Can SHFFL fine in practice, but screw up a lot while playing?

[Viking Milo]

9 out of 10 times I'll do it fine, but when I play someone I'll screw up the short hop or the fast fall. Does anyone else get this problem or what can I do to solve this?

 

[Elyssa Xey Hexen]

I think you might simply be lacking practice in both playing against people and the actual repetition of this motion.

If you practice on your own its different than when you play a CPU and diff. still when ou play a person. If you have to concentrate a lot on trying to perform these actions correctly you still have a ways to go. When you play a person there is an awful lot going on and you do not have time to concentrate on trying to SHFFL correctly. Thus, you might be getting distracted by other things in the match and the fact you have to consciously think about doing the SHFFL right it ends up failing because you are not thinking about it..

This is very common for me at trying to learn something new. It takes awhile for something to become ingrained and more of a muscle memory thing. Eventually, I think it gets to the point where you give mild consideration to your action. As in you do not have to think about the full motion or timings. You simply do it. Rather your mind gets to the point of doing a triage of the motion. If I am Marth and I start a SH. My mind will play the role of trying to consider when I should follow through with the aerial, L-cancel, fast fall. Sometimes you have no reason to follow through and simply fast fall down back to the ground with no aerial.

This way your body eventually gets to the point where you know how to perform the actions when your mind say do this action and with subtle variations in timings. However, that takes a long time to get those sort of motor skills brought-up to pace. So, keep practicing it and trying playing against people with this as well.

 

[GenNyan]

1. The timing is different when you whiff, hit a body, or hit a shield. You need to practice all 3. Timing is also different for different attacks (sometimes).

2. There's too much pressure and you're not confident enough. Just do shffls on a lvl 1 cpu for as long as it takes to get it 100%.

3. Break it up into pieces and practice each component separately. Then piece them back together.

 

[Stride]

1. The timing is different when you whiff, hit a body, or hit a shield. You need to practice all 3. Timing is also different for different attacks (sometimes).

Shields and hurtboxes have the same attacker hitlag, and the same defender hitlag with the exception that shields don't gain the 1.5x multiplier for electric element attacks; so the timing for a given hit is the same regardless of whether you connect with a shield or a hurbox.

To expand upon what you said: the only variable that determines hitlag is damage, so attacks that differ in damage by more than a few points (not every point of damage will make a difference since hitlag is a number of frames and therefore must be an integer; the value is floored to give the final hitlag amount) will have different hitlag.