Life
Smash Hero
Hey all,
Compare Pit to the other sword characters for a second. Fire Emblem characters outrange Pit and have higher kill power with arguably better mobility to boot. Link and Toon Link trade those for very strong projectile games. Meta Knight is really fast, can clank against aerials with dash attack, and has a transcendent sword.
Pit has a little of all of those things, and then arrows.
Arrows are hard. How hard, you ask?
Consider a Fox using upB below the ledge. We have some pretty good options against Fox in this situation (invincible back air ahoy) but the one thing that can definitely reach him before he starts moving (and therefore starts evading our edgeguard) is an arrow. Now, if you're in a spot where you can just hold down and it'll hit him, that's great. If you're a step to the side, you suddenly need to delay your angling by a frame or two, or your move the angle itself by a few degrees, or else you'll miss him, and now your job just got a whole lot harder.
So how can we ensure that arrow's gonna hit?
Well, there's no easy way to hit every shot. But with practice and understanding, you can reduce the variance in your arrow shots considerably.
I'm only going to go over the basics in this post; if I find any particularly advanced stuff, I'll make another post (or let you tell me about it first, either way).
First thing to understand:
Your arrow does not go in the direction you're pointing the control stick.
Maybe it just took me longer to notice than most people (I've been playing Pit since like Demo 2 and I'm just noticing now), but there's actually a pretty substantial dead zone where your control stick angle can be different from the arrow angle. I don't have a way of looking at the game's data directly, but I do have a ruler and some leftover knowledge from when I took trig in high school; I measured a few arrow angles against the platforms on PS2, and I estimate this dead zone is between 35 and 40 degrees to either side of the arrow's direction (some error introduced by camera angles, curvature of CRT, maybe looseness/tightness of control stick, etc--it's really hard to tell the actual angle and I don't have the patience to keep testing it). So if you hold 45º out you'll barely angle the arrow at all; if you hold straight up you'll get a little steeper than 45º up; if you hold 45º back your arrow will go almost straight up. In short: you have to lead the arrow angle-wise in order to get it where you want it to go. (There's also another dead zone where you're too close to opposite the arrow's angle; I'm assuming it's symmetrical.)
Second thing to understand:
You have blind spots.
Also a pretty obvious thing to longtime Pit players, but it's easy to forget. There are areas where Pit can't easily put an arrow. Those zones are:
1. The four-leaf clover shape made by maximally curved arrows in all cardinal directions (the reason why SH approaches are good against arrows is that they naturally fit into that zone)
2. The area directly below Pit (i.e. between the bottom two leaves of the clover) since he can't shoot arrows down
3. Any place that would require him to shoot through a solid object or downwards through a platform (the area directly next to ledges, the area below a platform if you happen to be in the air near a platform)
If you want to hit a target that's in those zones, you're gonna have to do some fancy looping. I haven't figured out any consistent loop setups--that's an ongoing project--but there you go.
Third thing to understand:
The arrow travels in a wider arc if you don't hold the control stick all the way to the gate.
By only holding the control stick partway in a direction, you can cause the arrow to travel in a much lazier arc than normal. This is useful for hitting targets that are farther out; you can shoot an arrow that would normally go a little wide of the target, but then curl it farther in by pushing the control stick the rest of the way. This could make it much easier to aim than trying to get the proper trajectory instantly; your mileage may vary.
That said: the wideness of the arrow arc is not related to the angle you're holding the control stick in, only its distance from the center. This means that if you wanna loop arrows in a perfect circle, you have a fairly reasonable margin of error in terms of stick angling.
-
Oh, and for those of you that haven't looked at the frame data thread: Pit doesn't loose an arrow instantly from when you let go. You can hold a direction to shoot left, right, or up, let go of B, and then you have six frames where you're locked in but the arrow hasn't spawned yet, meaning that if you move the control stick around in this window, you can start controlling the arrow the moment it comes out.
That's all I've got for arrow basics. Any questions? Stuff you want me to look into?
