Chevy
Smash Ace
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2014
- Messages
- 736
Edited 3-31-22
THE BASICS
I'm gonna recap a few things that every Samus player should start with before we get to the fun stuff.
MISSILE CANCELLING
Samus' missile animation land cancels. This means 4 frames of landing lag while descending or 0 if your downwards velocity is low enough(no impact landing). I'm not gonna go too in depth myself at the moment but the idea is that you fire a missile a little bit before landing on a platform or the ground. There are better guides already written so I'll just link them for now.
Melee Missile Guide(~95% of this is the same)
ESAM's PM missile video guide(3.02 but once again it's almost identical)
AERIAL INTERRUPT
Samus can manipulate her landing collision to force an early landing while she is rising by inputting an up-air
. Luckily the collision shifts during autocancel frames so we go into the standard 4 frames of landing lag. This is particularly useful as a way to access platforms faster. Or as an invincible ledge option. Keep in mind you can do anything after the 4 frames of lag, this is something to try and work into a lot of different areas of your game, but I'll touch more on it in the advanced stuff.
GRAPPLE JUMP
Samus can input her grapple beam at any point during air dodge, we can exploit this by cancelling an upwards air dodge with the grapple beam to keep all of the upwards momentum of the air dodge with none of the frames that slow her down.
This is mostly a niche recovery tech, but it has application in a couple places.
Inputs: ->(1 frame)(continue holding R)
Ideally you input the A button the frame after the initial air dodge for maximum height. You'll lose substantial height for every extra frame you are late but it's lenient enough to consistently get decent height. A max height grapple jump goes much higher than screw attack, and is sometimes your only way to recover.
Bomb Pressure
Samus can act out of morph bomb frame 1 of the explosion after it either hits something or manually detonates. She can use this to waveland back to the ground or act in the air with anything. You can also use the bomb's KB to push shielding opponents off of ledges, and wavebomb to follow up.
Melee Links that are mostly the same:
Goomy bomb guide
Old Blu2 TAS
Super Wavedash Options
An intentional reproduction of the infamous Melee glitch, PM's SWD functions similarly to it's predecessor. Because of a handful of mechanics new to Brawl, however, we have vastly more options available to us out of it.
A SWD is performed by holding left or right on the control stick on frame 40 of the bomb animation, and the opposite direction by frame 42. You must be grounded during these frames for this to work, however this doesn't mean you need to start on the ground.
The exact X coordinate of your stick when the second input is read controls how far Samus will slide, the best way to do this consistently is with angling, but we have better ways of controlling our distance.
There's a peculiar quirk in the physics engine that causes a character's momentum to be completely reversed if they crawl backwards. When you combine this with the ability to reverse your momentum you can gain near exact control of where Samus' SWD stops past a certain minimum distance.
Because we can reverse our momentum, we can position Samus back on top of the bomb that we used to initiate the SWD. You can also drop another bomb at any point during the SWD and start again. As long as the opponent cannot punish the initial minimum distance before we can act, the mixups are basically endless.
We also have a variety of ways to maintain SWD momentum when transitioning off stage.
Shield
Charge Shot
Charge Cancel
Bomb
Here's some more miscellaneous junk.
Input Flubber Mixup
Platform SWD
SWD OoS
B-Reverse
Reverse B-Reverse
Meme
What's Even Happening
Ledge Blast
More Niche Difficult Stuff
SWMW
SuperWaveDrop(credits to DrinkingFood)
Very Important Tech:
SWW
Optimal Ledge Grab
Ultimate Technique
CHOZO CHEATS
This is a collection of currently underutilized Samus techniques that I believe have a place, major or otherwise, in optimal endgame Samus play. I may add more to this post as I either discover, remember, or am otherwise made aware of something that's worth putting in.
Let's start with the one you all probably already know.
B-REVERSE RECOVERY JUNK
Charge Cancel Climbing
The go-to for extended recoveries when a wall is involved is the wall jump B-reverse charge cancel climb. Let's call it the charge cancel climb, because that's easier and no one has named it proper yet that I've seen.
