DiggersBoy
Smash Apprentice
- Joined
- May 30, 2014
- Messages
- 137
Seeing how there is no real official threads for Meta Knight players to talk about their current findings and data, as well as it being hard for many new players to get into maining Meta Knight due to the lack of accessible data, I've taken it upon myself to make a Data Thread for us Meta Knight players to discuss on. As of the start of this thread, I've taken the liberty of putting other people's important findings on here already, but if you have another finding with either A) Video Evidence or B) A couple of people to confirm, then I'll edit it into this thread. This thread's small little guide is meant for players with a bit of Smash experience: We will not teach you how to fastfall, tomahawk, or use your final smash (shoutouts to http://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/2gbctz/hi_what_button_do_i_press_for_the_final_smash_in/)
- For all the people looking into picking up Meta Knight, either as a main, a secondary, or even a nice little pocket, welcome to the Sm4sh Meta Knight subforum. It's been somewhat like an apocalypse here, with a lot of interested fans leaving in favor of other characters, such as Rosalina (Although I can somewhat relate, I left Palutena to come here), as well as many people dropping him after seeing the infamous range nerfs that has pretty much gone viral in the short time that the game has been out, causing a lot of people to assume that Meta Knight is incredibly bad. In addition, many players just getting into the competitive scene immediately drop Meta Knight, assuming he's still OP after hearing of the many Meta Knight bans at Brawl tournaments (Can confirm, a couple of people think that at my school).
- HOWEVER. Meta Knight is not bad, yet the general consensus is that he's not top-tier, either. In fact, he's somewhere in between. While his range nerfs do exist, you just have to deal with it. One tip that I personally like to give is to stick close to the target when attacking. Meta Knight already has the range and spacing of a stick, so why would you want to stay far away from them while attacking, if they can still hit you either way?
- I think the general consensus of the community is that Meta Knight relies highly on a "bait and punish" tactic. You play very passive and wait for the opponent to mess up, before jumping on that opportunity and beating the **** out of them, then retreating to start over again.
- Main kill moves include gimping, Up-B and Down-B. Other moves can be used to kill, but generally are not as reliable (i.e. Forwardsmash)
EDIT 11/18/14: With patch 1.04, new kill moves have arrived in Bair and Nair.
Now, for the current data as of November 2014.
Data Charts:
EDIT 11/19/14: Data Charts are up! Thank you, Claxus!
Attack | Damage | Max Total
Jab | 1% per hit, 2% finisher | 7% (Single tap)
F-tilt | 2%, 2%, 3% | 7%
U-tilt | 5% | 5%
D-tilt | 5% | 5%
N-air | 7%, 10% sweetspotted | 10%
F-air | 2%, 2%, 3% | 7%
B-air | 2%, 1%, 4% | 7%
U-air | 5% | 5%
D-air | 6% | 6%
F-smash | 16% | 16%
U-smash | 3%, 2%, 4% | 9%
D-smash | 7% front hit, 10% back hit| 10% F-throw | 6%, 3% | 9%
B-throw | 7%, 3% | 10%
U-throw | 10% | 10%
D-throw | 0.5% x 10, 2%| 7%
Neutral-B | 1% x (6-18), random 2%s(?), 3% finisher | 22%
Side-B | 1% x 8, 3% finisher | 11%
Up-B | 6% / 9% sweetspotted, 6% | 15%
Down-B (Neutral) | 15% / 16% sweetspotted | 16%
Down-B (Back) | 14% | 14%
Down-B (Forward) | 16% | 16%
Dash attack | 5% / 6% sweetspotted| 6%
Ledge attack | 7% | 7%
Get-up attack | 7% (both sides) | 7%
Final Smash | 40% | 40%
-Notes: Dtilt can trip enemies. Not sure on percentages, and the range is nerfed pretty hard, but keep that in mind when spacing to establish neutral game. Will put this into an actual data chart when it comes up.