Compare Pit to the other sword characters for a second. Fire Emblem characters outrange Pit and have higher kill power with arguably better mobility to boot. Link and Toon Link trade those for very strong projectile games. Meta Knight is really fast, can clank against aerials with dash attack, and has a transcendent sword.
Pit has a little of all of those things, and then arrows.
Arrows are hard. How hard, you ask?
Consider a Fox using upB below the ledge. We have some pretty good options against Fox in this situation (invincible back air ahoy) but the one thing that can definitely reach him before he starts moving (and therefore starts evading our edgeguard) is an arrow. Now, if you're in a spot where you can just hold down and it'll hit him, that's great. If you're a step to the side, you suddenly need to delay your angling by a frame or two, or your move the angle itself by a few degrees, or else you'll miss him, and now your job just got a whole lot harder.
So how can we ensure that arrow's gonna hit?
Well, there's no easy way to hit every shot. But with practice and understanding, you can reduce the variance in your arrow shots considerably.
I'm only going to go over the basics in this post; if I find any particularly advanced stuff, I'll make another post (or let you tell me about it first, either way).
First thing to understand:
Your arrow does not go in the direction you're pointing the control stick.
Maybe it just took me longer to notice than most people (I've been playing Pit since like Demo 2 and I'm just noticing now), but there's actually a pretty substantial dead zone where your control stick angle can be different from the arrow angle. I don't have a way of looking at the game's data directly, but I do have a ruler and some leftover knowledge from when I took trig in high school; I measured a few arrow angles against the platforms on PS2, and I estimate this dead zone is between 35 and 40 degrees to either side of the arrow's direction (some error introduced by camera angles, curvature of CRT, maybe looseness/tightness of control stick, etc--it's really hard to tell the actual angle and I don't have the patience to keep testing it). So if you hold 45º out you'll barely angle the arrow at all; if you hold straight up you'll get a little steeper than 45º up; if you hold 45º back your arrow will go almost straight up. In short: you have to lead the arrow angle-wise in order to get it where you want it to go. (There's also another dead zone where you're too close to opposite the arrow's angle; I'm assuming it's symmetrical.)
Second thing to understand:
You have blind spots.
Also a pretty obvious thing to longtime Pit players, but it's easy to forget. There are areas where Pit can't easily put an arrow. Those zones are:
1. The four-leaf clover shape made by maximally curved arrows in all cardinal directions (the reason why SH approaches are good against arrows is that they naturally fit into that zone)
2. The area directly below Pit (i.e. between the bottom two leaves of the clover) since he can't shoot arrows down
3. Any place that would require him to shoot through a solid object or downwards through a platform (the area directly next to ledges, the area below a platform if you happen to be in the air near a platform)
If you want to hit a target that's in those zones, you're gonna have to do some fancy looping. I haven't figured out any consistent loop setups--that's an ongoing project--but there you go.
Third thing to understand:
The arrow travels in a wider arc if you don't hold the control stick all the way to the gate.
By only holding the control stick partway in a direction, you can cause the arrow to travel in a much lazier arc than normal. This is useful for hitting targets that are farther out; you can shoot an arrow that would normally go a little wide of the target, but then curl it farther in by pushing the control stick the rest of the way. This could make it much easier to aim than trying to get the proper trajectory instantly; your mileage may vary.
That said: the wideness of the arrow arc is not related to the angle you're holding the control stick in, only its distance from the center. This means that if you wanna loop arrows in a perfect circle, you have a fairly reasonable margin of error in terms of stick angling.
-
Oh, and for those of you that haven't looked at the frame data thread: Pit doesn't loose an arrow instantly from when you let go. You can hold a direction to shoot left, right, or up, let go of B, and then you have six frames where you're locked in but the arrow hasn't spawned yet, meaning that if you move the control stick around in this window, you can start controlling the arrow the moment it comes out.
That's all I've got for arrow basics. Any questions? Stuff you want me to look into?
Last edited:
