Cosmo, I've been watching a lot of your matches and you seem to use usmash a lot. I notice most of the time you use it, your opponent SDI's out of it, and then are able to grab you before the animation is over. I just was curious about your strategy with that move. Do you hope to catch them off guard and hope they don't SDI it, that way you have an easy followup?
I see sometimes they will SDI it, but not followup in time, leaving you in perfect range to grab them, but more often than not, they catch you first. Just wanted to know your strategy there.
Upsmash oos is an okay way to move from pressure for a few reasons. notably, it's fast, hits "out" in that you can catch hurtboxes with the edges, and leads to solid punishment after. if they SDI out you can react via grab or dsmash and hope to catch them since the opponent doesn't really have enough time or reaction speed to perform an aerial prior to landing next to zelda. Even if they DI out, you want to use this falling time and landing lag as "stun" because they can't effectively use those frames.
unfortunately, you also have to wait for zelda's upsmash to finish, and then you have to perform her fast awesome downsmash, or her slow as **** grab, whichever you're feeling. if you do either, i'm sure you can see how or why it doesn't always work just because of the timing. it also requires them to over-extend to go inside your shield in the first place so you really only ever want to use it on characters that are okay hitting your shield while moving into you (fox/falco pretty much and no one else) and obviously zelda's upsmash on fox is a joke in the first place.
since you're coming back to the game from a long hiatus, i'd rather you looked at more reliable strategies. gameplay hasn't changed much in the past few years except it has gotten much tighter and players don't **** up like they used to, which is bad news for a character based on the opponent ****ing up.
I recommend wavedashing out of shield. Zelda can play to her major advantages, such as:
1. fairly fast, low lag, disjointed attacks. zelda's attacks themselves are either near useless or very, very good.
2. a very big awesome shield.
thus, using her very big awesome shield, and then sliding out of it ideally to use her better attacks will give you the best edge. start with things like shield > WD out > fsmash, fsmash tends to catch opponents that jump or try to follow your WD.