Charge Cancel Climbing
Inputs:->(wait 5 frames)->(within 4 frames)->(at least 9 frames later)(light press to avoid tech fail window)
Some of you probably already do the above to some extent, but I haven't seen anyone else use missiles this way yet.
If you want to make it at all useful instead of just a slower version of the CCC then you'll have to wavebounce the missile, which means inputting it towards the wall and then B-reversing it outwards. This is helpful whenever you want to simultaneously stall/recover against the wall and put out a hitbox to intercept a recovery. This doesn't come up very often. If it does, however, and you manage to pull it off, you'll be the coolest kid at the venue.
Smash Missile Climbing
Inputs:->(wait 5 frames)->(within 4 frames)
You can also do this with homing missiles.
Homing Missile Climbing(definitely nowhere near perfect)
Inputs:->(wait 5 frames)->(wait 4 frames)->->(within 4 frames)
TAS EDITION
AERIAL INTERRUPT SHAI DROPS(AISD)
I'm not going to explain Shai Dropping here, you can check out all the Melee details right here.
This is the big one that I want to talk about, I believe that is has a strong place in Samus' future metagame, in both Melee and PM. Lucky for us, you can buffer the Shai Drop out of landing lag in PM.
This means it's not incredibly hard to consistently perform if you can already execute aerial interrupts.
Basically just do a normal AI onto a platform, but after inputting the up-air, hold light press shield, and down on the control stick 6 frames before landing lag is over but not after 3 frames before landing lag is over, otherwise you will buffer spot dodge.
Most relevant platforms have a 2 frame window to Aerial Interrupt from full hop, the earlier and optimal window only has 2 frames of startup for up-air, the later window has 3 frames of startup, this is important because if you get the 2nd window for AI you have a frame that you can accidentally buffer shield for if you mistime it.
So if we consider the first actionable frame after landing lag to be frame 0, the inputs looks like this:
WINDOW 1______
-7 (airborne)
-6 (uair startup) = perfect drop
-5 (uair startup) = perfect drop
-4 (autocancel) = perfect drop
-3 (autocancel) = buffer spot dodge
-2 (autocancel) = buffer spot dodge
-1 (autocancel) = buffer spot dodge
0 (actionable) RESULT
___________________________________
WINDOW 2
-8 (airborne)
-7 (uair startup) = buffer shield
-6 (uair startup) = perfect drop
-5 (uair startup) = perfect drop
-4 (autocancel) = perfect drop
-3 (autocancel) = buffer spot dodge
-2 (autocancel)= buffer spot dodge
-1 (autocancel) = buffer spot dodge
0 (actionable) RESULT
_____________________________________
If successfully performed, you will drop through the platform the first frame after your normal landing lag.
This is Samus' fastest way to cancel a missile at ground level.
This also gives her a way to pseudo-shffl aerials.
Keep up the pressure.(this could definitely be performed a lot faster)
This opens up a lot of crazy ambiguous movement and mix-up potential with normal aerial interrupts,
possibilities are pretty wild if you can master this.
CRAWL BUFFERING
Normally, it takes 7 frames before you can input boost ball, and 14 before your hurtboxes are fully shrunk.
Regular Crawling
However, any character can transition directly into their crouch animation from any normal landing lag.
Since Samus has a crawl, she can transition directly into crawl, and subsequently, crawl attack.
Buffering Crawl
Since Missiles land cancel into normal lag, you can missile cancel directly into crawl
Missile Cancel Crawl
You can also use this with aerial interrupts. Autocancel your up-air and hold your control stick at a crawl angle during landing lag.
AI Crawl
This provides a very good option from ledge as well.
Get Creative Dummies
GRAPPLE BRAKING
Samus can cancel her momentum after crouch cancelling a powerful hit or otherwise sliding off stage with unwanted momentum, similar to GnW's bucket braking. You just need to hit as soon as you slide off a ledge, and hope you don't get killed by the tether glitch or fly too fast to catch ledge.
Be Quick
Don't Die
GRAPPLE DROPPING
Samus can perform a grapple drop similar to her grapple jump, just air-dodge down instead of up, and the frame after input z-air. This is a potential mix-up to escape aerial juggles and regain ground positioning.
