platform less than four times and then fall off onto more ground (either carried by forward momentum, pushed by a windbox, platform moved out from under it, or knocked off by an enemy attack), the 3-hop counter resets.
• If an enemy touches a bouncing gyro, it hops straight up and higher off the ground while resetting the 3-hop counter.
  • TIP: You can throw the top on the ground and try throwing out an attack/grab. If the opponent tries to punish you, they will likely hit the top and it will either protect you from being hit completely, or trade but prevent the enemy from follow-ups. If the move is quick enough, you can even pick the top back up. This can be particularly effective when combined with dsmash as dsmash is just barely quick enough to be thrown out after throwing the top down and still pick the top back up. If the opponent gets hit by the early hits of your dsmash, they will likely get drawn to your center, hit the top for extra damage and reset the counter so you can re-grab it, if you whiff, you still have gyro in-hand. If you're slowed down in your dsmash whatsoever, either by hitting a shield, being turned around by a cape or charge it whatsoever, you won't have time to pick it up. There are extremely specific combinations of percent and positioning that will cause the opponent to pop out before the last hit at an angle not particularly advantageous to either party. You can see me pull this off to great effect here.
• If a bouncing top hits or is hit by an opponent, then it becomes harmless to the opponent unless re-tossed (for instance, throwing an enemy into a bouncing top can hit them back towards you, but if you d-tilt them back into it, it has no effect).
• There are weird collision physics with the top that allow it to bounce higher off the ground. It is most easily replicated by first standing on a platform. Start to fast-fall through the platform and on the frame or maybe two after hitting down, throw the top downwards. The gyro will be thrown inside the platform's collision-box and since it's closer to the top of the platform than the bottom, wonky collision-detection pops it upwards to a height slightly higher than Battlefield platforms. This is a somewhat well-known factoid with limited use but has some possible edge-guarding applications.

Your Gyro's Place in the Stale Queue:

If you haven't heard of or know how the stale queue works, I suggest you watch this Beefy Smash Dood's video.

There are two things to consider when understanding how gyro based moves work in the stale queue. First is to realize that the top is an ITEM. Secondly that shooting/throwing/dropping your top counts as a MOVE in your queue.

Now, when I say that the top is an ITEM, that means it cannot become stale and does not receive a freshness bonus on impact. No matter what, tops thrown at the same speed and distance will always do the same amount of damage and knockback whether it's the first throw or the hundredth. This is distinctly different from a projectile, like Link's arrows, which do stale. This is pretty neat cause you have a ranged constant move that you can always count on dealing the same amount of damage. However, it gets cooler than just that.

When I say that a gyro hit counts as a MOVE, it means that it takes a spot in the queue just as any other smash, tilt, special, etc. However unlike those moves, launching or tossing a gyro always happens at a preset velocity which can't be staled (or otherwise altered) by being in the queue.

So if you can't see where I'm going with this:

Since a gyro hit is a MOVE that never stales/changes AND takes up a slot in the queue BUT what's dealing the actual damage is an ITEM that can't stale...then you can see...

GYRO HITS HAVE LITERALLY NO DOWNSIDE IN THE STALE QUEUE. THEY ARE COMPLETELY FREE ENTRIES!

Basically, when you're trying to refresh your regular moves in a match, you don't have to "trade" it by staling another regular move like most other characters do. This can be exceedingly convenient and keeps all of your other moves generally fresh if you mix in good gyro-play.



Charging Your Gyro:

As previously mentioned, the top can be charged by spinning it up to 8 times and then stores it away. We'll call these charges S1 through S8 with each one dealing more damage/knockback than the previous. You can see a spark next to the top for each charge. If you charge it all 8 times and then about a half second more, ROB puts the top away and starts flashing. We'll call this an FC, or Flashing Charge.

IMPORTANT!
When you start flashing, your gyro becomes much, much weaker than an S8. It is in fact weaker than an S7 and S6, being about the equivalent of an S5.


For comparison between an FC and an S8. When shot from the left edge of battlefield at Mario (I would teeter him on the right side of the left platform and drop him down), an FC does about 10.7% but an S8 does 12.5%. An FC will reach to about the center of battlefield when shot this way but an S8 goes a couple top-widths further than that at higher velocity.

So basically, FULLY CHARGED TOPS SUCK! They:

• take longer to charge
• deal less damage than an S8, S7 or even S6
• don't go as far
• don't travel as fast
• spins for less time than an S8, which can be bad and good
• signal to your opponent exactly how charged your top is
• prevent you from gyro-cancelling which limits many of your more advanced options
• flat-out stink

I see a good number of high-level ROBs in tournament fully charge their top when there's objectively no reason to purposely do so. An S8 is roughly equivalent to an S5, so it's really not worth the extra time it takes to charge.

Lastly, If you are hit while charging, you lose all charges/spins that you had on the gyro.

Anyways, I just mentioned gyro-cancelling which ever-so-conveniently is my next topic... in Part 2 of this guide as this part has gone on for far too long. I hope you enjoyed it and learned something new. If I made a mistake or didn't make myself very clear anywhere, feel free to reply below and I can clear that up. This was my first guide and realize it may be rough so criticism is openly welcome. Thank you all and hope you check out the second part of the guide where I'll cover gyro-cancelling and the many, many applications of it.