Well it seems that a lot of smashers on here enjoy the cooler techs like swd and the zairs and what not, but I figured Id create this thread to go over the little things in samuses game that make the differences.
Nair: it is actually +1 on shield, so you can L cancel it into jab pressure if you wait long enough to hit on shield.
Bombs: there are many different uses for bombs, but one of the least known uses is that they literally eat away at shields in melee, and in the new 3.5 update as well. You can see Darrell fire a missile towards an opponent and instead of pressing their shield or going for a grab, he runs right up to their shield, bombs on their shield, wavedashes back and starts with the jab pressure on an already weaken shield. What they do not, is they don't even recognize shield and you can short hop bomb over the opponent, where they believe the bomb will hit their shield, but it will put them in hitstun instead, for a free grab when you land and they are hit by it.
Jab Pressure: You need to perform jab cancels to do this properly and no you do not just press down to cancel the jab. Here is the melee thread regarding them, read it and learn them ^_^
http://smashboards.com/threads/jab-cancels.341250/
Missile Cancels: No one has laid this out yet so I will go stage by stage.
(I am only going off memory here, but I will try to come back asap with a more detailed missile stage guide)
Pokemon stadium 2: you need to fire a homing missile as soon as you make the short hop for you to cancel it on the platform, or you wait until the apex of your jump and firing a smash missile. Then fall through and fire another homing missile and repeat.
Yoshis Island/ Wario Ware/ Pokemon Stadium 1: same mechanics as melee, no messy timing with homing vs smash missiles.
Smashville/Dreamland: urghghg this one is difficult, you need to learn how to double jump really quick and fire a missile right after your second jump. The method ESAM uses is just double press the Y button fast, other samuses have said their method is tap jump into y into missile.
Battlefield: same method as Pkmn stadium 2, however you cannot to my knowledge spam a smash missile on the platform, only homing missiles with use of the short hop.
***ESAM's Missile Guide*** http://smashboards.com/threads/missile-tutorial.351642/
^ Adding this in my guide, because the Admin's still have not pinned it, and I give credit where credit it due ^_^
Note: You cannot short hop fast fall missile cancel in PM, you can full hop fast fall missile cancel though.
The crawl:
Buffs from Melee to Brawl: Up air and Up smash, both of which are extremely buffed in brawl and PM for samus, so do not be surprised when your up air out piroritizes your opponents move. Rising up air --> fast falling L canceled fair is a great combo for samus against semi floaty characters.
Chain Grabs: Samus does have a chain grab now, and you should use them. Most of them only exist for about 18-20 percent or so, and the one previously believed to work on fox is strongly DI dependent.
Getting onto the ledge:
Neutral Game:
Up Smash: Relatively the same as 3.02, cleaner animation, same range, I think the knock back was slightly reduced.
Fsmash: 2nd hit now freezes, first hit more knockback than previously in 3.02 but not as much kill potential as fire fsmash.
Fair: Great aerial option, however b/c of samus's fall speed and high short hop, shfflcing this move is not a great option in neutral, but never the less it is still viable, just readable and easily to react to. High priority and good range.
DTilt: 3 stacked hitboxes, that cause horizontal knock back, good for follow up dash attacks and zairs at mid percents.
Shield Poking: A ton of samus's moves have shield poking potential, especially the fire upsmash (specially the last hitbox), nair, and bair.
Canceling the grapple: if you grapple the stage and have an opponent already holding the ledge to force you to hop onto stage, you can press down to release your grapple, to an up B or to another grapple.
Ledge options for samus:
Changing between beams:
Out Of Shield Options:
This is all I can think of for now, but should anything else come to mind I will add to this comprehensive list.
Nair: it is actually +1 on shield, so you can L cancel it into jab pressure if you wait long enough to hit on shield.
Bombs: there are many different uses for bombs, but one of the least known uses is that they literally eat away at shields in melee, and in the new 3.5 update as well. You can see Darrell fire a missile towards an opponent and instead of pressing their shield or going for a grab, he runs right up to their shield, bombs on their shield, wavedashes back and starts with the jab pressure on an already weaken shield. What they do not, is they don't even recognize shield and you can short hop bomb over the opponent, where they believe the bomb will hit their shield, but it will put them in hitstun instead, for a free grab when you land and they are hit by it.
Jab Pressure: You need to perform jab cancels to do this properly and no you do not just press down to cancel the jab. Here is the melee thread regarding them, read it and learn them ^_^
http://smashboards.com/threads/jab-cancels.341250/
Missile Cancels: No one has laid this out yet so I will go stage by stage.