Hitboxes
This is handy if you find yourself in a bad situation and need to cover yourself and get down quickly.
GRAPPLE POKE RECOVERY
Samus can grapple jump at the very edge of her tether's grab radius but drift into range such that z-air hitbox covers ledge. If you space this correctly you can put out a hitbox before your opponent can react and get a chance at grabbing ledge. This is probably pretty easy to counterplay if your opponent is ready to act quickly after being hit, but the hitbox is unreactable so it's a decent trick.
SECRET Z-AIR ATTACK
On any stage that Samus can get close enough to z-air without latching on to ledge
you can do a grapple jump to poke opponents near ledge.
(There is also a way to simultaneously produce a hitbox and grapple on to the ledge with tether. This happened to me twice over the course of 3 days both times on Smashville but I haven't seen it since. I think it has something to do with rising z-air and moving into z-air's ledge grab zone after inputting it. If someone figures it out I'll add it to the list.)
SWING LANDING
Characters with a grapple can cancel their swinging animation by landing early
this is only really relevant on the Yoshi's stages, but it's another trick to have in the bag.
Grapple Interrupt from Ledge
Samus can interrupt her grapple much like her up-air from ledge, the inputs are a little bit harder and a lot riskier but it nets you up to 10 frames of actionable grounded invincibility vs. 7 from tourney winner waveland or AI.
There are technically 3 different timings for inputting the z-air, however I'm only going to cover the best(and easiest) version, as the others require very specific drift timings and aren't possible to option select with each other, or the good version.
How to perform(on left ledge):
Drop on frame 8 after grabbing ledge.
0 -Drop
1 - (3 frame window to DJ without changing the timing, we'll assume frame perfect here)
2 -
3 -
4 -
5 -
6 -
7 -
8 -
9 -
10 -
11 -
12 -
13-
After this you can stop drifting and Samus will land with 4 frames of lag.
Problem with this technique is that even though the potential reward is moderate, the risk is huge. The benefit of having the 10 extra frames implies you were trying to do something with them. Unfortunately, messing up trying to input, say a d-smash from ledge by grappling too earlier or not drifting enough looks like this. Although this technique does not require your tether be unused off-stage, it does consume it regardless. So if you mess up you are low off-stage with no tether or jump. We can recover with charge climbing if it's a walled stage, but otherwise you're dead.
Forced Tether Hop Mixups
The earlier Samus reaches ledge from her tether when being edge-hogged, the highers the forced jump begins. If you attach to ledge close enough, and reel in fast enough(earliest is the frame you hear the latch), then you will not suffer the normal 8 billion frames of landing lag.
Shield
Roll
Screw Attack
Waveland
Alternatively, you can purposefully wait until Samus is at the end of her tether for low jump mixups. These can be good if your opponent is going for greedier, slower punishes.
Wavedropping
Wavedropping is a universal technique exclusive to PM. It's particularly useful to Samus because of her excellent waveland and generally poor air speed. You essentially just buffer a shield drop out of a perfect waveland on a platform to transfer all of your grounded speed into aerial speed. Samus cannot perfect waveland out of her normal jump. She does, however get a 2 frame window on backwards jump, 2 frames from tourney winner on some stages, and up to 3 from the top of her double jump. You don't technically need to perfect waveland to wavedrop, but it is more effective if you do.
Inputs(going right):
0. input air dodge
1.airborne
2. air dodge landing lag(1)
3. air dodge landing lag(2)
4. air dodge landing lag(3)
5. air dodge landing lag(4)
6. air dodge landing lag(5) <Input down between here--------
7. air dodge landing lag(6)
8. air dodge landing lag(7) <And here------------------------------
9. air dodge landing lag(8) (continue holding down)
10. air dodge landing lag(9) (continue holding down)
11. air dodge landing lag(10) (continue holding down)
12. Airborne(Do whatever you want, you're crusing homeslice!)
Note that you don't need to buffer a shield drop and you can just drop normally, but this incurs squat frames and is not guaranteed to be perfect, so it's a bit slower.
