No, I never wanted to increase the power of grabs as far as knockback or shear killing strength like in 64. I wanted more hit stun so that grabs actually lead to things instead of nothing. Like Project said, Brawls grabs are laughable.
And yes, grabbing is really powerful now as far as ease with shield grabbing but its something we've had to deal with and this just means you still cant be stupid on your approach. Shield grabbing was in melee unless you were a space animal. Dont expect to be able to approach with any move wildly for shield pressure and not expect to be punished for it unless your playing 64.
When I said "he", I was referring to C_Ferris32, who wanted to increase grab power as an anti-shield measure.
Of course we'll still have to be careful with our approached, but shieldstun will let us actually approach in a variety of viable ways without getting punished with extreme ease. Right now, Brawl favours the defense to the extreme, forcing the approaching player to far more careful and precise. It's an extremely unbalanced mechanism that makes one side inherently have to try harder then the other side even in a match of equal skill level.
Shield grabbing in Melee wasn't as dominant as it is in Brawl, but of course it was still in. It has to be, it's needed defense mechanism. But Melee struck a balance in keeping shield grabbing viable (so that the approacher had to be smart) but also tricky due to shieldstun and shield pressure (so the defender had to be smart). It meant both offense and defense had to be focused at all times.
It was like I said before, the defense will never be too weak, and the shield grab will always be an important defense tool. It just shouldn't be so easy to be defensive like it is in Brawl currently. And for that, it's the shield that needs to be fixed, NOT the grab. I just wanted to emphasize that. But we agree on all this kupo, I think we're just making points the other already agrees with, heh.
Or, if you were smart and could jab, Sheik, Marth (u- or d-tilt rather), Falcon, Samus, Peach, maybe even Ganon.
If someone could kindly explain why they think it'd be better otherwise, I actually wouldn't mind playing with grabs and shieldstun the way they are. It's easier to punish approaches, but won't do as much unless the person is good at reading your next reaction.
Aside from what I wrote above, there are a couple more points I'll add in response to you, Yeroc.
It's true that Melee had shieldgrabs too and they were always something to be watched out for.
In Melee, though, the shield drop lag was what let you prevent constant out of shield attacks. It was what let you get in those jabs or fast attacks after getting your opponent to drop the shield.
In Brawl, the shield drop lag is practically non-existent. What this means is that, in Brawl, not only can you laglessly grab out of shields, but there are a lot of other things that can be done too, often very dangerous things like DDD's Utilt.
So you can't attempt to punish a shield with an attack in a lot of cases, because you'll have lag from the attack you used to hit the shield while the defender will laglessly attack you.
The ease of the Perfect Shield adds to that, because it is completely and rapidly lagless and extremely easy to pull off and lets you do anything after it.
On top of that, Brawl is slow enough that it makes reading and predicting a lot easier than it should be, and this is a massive imbalance when you look at how fast you're allowed to react out of shields and Perfect Shields. Especially when you look at how the lack of shieldstun allows you to continuously conserve your shield so that you never have to be afraid. You never have to fear being put into a bad spot by a shield because the shield gives you tons of stunless freedom.
Grabs are fine. I don't know why we're talking about them still.
Shield grabs in Melee are not the defensive problem.
There's nothing wrong with grabs. There are things wrong with other things - grabs just get affected.
No, shields are the problem.
What I was saying earlier about shields...
Shield pressure is an obvious yes, shield-break combos is a no. You can avoid shield-break combos simply by not letting shieldstun get too high. Combination of things like auto L-cancel with simply doubling shieldstun from what it is now probably won't create shield-break combos, so it is totally fine. You had to use some pretty specific stuff to pull it off in melee and those "tricks" aren't in Brawl so I doubt we'd see shield break combos unless we were specifically looking to introduce so much shieldstun to create shield break combos. Which is what I don't want, obviously.
I think you missed my previous post about this.
I said in that post that shield-break combos in Melee were actually more often just shield pressure combos. And there were rarely actually combos, just a combination of a multi-hit attack followed by another attack if you managed to get the transition done laglessly.