(I am only going off memory here, but I will try to come back asap with a more detailed missile stage guide)
Pokemon stadium 2: you need to fire a homing missile as soon as you make the short hop for you to cancel it on the platform, or you wait until the apex of your jump and firing a smash missile. Then fall through and fire another homing missile and repeat.
Yoshis Island/ Wario Ware/ Pokemon Stadium 1: same mechanics as melee, no messy timing with homing vs smash missiles.
Smashville/Dreamland: urghghg this one is difficult, you need to learn how to double jump really quick and fire a missile right after your second jump. The method ESAM uses is just double press the Y button fast, other samuses have said their method is tap jump into y into missile.
Battlefield: same method as Pkmn stadium 2, however you cannot to my knowledge spam a smash missile on the platform, only homing missiles with use of the short hop.
***ESAM's Missile Guide*** http://smashboards.com/threads/missile-tutorial.351642/
^ Adding this in my guide, because the Admin's still have not pinned it, and I give credit where credit it due ^_^
Note: You cannot short hop fast fall missile cancel in PM, you can full hop fast fall missile cancel though.
The crawl:
- I've seen a ton of different uses for this crawl, but an interesting thing about it is you can do the crawl boost ball on the edge of the stage and not fall off to hit or clank with anyone trying to recover above the stage, and then hold the stick foward to fall off after the boost attack into a falling ice fair (similar to what sheik does in melee)
- While on the ledge, there are three ways to directly go into the crawl, the first being, drop down, double jump, into laying a bomb on the side of the stage, and continue to roll forward, the second being, double jump so you land at the highest point of the double jump and just hold down and forward to proceed in crawl form, lastly Aerial Interrupt samus's up air, and immediately press and hold either down and forward or down and back to go into morph ball.
- Directly out of morphball when not moving, all smash and ground attacks may be used, including foward tilt and jab directly out of crawl attack.
Buffs from Melee to Brawl: Up air and Up smash, both of which are extremely buffed in brawl and PM for samus, so do not be surprised when your up air out piroritizes your opponents move. Rising up air --> fast falling L canceled fair is a great combo for samus against semi floaty characters.
Chain Grabs: Samus does have a chain grab now, and you should use them. Most of them only exist for about 18-20 percent or so, and the one previously believed to work on fox is strongly DI dependent.
Getting onto the ledge:
- When rolling backwards towards the ledge, you can short hop airdodge zair out of your morph ball crawl and will grab the ledge where it seems that you would just zair your opponent, and puts you in a position that your opponent most likely would not have expected.
- The same as before, if you roll backwards towards the ledge, and just let the control stick go back to neutral and samus should fall off the stage and grab ledge
- Wavedash backwards off stage to grab ledge
- PC drop
- SWD empty pivot to grab ledge from across the stage
- Standing on stage no longer cuts it for samus as an edgeguarder in this game (for the most part, low angled forward tilt, low angled fsmash, and up tilt are still great options).
- You need to be active going off stage with nairs, dairs, baires, and ice fairs. In melee samus could use uptilt, low angeled fsmash and ftilt to hit their opponent trying to sweet spot the ledge, because they all reached under the stage, but the sweet spot in PM for ledge grabs is much lower so you need to be a more active edge-guarder, when playing individuals that have their sweet spot for their up B down or going against tether characters.
- Running off stage into a bomb and falling back onto stage for an uptilt is a great way to edgeguard characters like squrtile, falcon, and ganon. Tether recoveries can be interrupted with a well placed bomb in the same fashion, where you can follow up with a dair instead of an uptilt on stage.
Neutral Game:
- Learning samus's neutral game in melee is a MUST, especially against characters that want to just abuse samus with their aerials.
- Missiles, Missiles, and More Missiles, its a great way to start off your matches to see how effective your opponent can deal with them, and its a great way to measure your opponents level of adaptability and competence.
- Crouch cancel Dsmash is one of your best friends, if you don't use it, learn it.
- Spacing with Zairs! Its one of the most broken moves of the game, and its all disjointed :D, once your opponent is forced to approach after the missile spam and zairs everywhere, your game will transition to more close combat.
- Spacing with ftilts and conditioning your opponent to stay in sheild with jab pressure is one of the few ways to get your opponent to respect your spacing.