Credit to Jadeyes for the wavedrop ideas.
Dashing Out of Crawl
You might feel like your movement is a little bit restricted while crawling, but you actually have every grounded option available to you while in morph ball(grab is one frame slower because you must shield first). Dashing out of crawl is a little bit awkward but consistently do-able.
Samus can always dash backwards out of crawl, the stand up-animation is cancellable with a turnaround which transitions into a dash.
Unfortunately, the same is not true for dashing forwards. If you enter the stand up-animation you cannot dash forward during it. One way around this is to simply dash backwards first.
The other method is kind of tricky, but if you slide your stick along the bottom ridge of your control gate, you can dash directly out of stationary or backwards crawl. The input seems kind of inconsistent in frame advance, but you can go directly from stationary to just above bottom right notch and usually get it.
Bombstooling
Any time you bomb a grounded opponent you should be able to footstool them before the bomb jump pushes you too far away. If they are under the percent where bomb starts to knock them airborne(55-80ish, character dependent), then you can do a few things during the footstool stun. The best option is generally d-air since it's our best combo starter and puts opponent into crumple at very low percents, which is generally huge damage for us. Here's a spreadsheet for frames to land d-air on every character.
Once bomb starts knocking the opponent airborne, the footstool will put them in a tech situation. If they miss tech or tech in place there is a small window to hit them with a fast fall aerial. If they tech in a direction I don't believe you can follow up. I didn't thoroughly test this vs. every character but the time before fast fall + charge shot startup seems to be enough for any character to shield in time. You can also z-air reset off of missed tech, but this is fairly hard to do(maybe impossible on some characters), only works in a narrow range of percents(small window between bomb knocking airborne and z-air scaling too much to jab reset), and loses to any tech option or ASDI up.
You can also bombstool aerial opponents. This is functionally just a more difficult version of the footstool tech mix-up that every character has access to, perk is that you get an extra 8%. This is a little bit harder than the grounded version as you generally will need to drift towards the bomb's knockback to catch your enemy. Bomb sends slightly up and away so you generally just need to drift a little bit closer to them before footstooling. Careful not to accidentally cross them up with the bomb, this will reverse the angle.
Shield Rebound Push-Off
Hitting an opponent's shield pushes the attacker back, as well as the defender. In PM this rebound will slide off of platform, unlike Melee. We can capitalize on this to get massive frame advantage when positioned near an edge that we can fall off of.
Dash attack is the most versatile tool we have to abuse this quirk with. D-smash has the highest potential advantage. Technically you can use pretty much any grounded normal but in this situations that we are trying to set up we want high shield damage, and large range; these two moves suit us best. Dash attack is up to +9 on block, and d-smash up to +11.
DA bair
(You must hit the front of their shield, otherwise the dash attack will launch you too far for the b-air to connect.)
(Can probably poke here but spacing is very difficult, once you go off with dash attack b-air is your quickest move to catch an OoS option)
DA Push Off N-air
DA Charge Shot Poke
DA Push Off Charge Shot (true confirm because of uninterruptible tumble)
AI DSmash Missile
Pivot Dsmash Charge Shot
Wavelanding
Real Life Application
Most of this is pretty gimmicky, but it's all super safe after the push off so even if your opponent starts to counterplay this stuff it's an advantageous position. These are just a few setups I thought of, you can do practically anything so play around with it cause it's cool as hell.
Bomb Angling
If a bomb collides with the corner of a surface, it'll bounce off at a 45 degree angle. This isn't too useful, but it can cover different space than a regular bomb off stage.
Taunt Cancelling Beam Switch
Samus can shorten her beam switch taunt by edge cancelling after the particle effect appears above her cannon. If you are in port 4 you will always respawn above a Battlefield side platform, allowing easy spacing for a switch on respawn. You can also make the timing very lenient by SWDing to a ledge and taunting.
Respawn Switch and Back
Miscellaneous Missile Stuff
Slide Off Missile
Double Bomb Missile Cancelling
Haxdash Missile - Frame perfect, not even remotely invincible, and a sloppy recording but kinda useful.
