First, I find it important to start you off with some music to listen to while reading this: http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=MMqcgEjU4MY
With that out of the way...
Returning from a figurative grave, I have interest in posting some articles about my thoughts on the state of P:M and my understanding of Smash mechanics in general that people seem to miss. My first subject will be a new 2.6/2.6b change that has drawn my ire that people wanted me to post about.
As surely some of you have noticed, a new code in the 2.6 release brings about a change or two in powershield behavior. One of them is that powershields are now automatic throughout a blockstring after powershielding once. That is, if you powershield a multi hitting attack that shield locks you without letting you drop your shield between hits (think Peach's Dsmash), *all* hits after the first will be powershielded automatically in addition to the first. This means that shield damage *and* shield pushback are negated through the entirety of a shieldlock. While at first glance this seems like a good addition to the game for the sake of keeping things consistent, it's one of those things that I've immediately come to loathe, even during the testing phase, for a number of reasons. Let's think about it a bit harder:
1. It's an imbalanced change, really only affecting a select few moves on a few characters. Despite there being a decent number of multihit moves in the game, very few of these moves actually generate significant pushback to be negated by a powershield of all the hits. Remember now that for a move to push in shield, it has to contain hits that actually deal enough damage to cause pushback. The vast majority of multihits moves deal very low single digit damage with each hit, hardly pushing anywhere despite a stack of these blows on a shield (think of a rapid jab and the lack of push they do despite hitting your shield for several hits). Powershielding moves like those to negate pushback doesn't provide you with much benefit over blocking them normally. They were already bad on block before and you will be close enough regardless to punish. Another reason they are bad on block that is not actually related to actual frame disadvantage is because of the stacked hitlag they cause on shields as well as on hit, which gives a defender more time to react properly to the move when caught by them. Against Zelda's Usmash for example, there is pretty much no way you can fail to SDI the last hit on reaction or shieldgrab her on block since those windows of opportunity occur very late into the move after it starts hitting. You don't need powershield to counter that out of shield. By the same token, powershield went from only having a little benefit against these moves to being extremely good against them, moreso than single hitters that were already relatively good on block.
As for what moves this change does affect in a large way: that's namely Peach's Dsmash, Zelda's Fsmash, G&W's Fsmash (no comment), and once released, *everything* Ice Climbers do as a team. As said before most of those other multihits have very little shield pushback to begin with. None of the top tier character of Melee have an issue with this change as they have no moves like this. Yet, they can take advantage of it on characters that do. It makes no sense to me that Peach and Zelda would be indirectly nerfed the most by this (it would be disingenuous to omit the fact that they are among the characters I play), yet I can lame out people with Sheik or Falco, overall better characters, and be none the wiser about this change because they have no moves like this and have effective frame trap abilities on shield even their approaches are powershielded often.
One might be thinking, "Why aren't single hits hit hard by the Brawl-like powershield changes like multihits?" That is partly due to how a match plays out in general. Smash favors a heavily aerial based approach, and in the air you have a great deal of control over your spacing against an opponent in shield, unlike the ground moves mentioned previously. Good SHFFL approaches that are seen so often in high level play will frame trap people even in powershield, leaving not much benefit of a powershield to actually counter these approaches in a meaningful way that is not countered themselves by CC or running out of range.
As for single hit ground moves, there are too many factors to account for, but in practice there's a lot of single hit moves are not heavily countered in all given situations of powershielding even against a high frequency of it (in short, let's say "improved character design" seems to be at work here). Less can be said for the multihits hit hard by this change, because of the sheer amount of time you have in shield to react to them. One obvious point to make is that some moves which generate large amounts of shieldpush to be negated by powershield have other risks attached to attempting to powershield them and potentially failing (high shield damage, high shieldstun, high kill power/damage, etc.), where it smarter to avoid shielding entirely and counter with non shield options due to their effectiveness against shields. You can apply similar logic to multihit moves with shieldpush, except more often than not, blocking them normally or heaven forbid, getting hit by them, isn't the worst thing that can happen to you in that you won't die at 60% or suffer 1/2 shield damage.
2. It's an unnecessary wrench in the shield game.
The shielding game prior to this was honestly, fine without this effect. Those moves that do shield damage and significant pushback even past a powershield are very few, enough for players who do simple homework to be aware of when entering a match against a particular character. In addition, those moves from Melee have genuine ways of getting around them, either by some flaw in the move itself or a limitation of the character possessing it. The moves mentioned are ground moves on slow moving characters which very much limits how well you can abuse them on shield in comparison to say, Fox SHFFL'ing aerials on you that frame trap into Shine. Thus, they were never a balance concern despite being having reliable pushback on shield. If you don't believe that at face value, remember that 11+ years of Melee metagame is behind those moves. People have been getting around them just fine with Melee like shielding.