- Playing with samus is tedious, and you need to be patient, because the second you lose your cool and try to get off against a faster higher priority opponent, you will get messed up.
Up Smash: Relatively the same as 3.02, cleaner animation, same range, I think the knock back was slightly reduced.
Fsmash: 2nd hit now freezes, first hit more knockback than previously in 3.02 but not as much kill potential as fire fsmash.
Fair: Great aerial option, however b/c of samus's fall speed and high short hop, shfflcing this move is not a great option in neutral, but never the less it is still viable, just readable and easily to react to. High priority and good range.
DTilt: 3 stacked hitboxes, that cause horizontal knock back, good for follow up dash attacks and zairs at mid percents.
Shield Poking: A ton of samus's moves have shield poking potential, especially the fire upsmash (specially the last hitbox), nair, and bair.
Canceling the grapple: if you grapple the stage and have an opponent already holding the ledge to force you to hop onto stage, you can press down to release your grapple, to an up B or to another grapple.
Ledge options for samus:
- Rising Fair
- Rising Dair
- Jumping Nair
- Jumping Fair
- Jumping Dair
- Rising zair (note this is not where you air dodge up and grapple at the same time to get an extra amount of distance, I just mean let go of ledge --> jump forward towards the stage --> zair)
- Aerial interrupt (where you let go of the ledge first possible frame you can, jump towards the stage, auto cancel your upair, now you have a few frames of invs you saved from the ledge --> jab, ftilt, fsmash, ect...)
- No impact landings (this is where you time your dj off the ledge to land at the apex of the jump on stage, and you can immediately act out of this once you have landed, however you are not invincible during most of this) and good follow up, --> dsmash.
- Roll onto stage --> up B.
- Wave dash onto stage into --> jab/up b/dsmash/upsmash.
- Just air dodge onto stage.
- Hylian Low Rider (for those of you that are link... wtf is that, its when you shoot a smash missile on the ledge with your dj, and regrab the ledge after the missile on the way back down.)
- \--> another option to hylian low rider to begin with if you can't get is consistently (it was a frame perfect tech in melee, but it is MUCH easier in PM), is just small charge shot on the ledge and regrab on way down.
- Confirmed in Melee but I am not 100% sure about the frame data in PM, but invincible Hax Dashing is possible and VERY useful to implement.
Changing between beams:
- start off a match with the ice moveset, my solution, start off the match with a super wave dash across the stage --> ledge canceled taunt --> presto ice moveset and your opponent may not have even realized what you did.
- The other alternative is either on platforms or the side of the stage, simply run towards them and as your momentum is still carrying you forward, change beams with your taunt, and the ledge will cancel your taunt.
Out Of Shield Options:
- Up B OoS: This is samus's number one option for being shield pressured. Here is how the move works for those who do not fully understand it. Frames 1-5 you are 100% invincible, frame 5 there are 4 hit boxes that appear like corners of a square around samus, Frame 5 you are both invincible and have hixboxes surrounding you... so if you make contact with anyone on that frame... huge chance you will be in the advantageous position.
- Nair OoS: Not used by most samus players, and there is not a huge reason for this besides most sami favor up B OoS. Nair comes out actually a frame faster than Up B OoS, but you are not invincible for those frames OoS when the nair is coming out. (Well you are not invincible during nair OoS at all, but it has more priority and it doesn't leave you in a helpless fall animation after you use it).
- Note: You MUST LET GO OF SHIELD WHILE NAIRING OoS, OTHERWISE YOUR ZAIR WILL JUST COME OUT
- Wavedash: Forward or Back OoS
- Roll/Buffer Roll OoS
- Bomb OoS (Useful option as a mix up for characters trying to pressure your shield from a medium distance)
- Airdodge back or foward OoS
- Shield dropping on platforms: This can be very useful for samus players, and you can directly go into a fast falling up air to hit an opponent trying to hit you shielding on a platform, or a fast falling fair if they are in front of or on top of you.
- As a general rule of thumb down throw for the majority of the cast for samus, it leads into at the very least a dash attack, nair or ice fair. With the possibility of a fire or ice up smash depending on the weight and percentage of the opponent.
- Against fast fallers the better throw is up, which can be followed up with a bair, ice fair, nair, dair, or bomb into nair depending on percent and how they DI. At higher percents against fast fallers, there are some chain grabs, and regrabs based off of poor or nonexistent DI.
This is all I can think of for now, but should anything else come to mind I will add to this comprehensive list.
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