THE BASICS
I'm gonna recap a few things that every Samus player should start with before we get to the fun stuff.
MISSILE CANCELLING
Samus' missile animation land cancels. This means 4 frames of landing lag while descending or 0 if your downwards velocity is low enough(no impact landing). I'm not gonna go too in depth myself at the moment but the idea is that you fire a missile a little bit before landing on a platform or the ground. There are better guides already written so I'll just link them for now.
Melee Missile Guide(~95% of this is the same)
ESAM's PM missile video guide(3.02 but once again it's almost identical)
AERIAL INTERRUPT
Samus can manipulate her landing collision to force an early landing while she is rising by inputting an up-air
. Luckily the collision shifts during autocancel frames so we go into the standard 4 frames of landing lag. This is particularly useful as a way to access platforms faster. Or as an invincible ledge option. Keep in mind you can do anything after the 4 frames of lag, this is something to try and work into a lot of different areas of your game, but I'll touch more on it in the advanced stuff.GRAPPLE JUMP
Samus can input her grapple beam at any point during air dodge, we can exploit this by cancelling an upwards air dodge with the grapple beam to keep all of the upwards momentum of the air dodge with none of the frames that slow her down.
This is mostly a niche recovery tech, but it has application in a couple places.
Inputs:
->(1 frame)(continue holding R)Ideally you input the A button the frame after the initial air dodge for maximum height. You'll lose substantial height for every extra frame you are late but it's lenient enough to consistently get decent height. A max height grapple jump goes much higher than screw attack, and is sometimes your only way to recover.
Bomb Pressure
Samus can act out of morph bomb frame 1 of the explosion after it either hits something or manually detonates. She can use this to waveland back to the ground or act in the air with anything. You can also use the bomb's KB to push shielding opponents off of ledges, and wavebomb to follow up.
Melee Links that are mostly the same:
Goomy bomb guide
Old Blu2 TAS
Super Wavedash Options
An intentional reproduction of the infamous Melee glitch, PM's SWD functions similarly to it's predecessor. Because of a handful of mechanics new to Brawl, however, we have vastly more options available to us out of it.
A SWD is performed by holding left or right on the control stick on frame 40 of the bomb animation, and the opposite direction by frame 42. You must be grounded during these frames for this to work, however this doesn't mean you need to start on the ground.
The exact X coordinate of your stick when the second input is read controls how far Samus will slide, the best way to do this consistently is with angling, but we have better ways of controlling our distance.
There's a peculiar quirk in the physics engine that causes a character's momentum to be completely reversed if they crawl backwards. When you combine this with the ability to reverse your momentum you can gain near exact control of where Samus' SWD stops past a certain minimum distance.
Because we can reverse our momentum, we can position Samus back on top of the bomb that we used to initiate the SWD. You can also drop another bomb at any point during the SWD and start again. As long as the opponent cannot punish the initial minimum distance before we can act, the mixups are basically endless.
We also have a variety of ways to maintain SWD momentum when transitioning off stage.
Shield
Charge Shot
Charge Cancel
Bomb
Here's some more miscellaneous junk.
Input Flubber Mixup
Platform SWD
SWD OoS
B-Reverse
Reverse B-Reverse
Meme
What's Even Happening
Ledge Blast
More Niche Difficult Stuff
SWMW
SuperWaveDrop(credits to DrinkingFood)
Very Important Tech:
SWW
Optimal Ledge Grab
Ultimate Technique
CHOZO CHEATS
This is a collection of currently underutilized Samus techniques that I believe have a place, major or otherwise, in optimal endgame Samus play. I may add more to this post as I either discover, remember, or am otherwise made aware of something that's worth putting in.
Let's start with the one you all probably already know.
B-REVERSE RECOVERY JUNK
Charge Cancel Climbing
The go-to for extended recoveries when a wall is involved is the wall jump B-reverse charge cancel climb. Let's call it the charge cancel climb, because that's easier and no one has named it proper yet that I've seen.