Those tricks are still in Brawl, because one of those tricks was just Yoshi's Dair. In Brawl, you can go from Yoshi's Dair to an Utilt easily. That's a shield pressure combo. If the opponent isn't quick enough to react, then the Yoshi could pull a Dair->Dair and get a shieldbreak combo.
So such shield-breaking possibilities will definitely exist with shieldstun. It's not a matter of us putting it in, it's a matter of people having the technical ability to do it on an opponent which is too slow or unaware to react properly.
They were rare in Melee. Exceedingly rare. You never saw them happen in competitive play. It should be the same in Brawl+, and the Brawl+ Project needs to make sure of that. Shield-break "combos" don't break the game and it's not something we should be afraid of, not if they're incorporated in Brawl+ like they were in Melee.
And power shielding has little to do with how strong grabs are. If you powershield a move, you can pretty much do whatever you want afterwards, not just grabs. You can make the timing a little harder, I don't care- a person good enough to powershield most things is going to be seriously aided both on the offense and on the defense and there is little to be done about that.
Perfect Shielding is broken entirely. And I've been saying the whole time that it is FAR too easy as it is and needs to have the timing made more difficult.
In Melee, you pretty much never saw a powershield. The powershield was never something anyone relied upon in Melee like they do in Brawl. You never saw the powershield intentionally being used in competitive play, it was always luck.
Brawl's Perfect Shield is ridiculous. It's extremely powerful and extremely easy. Something that strong shouldn't be so easily pulled off.
Now, we don't have to make the timing as impossible as Melee timing was, but it should not be something people rely on like it currently is in Brawl.
FINALLY:
Brawl grabs aren't useless. Just some are more useful than others. Luigi has great follow-ups out of his dthrow, Kirby's fthrow can chain into aerials, especially his uair, and then be followed up with another grab and fthrow, repeated depending on how fast the opponent falls. It's not a combo, but fthrow to chasing with the aerial hammer is a good way to get kills too. Then there are the throws that can kill- Squirtle, anyone? Not every throw is going to be as useful in comboing and killing, some characters are going to have no real awesome followup out of a throw, like Sheik, but she still gets good use out of throws all of the time because of her fast/good grab range makes it a safe and easy option for damage.
Same thing goes with the high "knockback" on moves preventing combos in brawl unless we introduced more hitstun. Combos didn't appear out of nothing in melee either, you did have to use the moves that had either fixed(or partially fixed) knockback, weak knockback, or sent them in a very ideal trajectory that was easy to follow up on based on the speed of your character(part of which was wavedashing) and the different lag-cancelling tools at hand. There are still fixed knockback moves in brawl, weak knockback moves, and fast/mobile characters in brawl, and when combined the right way they really don't suffer at creating momentum at all. This is why I've been repeatedly been saying I don't think more hitstun is actually needed once you fix the broken attack/airdodge halfway out of hitstun part that could cause you to get hit in retaliation of the lag of your own move(kinda like the result of what a perma-crouch cancel would cause). Sometimes I feel as if I'm playing an entirely different game from some of you. Sure, tweak the hitstun around a bit, but you're really not going to much more out of what is already there unless you break it.
Agree with everything except the Melee grab thing, which kupo already responded to.
But I want to respond to the part in bold and underlined:
That, I believe, is what the current hitstun code does. But it doesn't seem to be doing enough, and that's why there's talk of actually increasing the hitstun in general, if possible.
I have a suggestion for OP.
Can you fix Ness', Lucas' and Wario's grab release animations? Like for Ness and Lucas, increase their distance of their release and decrease their time length.
For Wario, make it so his jumpbreak moves backwards. (not just straight up)
Ideally, we should change the grab-release-into-the-air animation the same as it was in Melee. In other words, it would just release you into a regular jump. Brawl's unique release animations are full of problems.
Unfortunately, this is something that likely won't be able to fit into the final product due to the 256 lines of code limit and other things having more priority.
OMG long post in long...
