Can I get a critique on my Doc v. Fox? I played several $1 MMs with a friend, and the set count went 1-3, 3-2, 3-0, 2-3. Only two of the matches were recorded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ACWS3_SRvs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKWkPREJ_eo
Apologies in advance for the poor quality and bad music.
I know I have a lot of bad habits. I should grab instead of cc -> Dsmash or WD back -> Fsmash, and my ledge options are predictable. Any advice would be appreciated.
I clicked the first match, heard the music, and lost my ****.
After watching I can say I have way more things to say about the Fox, but I'll give you some advice. Stop rolling. You get pressured into rolls easily, and part of it is you do it accidentally I think when you shield and hitstun and all, but other times you just throw out a move that whiffs and you roll backwards on reaction. Quit it. Work on getting your WDs longer and lower to the ground, this will help your mobility. Do not approach while dropping the pill. WAY too many attacks in this game eat the pill and hit you too. Retreating pill or follow the pill after you are out of lag. Fastfall way more often, you don't enough. Work on your OoS game, Usmash especially. WD OoS instead of roll. Consider usmash after a uthrow (you had it pretty easy because that Fox had bad DI). Imo uthrow usmash uair dsmash is way better at mid %s than hoping to extend the chaingrab. More wavelands. Shoot a pill in the air? Waveland. Did a rising bair? Waveland.
Learn to sweetspot correctly. Your head should not go above the edge, Doc has them magic hands. You need better survival DI but that's a harder thing to practice, it comes mostly with experience. Good for using ftilt but bad times for it. Poke safely at shields with it, if they are going to ledgehop an aerial, use it. Works extremely well vs characters like Marth who generally can ledgehop an aerial. Get on the edge and bair them if they are below stage level. If they are level with the stage and up B, jump off towards them to cape, it covers if they go straight or high. You still miss l-cancels sometimes. Fix that.
Work on your platform game. Go on every stage and teach yourself the exact timing to waveland out of a jump to most quickly get up to platforms in order to techchase. Way better option than trying to harass with an aerial. Stop trying to use upB offensively, even oos it should be a last resort move. You never use dair. Fullhop them to stuff jumps. I like using dair -> uair/bair or dairing the top of a shield and wavelanding away. It is a more situational thing but is extremely good if you notice the other player jumps always to get out of their shield.
Don't ledgehop an aerial unless they have whiffed. Doc gets poked away too easily. Get into a habit of immediately ledgedashing back onstage when you have invincibility. You need to work on your gimp game in general, as well as getting onto the edge asap to get clutch edgehogs.
A lot of this stuff will just come from playing, but there is one thing everyone must learn in their pursuit of greatness that few ever fully obtain, but is absolutely required if you want to keep playing Doc and not feel the oppression of his limitations on you, especially when looking at just about every character above him. The key to being good at this game is by playing a very conservative game. By this I mean all those times you throw a pill and rush in with an aerial or the like are times where the only thing stopping you from being punished is his skill, he has full advantage in those moments to decide the outcome of the exchange. So get this into your head that the goal of Melee is to successfully bait and then punish your opponent above all else. Players that win by aggression do so by absolutely outplaying their opponent to the point of getting hard reads or overwhelming them, but they are still baiting their opponent. They are baiting the jumps, the rolls, and the fear to do predictable things as they punish. So think about these words long and hard, and think about them while watching videos of great Doc players like Shroomed. Think about it every time you jump towards the other player with the hopes of landing a hit and constantly remind yourself that waiting will make you into the player you want to be if you have the mental fortitude to stick with it.