Charge Cancel Climbing
Inputs:
->(wait 5 frames)->(within 4 frames)->(at least 9 frames later)(light press to avoid tech fail window)Some of you probably already do the above to some extent, but I haven't seen anyone else use missiles this way yet.
If you want to make it at all useful instead of just a slower version of the CCC then you'll have to wavebounce the missile, which means inputting it towards the wall and then B-reversing it outwards. This is helpful whenever you want to simultaneously stall/recover against the wall and put out a hitbox to intercept a recovery. This doesn't come up very often. If it does, however, and you manage to pull it off, you'll be the coolest kid at the venue.
Smash Missile Climbing
Inputs:
->(wait 5 frames)->(within 4 frames)You can also do this with homing missiles.
Homing Missile Climbing(definitely nowhere near perfect)
Inputs:
->(wait 5 frames)->(wait 4 frames)->->(within 4 frames)TAS EDITION
AERIAL INTERRUPT SHAI DROPS(AISD)
I'm not going to explain Shai Dropping here, you can check out all the Melee details right here.
This is the big one that I want to talk about, I believe that is has a strong place in Samus' future metagame, in both Melee and PM. Lucky for us, you can buffer the Shai Drop out of landing lag in PM.
This means it's not incredibly hard to consistently perform if you can already execute aerial interrupts.
Basically just do a normal AI onto a platform, but after inputting the up-air
, hold light press shield, and down on the control stick 6 frames before landing lag is over but not after 3 frames before landing lag is over, otherwise you will buffer spot dodge.Most relevant platforms have a 2 frame window to Aerial Interrupt from full hop, the earlier and optimal window only has 2 frames of startup for up-air, the later window has 3 frames of startup, this is important because if you get the 2nd window for AI you have a frame that you can accidentally buffer shield for if you mistime it.
So if we consider the first actionable frame after landing lag to be frame 0, the inputs looks like this:
WINDOW 1______
-7 (airborne)
-6 (uair startup)
= perfect drop -5 (uair startup)
= perfect drop -4 (autocancel)
= perfect drop -3 (autocancel)
= buffer spot dodge-2 (autocancel)
= buffer spot dodge-1 (autocancel)
= buffer spot dodge0 (actionable) RESULT
___________________________________
WINDOW 2
-8 (airborne)
-7 (uair startup)
= buffer shield-6 (uair startup)
= perfect drop -5 (uair startup)
= perfect drop-4 (autocancel)
= perfect drop-3 (autocancel)
= buffer spot dodge -2 (autocancel)
= buffer spot dodge-1 (autocancel)
= buffer spot dodge0 (actionable) RESULT
_____________________________________
If successfully performed, you will drop through the platform the first frame after your normal landing lag.
This is Samus' fastest way to cancel a missile at ground level.
This also gives her a way to pseudo-shffl aerials.
Keep up the pressure.(this could definitely be performed a lot faster)
This opens up a lot of crazy ambiguous movement and mix-up potential with normal aerial interrupts,
possibilities are pretty wild if you can master this.
CRAWL BUFFERING
Normally, it takes 7 frames before you can input boost ball, and 14 before your hurtboxes are fully shrunk.
Regular Crawling
However, any character can transition directly into their crouch animation from any normal landing lag.
Since Samus has a crawl, she can transition directly into crawl, and subsequently, crawl attack.
Buffering Crawl
Since Missiles land cancel into normal lag, you can missile cancel directly into crawl
Missile Cancel Crawl
You can also use this with aerial interrupts. Autocancel your up-air and hold your control stick at a crawl angle during landing lag.
AI Crawl
This provides a very good option from ledge as well.
Get Creative Dummies
GRAPPLE BRAKING
Samus can cancel her momentum after crouch cancelling a powerful hit or otherwise sliding off stage with unwanted momentum, similar to GnW's bucket braking. You just need to hit
as soon as you slide off a ledge, and hope you don't get killed by the tether glitch or fly too fast to catch ledge.Be Quick
Don't Die
GRAPPLE DROPPING
Samus can perform a grapple drop similar to her grapple jump, just air-dodge down instead of up, and the frame after input z-air. This is a potential mix-up to escape aerial juggles and regain ground positioning.