- This exists. Creds to Ambrose/My Smash Corner for the find. Can confirm, have done this before. This is because Meta Knight's second-to-last hit of the fair is a spike, so if you fast fall and miss the last hit, you will spike them to the ground.
EDIT 11/18/14: Since the 1.04 patch, Fair no longer spikes. Bair still spikes, but it's quite hard to combo that into Downtilt. However, you can still combo a Bair spike into a Sidesmash. ItoI6 has also brought to attention that the person hit by the spike can immediately attack after hitting the ground, making this quite situational.
- ⑨ball has stated that Tornado and Down-B auto cancel. No real confirmation on this yet, but if anyone can confirm, please tell me.
- There are 3 visual angles at which Meta Knight attacks with his down-b, Dimensional Cape. In this link you can see that he has a Neutral slash, a Retreating slash, and a Reverse slash. Lavani has helped me out and has said this:
EDIT 11/19/14: Meta Knight's Neutral Slash confirmed to have a sweetspot. It does 16%, and kills as well as the Reverse Slash. However, both slash in different directions, so you need to do the slash that launches towards the nearest blast zone. Retreating Slash still confirmed useless compared to the others. Also, I didn't say this before, but the Slash is determined by what direction you're pressing right before Meta Knight appears. If you try to do a Reverse Slash, but return the Circle Pad/Control Stick back to neutral before Meta Knight appears, you will do a Neutral Slash.
EDIT 11/21/14: Katakiri has evidence that Meta Knight's Upair and Downair have their range indicators shorter to match their actual hitboxes. The other attacks remain the same, however.
While there is a thread corresponding to this question (Thanks, AmazingAmpharos!), I'd thought that I could touch up on it here, with EVO now accepting custom moves and all.
The majority rule on MK's customs are that 1111 is not trash, but there's only a few good options to change on him.
- All of Meta Knight's Dimensional Capes suck except for the default (Although, if you can find a good use for them, show us!)
- Meta Knight's default Shuttle Loop is the most consistent, but Blade Coaster (2) might be an option, as shown here.
- Meta Knight's default Mach Tornado is pretty good, but I've currently started to use his Entangling Tornado (2), and I've been loving it as a strong kill option.
- Meta Knight's Side-B can be changed accordingly. While default is pretty good, High-Speed Drill (2) is great as a quick, horizontal recovery option, and Giga Drill Breaker (3) is great to punish shields.
That's all I currently have.
Now, a few questions:
1) How do you play your Meta Knight? How does it perform different than other people's Meta Knights?
2) What Useful Info have you found with Meta Knight? Do you mind sharing? Even if it's a well known find, we could still use the help. Just... no "omg Meta Knight is actually good", because we know that. That's why we're here.
3) Any new findings on custom moves?
- For all the people looking into picking up Meta Knight, either as a main, a secondary, or even a nice little pocket, welcome to the Sm4sh Meta Knight subforum. It's been somewhat like an apocalypse here, with a lot of interested fans leaving in favor of other characters, such as Rosalina (Although I can somewhat relate, I left Palutena to come here), as well as many people dropping him after seeing the infamous range nerfs that has pretty much gone viral in the short time that the game has been out, causing a lot of people to assume that Meta Knight is incredibly bad. In addition, many players just getting into the competitive scene immediately drop Meta Knight, assuming he's still OP after hearing of the many Meta Knight bans at Brawl tournaments (Can confirm, a couple of people think that at my school).
- HOWEVER. Meta Knight is not bad, yet the general consensus is that he's not top-tier, either. In fact, he's somewhere in between. While his range nerfs do exist, you just have to deal with it. One tip that I personally like to give is to stick close to the target when attacking. Meta Knight already has the range and spacing of a stick, so why would you want to stay far away from them while attacking, if they can still hit you either way?
