Airdodge in jumpsquat

[Scuba Steve]

After seeing lots of small differences in the way Melee and PM work, one of my favorites was how PM would let you airdodge out of IASA, unlike melee. This small tweak opened up several new options for many characters, notably Ganon and Bowser who can make good use of perfect wavelands out of aerials that were otherwise impossible in Melee.

After noticing this, I tried to think of other small tweaks like this that could also open up the game a little bit more. The ability to airdodge during jumpsquat came to mind. The main thing this would accomplish is homogenizing the speed of wavedashes amongst the cast. Not in terms of distance or anything like that, but all wavedashes could be done in the same amount of frames with any character. This could help out characters with long jumpsquats have better grounded movement options since they're no longer stuck in a huge jumpsquat animation any time they wavedash.

Along with helping out the fatties with grounded movement, this would also make wavedashing stupid easy to execute, not that it's extremely technically demanding as it is now. This could actually be a dealbreaker with some people too though since some people sneer at the idea of making things easier to execute in vidyagames.

Anybody have any ideas on this? Interested to hear any opinions.

 

[Bazkip]

You're still on the ground during jumpsquat so I don't see how this would be possible.

 

[ECHOnce]

Afaik, can't be done. Characters are considered grounded during jumpsquat, and can only air dodge when airborne. That said, maybe you could make the game treat characters like they're already airborne during their jumpsquat animation, but that's not really what you want. That would only be solving things visually. Mechanically, you'd be screwing the longer jumpsquatters over; if they get hit during this period of being airborne but visually grounded, this would worsen their DI (can't remember if this concerns more than just crouch canceling, but I've read it up somewhere), and while uncommon, you'd be removing their opportunity to SDI down and tech the hit (you can't tech onto surfaces that would change your "grounded/airborne state" ...only "grounded state --> ground/platform" techs or "airborne state --> wall" techs are allowed). It's also just bad game design...when balancing game mechanics like this, there's a fine line between cleaning things up (player-, meta-friendly) and complicating things unnecessarily (unintuitive).

If anything, I'd advocate for the jumpsquat times to be reduced or more homogenized roster-wide (mostly/only shortening it). Since the majority of the cast is spread out between 3-5 frame jumpsquats, I see no reason for Bowser, Ganon, and whoever else with 6 frame jumpsquats to get theirs reduced by a measly frame, if that's what the people (who main them) want. Wouldn't significantly change meta, but it would allow players to more easily go back and forth between characters with different jumpsquat lengths --> wavedash timings.