Q&A Link's Take Over - Q&A and General Link Discussion

[Thor]

Should I use up smash more often because of it's low end lag? Like in neutral?

If by in neutral you mean as a read, what Hunybear said is correct [utilt is much better].

However, usmash doesn't have enough lag to have people shield drop punish it on block [although they might be able to between the hits?], so it's a decent tool for poking at people on platforms. That's not what most people would call neutral, though.

 

[Hunybear]

Just watch A Link named SlykBacc (4serial) beat Saus's Falco. Maybe Saus will come back and play a good charecter now ;P

 

[ChivalRuse]

Oh the irony ...

 

[garotis]

Hunybear

Do you have a link to a video of the match? Last time I watched them play, SAUS destroyed 4serial, with SAUS getting roughly 10 million shine-grabs during the set.

 

[Hunybear]

Hunybear

Do you have a link to a video of the match? Last time I watched them play, SAUS destroyed 4serial, with SAUS getting roughly 10 million shine-grabs during the set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL9DNCf7kv4&index=95&list=PLfVxNtOaCCFmSUKP7VDn54pACY2Bc_upK

 

[garotis]

Hunybear Thanks. Tried searching on YouTube but all I could find was the one I linked to earlier.

 

[Thor]

Does anyone have links to old anti-Fox stuff? I can't seem to play that matchup very well anymore... nowadays I usually just go straight to my pretty bad Samus and spend matches looking for chances to get a (usually wavedash back or CC) dsmash/dtilt and start a punish [mixed in with ftilts, jump reads, missiles, and charging charge shots] and it still somehow works so much better than whatever I did [or do] with Link...

Considering rewatching old sets of myself or sets of other Links vs Fox as well... anyone have any good ideas for sets to look at?

On an unrelated note: There was discussion a while back on why tethers break... did we ever figure that one out? I feel like when I tether as Link it's been breaking more than usual lately... wonder if I'm just tethering wrong [trying to push things too far or something] or if I'm like holding down A/Z too long and that somehow breaks the tether.

 

[Hunybear]

Does anyone have links to old anti-Fox stuff? I can't seem to play that matchup very well anymore... nowadays I usually just go straight to my pretty bad Samus and spend matches looking for chances to get a (usually wavedash back or CC) dsmash/dtilt and start a punish [mixed in with ftilts, jump reads, missiles, and charging charge shots] and it still somehow works so much better than whatever I did [or do] with Link...

Considering rewatching old sets of myself or sets of other Links vs Fox as well... anyone have any good ideas for sets to look at?

On an unrelated note: There was discussion a while back on why tethers break... did we ever figure that one out? I feel like when I tether as Link it's been breaking more than usual lately... wonder if I'm just tethering wrong [trying to push things too far or something] or if I'm like holding down A/Z too long and that somehow breaks the tether.

I actually tried to figure out how tether works for a few months before giving up </3 lol. I'm not the most knowledgable at that kind of thing and the people who are don't care about helping Link... One guy "not calling him out". Said he'd help if the character was worth advancing but because it's link I should go suck a **** ^_^. Anyway I'm still learning about how melee is coded and what not so it won't be long before I can archive more link info.

On a side note because links Nair beats Falcons Nair and sets up sick jab presser I've started using it way more in the MU. This has netted me so many sheild pokes and it's not hard to react to roles. this MU is hardly a problem anymore after watching some Christian videos and figuring out how he gets so much space to pull bombs.

 

[Thor]

I actually tried to figure out how tether works for a few months before giving up </3 lol. I'm not the most knowledgable at that kind of thing and the people who are don't care about helping Link... One guy "not calling him out". Said he'd help if the character was worth advancing but because it's link I should go suck a **** ^_^. Anyway I'm still learning about how melee is coded and what not so it won't be long before I can archive more link info.

On a side note because links Nair beats Falcons Nair and sets up sick jab presser I've started using it way more in the MU. This has netted me so many sheild pokes and it's not hard to react to roles. this MU is hardly a problem anymore after watching some Christian videos and figuring out how he gets so much space to pull bombs.

2 things

1) Was that Kadano or someone else? Because that sounds like a Kadano thing lol.

2) Falcon can space his nair to beat Link nair, and he can scoop uair you. But nair is amazing in the MU [it often trades (which is favorable because you can press nair again and it's faster) or can beat out nair startup or go between nair hits, and that helps a ton].

The only matchup I now don't like playing is the Fox MU [which I may need to look at old stuff and rebuild my anti-Fox game quite a lot... or just switch...?]

I also technically kinda dislike ICs MU, but that's because I don't find platform camping them particularly interesting [but winning is more fun/interesting than not, so I do it, it just can get tedious vs a lot of ICs].

 

[4Serial]

Tether seems to break pretty often if I'm carrying a lot of momentum when trying to do it or the hookshot hits really high at the tip of the edge.

Against Falcon nairing is really good if you can cross up his shield and instant shffl nair right after to call him out of doing his own shffl oos. Or cross up into usmash behind him because it'll catch him sometimes and set up for something juicy. SAUS is really good at utilizing usmash against falcon and catching him out of approaches. Jabbing against Falcon is good to stuff his offense but his sh perfectly avoids jabs and he can get a dair or anything really.

Against Fox it helps to di u throw behind and sdi uair the opposite way or up and away at higher percents. And sdi drill and shine.
I've been experimenting lately with FD and stadium vs spacies because it's usually considered bad for Link, but I've seen germ and j666 actually favouring those stages against Fox. I feel like if my punishes and edgeguards are on point, it's not such a bad stage, but it's completely dependent on confidence and landing grabs. I'd still prefer Yoshi's or FoD or Battlefield though.

I don't really mind the IC's MU because I think it's a good test of patience and forces you to not do dumb things. Getting wobbled shouldn't put you on tilt any more than Sheik chaingrab death comboing you or Falcon uthrow knee arrrggghhh that one is the most imo

 

[Hunybear]

2 things

1) Was that Kadano or someone else? Because that sounds like a Kadano thing lol.

2) Falcon can space his nair to beat Link nair, and he can scoop uair you. But nair is amazing in the MU [it often trades (which is favorable because you can press nair again and it's faster) or can beat out nair startup or go between nair hits, and that helps a ton].

The only matchup I now don't like playing is the Fox MU [which I may need to look at old stuff and rebuild my anti-Fox game quite a lot... or just switch...?]

I also technically kinda dislike ICs MU, but that's because I don't find platform camping them particularly interesting [but winning is more fun/interesting than not, so I do it, it just can get tedious vs a lot of ICs].

naww it wasn't kadano. also i do get scooped sometimes by up air but falcon doesnt normaly use approching u-airs. no ones really caught on to it yet, but if i incentivizes falcon to stay closer i'll still will use nair as an anti air. that jab and u-tilt. I really only get punished if they DD around it.

 

[Thor]

Tether seems to break pretty often if I'm carrying a lot of momentum when trying to do it or the hookshot hits really high at the tip of the edge.

Against Falcon nairing is really good if you can cross up his shield and instant shffl nair right after to call him out of doing his own shffl oos. Or cross up into usmash behind him because it'll catch him sometimes and set up for something juicy. SAUS is really good at utilizing usmash against falcon and catching him out of approaches. Jabbing against Falcon is good to stuff his offense but his sh perfectly avoids jabs and he can get a dair or anything really.

Against Fox it helps to di u throw behind and sdi uair the opposite way or up and away at higher percents. And sdi drill and shine.
I've been experimenting lately with FD and stadium vs spacies because it's usually considered bad for Link, but I've seen germ and j666 actually favouring those stages against Fox. I feel like if my punishes and edgeguards are on point, it's not such a bad stage, but it's completely dependent on confidence and landing grabs. I'd still prefer Yoshi's or FoD or Battlefield though.

I don't really mind the IC's MU because I think it's a good test of patience and forces you to not do dumb things. Getting wobbled shouldn't put you on tilt any more than Sheik chaingrab death comboing you or Falcon uthrow knee arrrggghhh that one is the most imo

I don't get tilted when ICs wobble me, I just don't particularly enjoy having to platform camp someone for 12 minutes to win a set. It's the same reason I don't enjoy the Little Mac matchup in Smash 4 lollollol.

Sheik chaingrabs don't bother me because if we ever get her with 2 or 3 uairs it can often convert to a stock, and Falcon's uthrow knee may be free, but there are still some decent DI mixups for it [DI offstage at the edge, DI straight up or up and slightly behind or straight behind onstage, sometimes you can actually manage to tech the top platform] (although it does sometimes make me shake my head when his fair can KO at 60 and ours won't at 160 LOL).

I'll try experimenting with Link on FD vs Fox I guess... I've seen The Germ take Falcos there which still doesn't make much sense to me, but it might be an option. Link on PS seems riskier because one inconveniently timed waveshine on a transition can lead to an infinite, or just a mistake on a transformation. What the stage does give us is more space to run away, but if I want space [vs like an aggressive Fox], I'll still tend to favor Dreamland [another stage I've strayed away from... might just try experimenting with those 3 stages myself...].

Probably gonna have to see if I can actually nail down anti-approach options correctly, I seem to struggle to counter-attack his full-hops and SH drill correctly [and drill in general]. SAUS said SH retreating fair somewhere quite a while back... might need to see about finding a Fox and just playing for a while in the matchup or something.

 

[4Serial]

FD is good for guaranteed combos for percent and kills off of grab and launchers like dash attack, utilt and dtilt. It also limits spacies' recovery options so edgeguarding is easier. It's kinda of rough because you can't camp safely to get him out of cc percents and have to straight out outplay them but that's generally the name of the game lol.

Most of the "recent" stuff on swf was about optimizing Link and knowing what stuff can be guaranteed and having solid follow ups so it gave me the idea of taking scrubby fox's on FD to practice death comboing them m2k style.

Stadium isn't so bad because there's no top platform for spacies to safely retreat and the small side platforms are really to tech chase on. I think it might be Link's best stage if not for the transformation. The fire stage actually isn't that bad for Link because of how well he can hold position under that big platform.

I've been staying away from Dreamland more and more because if the spacies really make it a point to camp it can be suuuper annoying. The platforms are so big and it's hard to cover everything so you gotta read most of the time. Link has his advantages here like living forever with bomb jumps, but dair will take longer to kill, so you gotta rely on edgeguards, and spacies will usually have access to the platforms.

So the thing about approaching and anti approachs with Fox that's been working better for me is conditioning them with fh nairs until they start doing their own fh aerials. Then you can do sh uair to catch them and get something started. Fox shouldn't be able to come down with any aerial against uair unless it's misspaced.
For sh drill, if your sh nair comes out the same time sometimes it will trade and that's a better trade for you especially if he's at knockdown percent. But prepare for the Top Tier Privilege in the case that drill straight up beats your nair and asdi + sdi for your life.

 

[TrashWizard]

I dont know whether this is found or not but you can throw links bombs low if you press down b during links empty jump landing animation thing (that 2 or 4 frame thing that happens whether you fastfall or not without throwing out a move) and also after fiddling about with it it seems like links down b bomb throw acts super wierd when you miss the down b during jumpsquat in which it looks like it teleports the bomb upwards slightly above where you are and launches it, I dont see either used but both are probably incredibly situational so the tech is probably not really useful anyway

 

[Hunybear]

I dont know whether this is found or not but you can throw links bombs low if you press down b during links empty jump landing animation thing (that 2 or 4 frame thing that happens whether you fastfall or not without throwing out a move) and also after fiddling about with it it seems like links down b bomb throw acts super wierd when you miss the down b during jumpsquat in which it looks like it teleports the bomb upwards slightly above where you are and launches it, I dont see either used but both are probably incredibly situational so the tech is probably not really useful anyway

First- it's really hard to understand what your trying to tell us.
Second- I believe what your referring to is when Link throws a bomb while landing and it either gets released way above his head or close to his knees. This is because links areal bomb release frame is different than his grounded release frame. And because when you land the animation transitions from areal to grounded link does weird crap. The bomb will always release on frame 6 if he throws it in the air and lands. When he throws the bomb way high it's because on frame six of his grounded throw he still has his hand above his head in that animation but it's released anyway. When it's thrown low, it's because he actually threw it right befor landing but the game updated his animation because it hadn't completed in the air.

All the bomb weirdness I know has been documented in my projectile thread if your interested in more.

 

[TrashWizard]

Yeah I was super incoherent with what I was trying to say because I was super sick on wednesday, I was just messing around with links bombs and it came out with the thing you were talking about. And also if the offer is still there can I have a link to it? (no pun intended)

 

[Hunybear]

https://smashboards.com/threads/projectile-data-tech-thread-groovy-update-8-20-16.434884/

 

[Thor]

FD is good for guaranteed combos for percent and kills off of grab and launchers like dash attack, utilt and dtilt. It also limits spacies' recovery options so edgeguarding is easier. It's kinda of rough because you can't camp safely to get him out of cc percents and have to straight out outplay them but that's generally the name of the game lol.

Most of the "recent" stuff on swf was about optimizing Link and knowing what stuff can be guaranteed and having solid follow ups so it gave me the idea of taking scrubby fox's on FD to practice death comboing them m2k style.

Stadium isn't so bad because there's no top platform for spacies to safely retreat and the small side platforms are really to tech chase on. I think it might be Link's best stage if not for the transformation. The fire stage actually isn't that bad for Link because of how well he can hold position under that big platform.

I've been staying away from Dreamland more and more because if the spacies really make it a point to camp it can be suuuper annoying. The platforms are so big and it's hard to cover everything so you gotta read most of the time. Link has his advantages here like living forever with bomb jumps, but dair will take longer to kill, so you gotta rely on edgeguards, and spacies will usually have access to the platforms.

So the thing about approaching and anti approachs with Fox that's been working better for me is conditioning them with fh nairs until they start doing their own fh aerials. Then you can do sh uair to catch them and get something started. Fox shouldn't be able to come down with any aerial against uair unless it's misspaced.
For sh drill, if your sh nair comes out the same time sometimes it will trade and that's a better trade for you especially if he's at knockdown percent. But prepare for the Top Tier Privilege in the case that drill straight up beats your nair and asdi + sdi for your life.

I hadn't actually seen this reply until today but I actually have started doing a lot better against Fox player of late [inb4 jinxed and go back to doing worse]. I have multiple games off the #2 player on the PR, a Fox player I wasn't sure how I'd possibly beat with Link [last time we played, I SD'd game 3 going for an edgeguard that would have exactly evened up stocks, and I made sure to go check what I did wrong to avoid it happening again], and beat two Fox players in bracket 2-0 that both gave me lots of trouble.

If anyone is interested in videos I can put them up (both wins were on stream, and I can link the much closer sets if anyone cares) [and I'll definitely link a video of if I ever manage to beat that Fox player who gives me so much trouble (I beat him the first time we played and that's it) or another one I haven't beaten in quite some time].

In the meantime, here's a hilarious phantom hit moment that works out in my favor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2oltSinEvU&t=5m50s ) and here's a sick combo [followed by me getting hit with taunt -> get bodied... whoops]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omm89qR1Vgk&t=6m53s

[I also have various sets of me beating a Peach player a bunch on FD and Dreamland and some other matchups and stuff, but I'm not struggling in those MUs nearly as much and the Peach sets are usually around 12 minutes so I understand if people don't care to watch LOL.]

Unrelated: @SAUS I fully respect your decision regardless of what it is, but are you now full-time Falco, just playing Falco for now, or planning to dual-main, and regardless of the answer, are you still willing to hang around and help us Link mains out, or would you rather just focus on your character and stuff? Wanting to know if I can tag you if questions arise and whatnot.

 

[link7]

Can we talk about how Sixx took sets off of Zgetto and Amsah at Avalon M-VI? They're ranked top 10 in Europe, and he barely wavedashes. Oh, and he took 2nd. At a regional.

 

[Hunybear]

Can we talk about how Sixx took sets off of Zgetto and Amsah at Avalon M-VI? They're ranked top 10 in Europe, and he barely wavedashes. Oh, and he took 2nd. At a regional.

Join the discord. We talked about it a while ago but its a lot more active than the boards

 

[Hunybear]

I learned how to make gif.s
This was a test run to see how big the size would be.

 

[Thor]

This thread has fallen into disuse...

I'd like to ask about z-dropping bombs. In the ICs MU, I've started messing around with it as an OoS vs ICs when Link has a percent lead. When they uair shield, immediate jump z-drop OoS lets the bomb hit the uair hitbox [after the uair hit your shield], meaning all 3 characters are caught in a bomb explosion. I seem to have at least moderate success mashing a nair out before ICs get out of hitstun, allowing a relatively easy way to desync the climbers if I hit only one of them, or if they have a percent difference.

Vs Fox drill on shield (-6 on block at best), unless he is frame-perfect [and even then? I'd need to ask Kadano if inputting z on frame 6 of jump squat causes Link to be airborne z-dropping frame 7 or just a really slow jump cancel grab], it will mean if Fox shines, the bomb should be hit. I'm not sure if this should reliably set it off, but if so, it's a potential way out of shield [this might also be asking to get CC usmashed, IDK].

And most pertinently, I am starting to use it a lot more vs Sheik. One of the eternal conundrums is that if we're holding bomb, we can't aerial, and if we're not holding bomb, a grab can be up to 80+% on FD. I've found that by treating Sheik like the ICs MU, but with less platform camping and liberal use of z-drop bombs -> aerial, Link is able to make good use of fair and nair in the MU, while also having a modicum of safety if grabbed [since the bomb + mashing can interrupt the CG]. Furthermore, I can also just throw bombs in any direction, which means Link is able to come down on Sheik with empty land z-dropped bomb, bomb throw, z-drop bomb and an aerial [can be great as a zoning option or even a crossup over her shield, the z-drop bomb can discourage nair OoS].

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I feel like I almost *never* see z-dropped bombs get used, and I think it could potentially become an important part of Link's set of moves (and I feel l make somewhat decent use of it), instead of just a faster way to tether offstage when bomb throw is too laggy.

P.S.: If z-drop is a single frame action, shield drop z-drop platform cancelled nair is theoretically possible, although you might just end up dropping the bomb on your own nair LOL

 

[Pinkie_Pie]

Does anyone have a list for what percents moves break yoshi's armor? or if someone could direct me to where I could find one. I've been looking but I can't find anything.

 

[Sdhy]

Disclaimer: I'm still a noob. But I have spun on people faster than me!

Spin against fast people on small stages! Because they're zipping around the stage so much, they sometimes run into it!

Throw them onto platforms, forcing them to tech. That'll give clunky Link time to follow up!
And then throw in that unexpected downthrow to spin.

I find that full jumping fast-falling nairs gets some hits. Try adding that to your mixup.

A well-angled wavedash might improve Link's mobility.

Tilt your shield up to to pump fake a spin oos?

 

[Hunybear]

S Sdhy no one uses this thread anymore but if you're down to chat with links you should join the link discord and link facebook R&D group.

 

[Sdhy]

thanks!

S Sdhy no one uses this thread anymore but if you're down to chat with links you should join the link discord and link facebook R&D group.

Link R&D I love the name lol.
Joined the group.
So OI read that you can sometimes stop a charged Samus shot with an arrow, eh? pretty nifty.

 

[fairsquaredylan]

Is there a Gecko/AR code/mod for Link that changes what he pulls out with Down-B? What about Young-Link and Peach?