- I think the general consensus of the community is that Meta Knight relies highly on a "bait and punish" tactic. You play very passive and wait for the opponent to mess up, before jumping on that opportunity and beating the **** out of them, then retreating to start over again.
- Pretty much your whole moveset is garnered toward punishing. Throws are Meta Knight's main source of damage (Check out ItoI6's Throw guide, a little bit below!), and while the tornado (Neutral-B) doesn't have any vacuum properties or priority anymore, it does a bunch of damage (20% if mashed all the way) and has a little bit of knockback to ensure that you can recover and safely return to a neutral game.- MK is clearly lacking power and range. I feel that the strongest way to play him is methodically aggressive. By this I mean that we should play very conservatively on stage and punish hard when given the opportunity.
- Main kill moves include gimping, Up-B and Down-B. Other moves can be used to kill, but generally are not as reliable (i.e. Forwardsmash)
EDIT 11/18/14: With patch 1.04, new kill moves have arrived in Bair and Nair.
Now, for the current data as of November 2014.
Data Charts:
EDIT 11/19/14: Data Charts are up! Thank you, Claxus!
Attack | Damage | Max Total
Jab | 1% per hit, 2% finisher | 7% (Single tap)
F-tilt | 2%, 2%, 3% | 7%
U-tilt | 5% | 5%
D-tilt | 5% | 5%
N-air | 7%, 10% sweetspotted | 10%
F-air | 2%, 2%, 3% | 7%
B-air | 2%, 1%, 4% | 7%
U-air | 5% | 5%
D-air | 6% | 6%
F-smash | 16% | 16%
U-smash | 3%, 2%, 4% | 9%
D-smash | 7% front hit, 10% back hit| 10% F-throw | 6%, 3% | 9%
B-throw | 7%, 3% | 10%
U-throw | 10% | 10%
D-throw | 0.5% x 10, 2%| 7%
Neutral-B | 1% x (6-18), random 2%s(?), 3% finisher | 22%
Side-B | 1% x 8, 3% finisher | 11%
Up-B | 6% / 9% sweetspotted, 6% | 15%
Down-B (Neutral) | 15% / 16% sweetspotted | 16%
Down-B (Back) | 14% | 14%
Down-B (Forward) | 16% | 16%
Dash attack | 5% / 6% sweetspotted| 6%
Ledge attack | 7% | 7%
Get-up attack | 7% (both sides) | 7%
Final Smash | 40% | 40%
-Notes: Dtilt can trip enemies. Not sure on percentages, and the range is nerfed pretty hard, but keep that in mind when spacing to establish neutral game. Will put this into an actual data chart when it comes up.
Advanced Tech/Other Neat Findings:Other information:
Key KO move averages (tested on Marth, Omega stage):
Center stage / Near edge
F-smash: 100% / 80%
U-smash: 130%
D-smash (back hit): 150% / 120%
N-air: 160% / 130%
B-air: 145% / 120%
Up-B: Can start KOing used from about fullhop height around 105%
Neutral-B: Started at fullhop, around 130%
Side-B: Started near the edge, can KO around 145%
Down-B: Non-backwards versions can KO at 115%, 100% near the edge. Sweetspot the neutral version.
And some move tidbits:
F-smash has a sweetspot close to Meta Knight. Does the same damage but tippers have less knockback.
D-tilt has a chance to trip, works up to 59%.
Up-B has a sweetspot point blank to Meta Knight which will do extra damage, and a bit more knockback.
Down-B neutral slash has a sweetspot, hitting enemies from above. Sourspotted its knockback requires 15%~ more to KO.
Dash attack sweetspots during the start of the animation. If sourspotted, it will do less damage but launches directly upwards.
- This exists. Creds to Ambrose/My Smash Corner for the find. Can confirm, have done this before. This is because Meta Knight's second-to-last hit of the fair is a spike, so if you fast fall and miss the last hit, you will spike them to the ground.