Hitboxes
This is handy if you find yourself in a bad situation and need to cover yourself and get down quickly.
GRAPPLE POKE RECOVERY
Samus can grapple jump at the very edge of her tether's grab radius but drift into range such that z-air hitbox covers ledge. If you space this correctly you can put out a hitbox before your opponent can react and get a chance at grabbing ledge. This is probably pretty easy to counterplay if your opponent is ready to act quickly after being hit, but the hitbox is unreactable so it's a decent trick.
SECRET Z-AIR ATTACK
On any stage that Samus can get close enough to z-air without latching on to ledge
you can do a grapple jump to poke opponents near ledge.
(There is also a way to simultaneously produce a hitbox and grapple on to the ledge with tether. This happened to me twice over the course of 3 days both times on Smashville but I haven't seen it since. I think it has something to do with rising z-air and moving into z-air's ledge grab zone after inputting it. If someone figures it out I'll add it to the list.)
SWING LANDING
Characters with a grapple can cancel their swinging animation by landing early
this is only really relevant on the Yoshi's stages, but it's another trick to have in the bag.
Grapple Interrupt from Ledge
Samus can interrupt her grapple much like her up-air from ledge, the inputs are a little bit harder and a lot riskier but it nets you up to 10 frames of actionable grounded invincibility vs. 7 from tourney winner waveland or AI.
There are technically 3 different timings for inputting the z-air, however I'm only going to cover the best(and easiest) version, as the others require very specific drift timings and aren't possible to option select with each other, or the good version.
How to perform(on left ledge):
Drop on frame 8 after grabbing ledge.
0 -
Drop1 -
(3 frame window to DJ without changing the timing, we'll assume frame perfect here)2 -
3 -
4 -
5 -
6 -
7 -
8 -
9 -
10 -
11 -
12 -
13-
After this you can stop drifting and Samus will land with 4 frames of lag.
Problem with this technique is that even though the potential reward is moderate, the risk is huge. The benefit of having the 10 extra frames implies you were trying to do something with them. Unfortunately, messing up trying to input, say a d-smash from ledge by grappling too earlier or not drifting enough looks like this. Although this technique does not require your tether be unused off-stage, it does consume it regardless. So if you mess up you are low off-stage with no tether or jump. We can recover with charge climbing if it's a walled stage, but otherwise you're dead.
Forced Tether Hop Mixups
The earlier Samus reaches ledge from her tether when being edge-hogged, the highers the forced jump begins. If you attach to ledge close enough, and reel in fast enough(earliest is the frame you hear the latch), then you will not suffer the normal 8 billion frames of landing lag.
Shield
Roll
Screw Attack
Waveland
Alternatively, you can purposefully wait until Samus is at the end of her tether for low jump mixups. These can be good if your opponent is going for greedier, slower punishes.
Wavedropping
Wavedropping is a universal technique exclusive to PM. It's particularly useful to Samus because of her excellent waveland and generally poor air speed. You essentially just buffer a shield drop out of a perfect waveland on a platform to transfer all of your grounded speed into aerial speed. Samus cannot perfect waveland out of her normal jump. She does, however get a 2 frame window on backwards jump, 2 frames from tourney winner on some stages, and up to 3 from the top of her double jump. You don't technically need to perfect waveland to wavedrop, but it is more effective if you do.
Inputs(going right):
0.
input air dodge1.
airborne2.
air dodge landing lag(1)3.
air dodge landing lag(2)4.
air dodge landing lag(3)5.
air dodge landing lag(4)6.
air dodge landing lag(5) <Input down between here--------7.
air dodge landing lag(6)8.
air dodge landing lag(7) <And here------------------------------9.
air dodge landing lag(8) (continue holding down)10.
air dodge landing lag(9) (continue holding down)11.
air dodge landing lag(10) (continue holding down)12. Airborne(Do whatever you want, you're crusing homeslice!)
Note that you don't need to buffer a shield drop and you can just drop normally, but this incurs squat frames and is not guaranteed to be perfect, so it's a bit slower.
Credit to Jadeyes for the wavedrop ideas.
Dashing Out of Crawl
You might feel like your movement is a little bit restricted while crawling, but you actually have every grounded option available to you while in morph ball(grab is one frame slower because you must shield first). Dashing out of crawl is a little bit awkward but consistently do-able.
Samus can always dash backwards out of crawl, the stand up-animation is cancellable with a turnaround which transitions into a dash.
Unfortunately, the same is not true for dashing forwards. If you enter the stand up-animation you cannot dash forward during it. One way around this is to simply dash backwards first.
The other method is kind of tricky, but if you slide your stick along the bottom ridge of your control gate, you can dash directly out of stationary or backwards crawl. The input seems kind of inconsistent in frame advance, but you can go directly from stationary to just above bottom right notch and usually get it.
Bombstooling
Any time you bomb a grounded opponent you should be able to footstool them before the bomb jump pushes you too far away. If they are under the percent where bomb starts to knock them airborne(55-80ish, character dependent), then you can do a few things during the footstool stun. The best option is generally d-air since it's our best combo starter and puts opponent into crumple at very low percents, which is generally huge damage for us. Here's a spreadsheet for frames to land d-air on every character.
Once bomb starts knocking the opponent airborne, the footstool will put them in a tech situation. If they miss tech or tech in place there is a small window to hit them with a fast fall aerial. If they tech in a direction I don't believe you can follow up. I didn't thoroughly test this vs. every character but the time before fast fall + charge shot startup seems to be enough for any character to shield in time. You can also z-air reset off of missed tech, but this is fairly hard to do(maybe impossible on some characters), only works in a narrow range of percents(small window between bomb knocking airborne and z-air scaling too much to jab reset), and loses to any tech option or ASDI up.
You can also bombstool aerial opponents. This is functionally just a more difficult version of the footstool tech mix-up that every character has access to, perk is that you get an extra 8%. This is a little bit harder than the grounded version as you generally will need to drift towards the bomb's knockback to catch your enemy. Bomb sends slightly up and away so you generally just need to drift a little bit closer to them before footstooling. Careful not to accidentally cross them up with the bomb, this will reverse the angle.
Shield Rebound Push-Off
Hitting an opponent's shield pushes the attacker back, as well as the defender. In PM this rebound will slide off of platform, unlike Melee. We can capitalize on this to get massive frame advantage when positioned near an edge that we can fall off of.
Dash attack is the most versatile tool we have to abuse this quirk with. D-smash has the highest potential advantage. Technically you can use pretty much any grounded normal but in this situations that we are trying to set up we want high shield damage, and large range; these two moves suit us best. Dash attack is up to +9 on block, and d-smash up to +11.
DA bair
(You must hit the front of their shield, otherwise the dash attack will launch you too far for the b-air to connect.)
(Can probably poke here but spacing is very difficult, once you go off with dash attack b-air is your quickest move to catch an OoS option)
DA Push Off N-air
DA Charge Shot Poke
DA Push Off Charge Shot (true confirm because of uninterruptible tumble)
AI DSmash Missile
Pivot Dsmash Charge Shot
Wavelanding
Real Life Application
Most of this is pretty gimmicky, but it's all super safe after the push off so even if your opponent starts to counterplay this stuff it's an advantageous position. These are just a few setups I thought of, you can do practically anything so play around with it cause it's cool as hell.
Bomb Angling
If a bomb collides with the corner of a surface, it'll bounce off at a 45 degree angle. This isn't too useful, but it can cover different space than a regular bomb off stage.
Taunt Cancelling Beam Switch
Samus can shorten her beam switch taunt by edge cancelling after the particle effect appears above her cannon. If you are in port 4 you will always respawn above a Battlefield side platform, allowing easy spacing for a switch on respawn. You can also make the timing very lenient by SWDing to a ledge and taunting.
Respawn Switch and Back
Miscellaneous Missile Stuff
Slide Off Missile
Double Bomb Missile Cancelling
Haxdash Missile - Frame perfect, not even remotely invincible, and a sloppy recording but kinda useful.
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