EDIT 11/18/14: Since the 1.04 patch, Fair no longer spikes. Bair still spikes, but it's quite hard to combo that into Downtilt. However, you can still combo a Bair spike into a Sidesmash. ItoI6 has also brought to attention that the person hit by the spike can immediately attack after hitting the ground, making this quite situational.
- ⑨ball has stated that Tornado and Down-B auto cancel. No real confirmation on this yet, but if anyone can confirm, please tell me.
EDIT 11/20/14: Claxus and sxiz have confirmed that Tornado and Down-B auto cancel. sxiz elaborates on this:Yeah, both tornado and downB auto cancel. Tornado auto cancels from about triple jump height and DownB is about full jump height. I usually just hold diagonal up back and fast fall when I come out and it works pretty easy. Trying to get it at other distances for approaches and generally unpredictable movement.
Looking at the animations for both it might be connected to the way MK lands from his recovery animation meaning we might also find an autocancel angle for sideB. If I find one I'll update.
I can confirm tornado and cape auto-cancel when you hit the ground during the aerial ending animation. The aerial ending will then be interrupted and you'll go through the grounded ending. The sooner you interrupt the aerial ending, the longer you'll spend in the grounded ending. It seems there was a similar (if not identical) mechanic for tornado in Brawl:
Sounds like the same thing is happening here, with the cape this time too. I put up a video showing what happens at various heights, along with the helpless landings I was using for comparison.
The cool part is if you land right as the aerial ending animation finishes, you'll suffer at most one frame of landing lag, and there might be a way to get no lag at all. For cape (assuming you fall straight down and don't fastfall) this happens if you reappear without attacking at about full jump height from the ground. If you do attack, it's a little higher, about the height of MK's double jump. For tornado, it happens when you come out of it around the height of MK's double or triple jump.
Ending a tornado right above the ground results in a grounded ending of 12 frames in the video, which is 30 FPS, so I'll estimate that the one I did was 24 on the 3DS. This is in line with the above data from Brawl, which has aerial tornado's cooldown at 29 frames, so until someone cracks this game open I'm going to assume it's always that way and grounded endlag fills in any gap left behind by interrupted aerial endlag. For comparison, landing in helpless was 12 frames in my video.
I didn't get a no-attack cape right above the ground, but the interval from aerial reappearance to the end of the grounded animation is ~14 frames (so, ~28 frames). This is close to the Brawl data of 27 frames, so that's the number I'm going with.
For a cape with attack, I can't tell when the hitbox goes away and the cooldown officially begins, but he starts putting his sword away about 15 (30) frames before the ground ending is over. It's probably a little higher than that, if the additional autocancel height is any indication.
Drill Rush, as it turns out, has almost no actual endlag in the air. I couldn't get it to auto-cancel. I would either be so close to the ground that I triggered the grounded ending, or too high up to land before going into helpless. It's not very practical, if it's even possible at all.
Shuttle Loop is the same way, only worse. You'd have to start the move at a lower altitude than the ground you're going to land on. But the ending is so short that even the middle platform on Battlefield is too close to the ground for a grounded Shuttle Loop to put you in the right spot, and you'd hit the ledge if you tried to come up from offstage and drift over to land. Also, passing through platforms seems to dramatically increase its height? Is this new?
- There are 3 visual angles at which Meta Knight attacks with his down-b, Dimensional Cape. In this link you can see that he has a Neutral slash, a Retreating slash, and a Reverse slash. Lavani has helped me out and has said this:
And then Claxus elaborates a little on the Reverse slash:The stationary slash does 15% and KOs Mario around 125%
The retreating slash does 14% and KOs Mario around 130%
The advancing/reverse slash does 16% and KOs Mario around 115%
(percents from center of FD)
As far as I can tell the launch angle does seem the same between all three versions, so if there's any differences I'd imagine it's in hitboxes or end lag, which I'm rather curious about personally because the reversed slash seems like the only one you'd ever want to use otherwise. Also worth noting that since you can move in multiple directions during Dimensional Cape, you can move back then forward to do a reversed slash on the spot.
EDIT: While attempting to compare the hitboxes between slashes I found a 16% hitbox on the stationary slash that KOs at 117%, seems to be around MK's feet, or maybe his center? I guess there's more to these variations after all.
Seems like the general consensus is that Reverse slash is the strongest. However, it leaves you quite open, and close to them as well.Haven't found much use to the different versions the past few days... His strongest (reverse) slash already has a hitbox that seems to hit all around him and KOs the best. It also has the best range. Seems kinda weird that the other versions are there but don't really change much except being weaker in power and range. The neutral one is alright, but needs that awkward sweetspot.
I love to find niches for moves like this, but I dunno... Feels like their niche was making me wonder why I wasn't KOing sometimes. Now I know to go for the reverse version always...
EDIT 11/19/14: Meta Knight's Neutral Slash confirmed to have a sweetspot. It does 16%, and kills as well as the Reverse Slash. However, both slash in different directions, so you need to do the slash that launches towards the nearest blast zone. Retreating Slash still confirmed useless compared to the others. Also, I didn't say this before, but the Slash is determined by what direction you're pressing right before Meta Knight appears. If you try to do a Reverse Slash, but return the Circle Pad/Control Stick back to neutral before Meta Knight appears, you will do a Neutral Slash.
EDIT 11/21/14: Katakiri has evidence that Meta Knight's Upair and Downair have their range indicators shorter to match their actual hitboxes. The other attacks remain the same, however.
EDIT 12/1/14: Lavani has added onto Katakiri's post, saying that the hitboxes of the Uair and Dair have been changed a little bit, as well.So I wasn't crazy. I did some testing with one 3DS on 1.0.4 and the other on 1.0.3. I found that both Meta Knight's Down-Air and Up-Air have changed but it's not as exciting as I thought it would be.
D-Air & Up-Air's Sword-trails are now shorter to match their actual reach. F-Air, F-Tilt, & D-Smash still have their slightly deceptive sword trails. Even then, F-Air almost isn't even worth mentioning because the sword-trail is only very slightly inaccurate and F-Tilt isn't even a spacing tool so, if D-Smash gets fixed, MK will literally look good.
So no new hitboxes, just honest sword-trails. It really does make a big difference though. A lot less whiffed D-Airs or ruined Up-Air chains.
Custom Moves??? (Updated 3/4/15):Adding to the uair/dair changes, the hitboxes were also changed along with the visuals. uair's hitboxes were shifted upward, while dair's were shifted downward and back, more accurately matching the animation.
Since @Katakiri made a convenient image and I'm really bored, I made a (really) rough approximation:
While there is a thread corresponding to this question (Thanks, AmazingAmpharos!), I'd thought that I could touch up on it here, with EVO now accepting custom moves and all.
The majority rule on MK's customs are that 1111 is not trash, but there's only a few good options to change on him.
- All of Meta Knight's Dimensional Capes suck except for the default (Although, if you can find a good use for them, show us!)
- Meta Knight's default Shuttle Loop is the most consistent, but Blade Coaster (2) might be an option, as shown here.
- Meta Knight's default Mach Tornado is pretty good, but I've currently started to use his Entangling Tornado (2), and I've been loving it as a strong kill option.
- Meta Knight's Side-B can be changed accordingly. While default is pretty good, High-Speed Drill (2) is great as a quick, horizontal recovery option, and Giga Drill Breaker (3) is great to punish shields.
That's all I currently have.
Now, a few questions:
1) How do you play your Meta Knight? How does it perform different than other people's Meta Knights?
2) What Useful Info have you found with Meta Knight? Do you mind sharing? Even if it's a well known find, we could still use the help. Just... no "omg Meta Knight is actually good", because we know that. That's why we're here.
3) Any new findings on custom moves?
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