It is fine that some moves are not ideally counterable by some options. That is simply something that deepends a fighting game's complicated R/P/S strategy. Some moves counter dodges and rolls (GW ftilt), some moves are effective against CC (shines), some moves are more easily punished out of shield than on whiff (character dependent), and other moves are dangerous to even try to shield let alone powershield (Bowser). Catch-all defensive options make for a dull game. The multihit moves in question from Melee have significant flaws that prevent them from being on the level of a top tier's safe bread and butters. I would be accepting of this change if such moves that were effective against the pushback negation of powershielding actually ran rampant in many character movesets, had next to no weaknesses otherwise, or were on ridiculously good characters that were more deserving of an overall balance check. None of this applies in this case, which makes its very presence give off a forced aura of "because we can" leaving players thinking "why?"
Powershielding as it works in general is rather unclean, due to how it works favoring those who can displace their hurtboxes with a low crouch to "force" more powershields to happen. As much as I like to abuse that myself with a character like Sheik and advise others to do the same I can admit it's an imbalanced effect and would say that the powershield game doesn't need to become any more imbalanced by circumstances a character was born with. If one changes that because they feel like it then those moves can also be changed to not shield lock and be a total pain to manually powershield in a manner like DK's Down B is to retain their reliable shield push in critical moments. Such moves are few to the point where it could actually be warranted, but that would be a stupid thing to do to counteract a change that affects such a small portion of moves on a small portion of the roster.
4. It looks and feels aesthetically off. This is rather subjective, but it is quite jarring to have a moves of those degrees have a large amount of pushback nullified to that degree. In Melee, shield pushback was not nullified by powershields at all. In Brawl, powershielding negated pushback (and shieldstun) for single hits but was still ineffective for negating multihit shield pushback. For a Melee or Brawl player to expect reliable pushback of moves that are more or less specifically designed to work that way, not having it function like that in P:M for any reason is a pretty big shock as it's not Melee-like nor Brawl-like. Peach's Dsmash, on the extreme end, generates enough hitlag to make lunch on powershielding all 5 hits and punish it with a Smash, which is unprecedented in any Smash game.
5. As far as I can tell, no one really wanted it in the first place.
I value having contact with the player community in many guises. With my time spent reading the forums, in stream chat channels, chatrooms, etc. having general chat about Smash concerning what players like and don't like in regards to Project:M, many subjects have been brought to the table. Usually, these subjects are related to specific characters and moves, but there is a fair share of discussion concerning general mechanics and flow of the game, both on its own and in comparison to other Smash iterations. Shield interactions concerning the reward of a powershield has never been one of those subjects brought up. I'm a firm believer of of happy players being quiet players, and there not being any kind of negative voice about this previously, to me means that it was fine. After the change though, people not limited to myself have been reacting to it negatively. However, because less popularly used characters are adversely affected by it as such, there hasn't been as much discussion about it brought to light like, say... the space animal nerfs. If changes are controversial and not critical then one needs to be careful. When said change is in the guise of a "global" mechanical change that honestly only affects a few of many characters, it is controversial.
I WELCOME YOUR FLAMES AND REGRET NOTHING
With that out of the way...
Returning from a figurative grave, I have interest in posting some articles about my thoughts on the state of P:M and my understanding of Smash mechanics in general that people seem to miss. My first subject will be a new 2.6/2.6b change that has drawn my ire that people wanted me to post about.
As surely some of you have noticed, a new code in the 2.6 release brings about a change or two in powershield behavior. One of them is that powershields are now automatic throughout a blockstring after powershielding once. That is, if you powershield a multi hitting attack that shield locks you without letting you drop your shield between hits (think Peach's Dsmash), *all* hits after the first will be powershielded automatically in addition to the first. This means that shield damage *and* shield pushback are negated through the entirety of a shieldlock. While at first glance this seems like a good addition to the game for the sake of keeping things consistent, it's one of those things that I've immediately come to loathe, even during the testing phase, for a number of reasons. Let's think about it a bit harder:
1. It's an imbalanced change, really only affecting a select few moves on a few characters. Despite there being a decent number of multihit moves in the game, very few of these moves actually generate significant pushback to be negated by a powershield of all the hits. Remember now that for a move to push in shield, it has to contain hits that actually deal enough damage to cause pushback. The vast majority of multihits moves deal very low single digit damage with each hit, hardly pushing anywhere despite a stack of these blows on a shield (think of a rapid jab and the lack of push they do despite hitting your shield for several hits). Powershielding moves like those to negate pushback doesn't provide you with much benefit over blocking them normally. They were already bad on block before and you will be close enough regardless to punish. Another reason they are bad on block that is not actually related to actual frame disadvantage is because of the stacked hitlag they cause on shields as well as on hit, which gives a defender more time to react properly to the move when caught by them. Against Zelda's Usmash for example, there is pretty much no way you can fail to SDI the last hit on reaction or shieldgrab her on block since those windows of opportunity occur very late into the move after it starts hitting. You don't need powershield to counter that out of shield. By the same token, powershield went from only having a little benefit against these moves to being extremely good against them, moreso than single hitters that were already relatively good on block.
As for what moves this change does affect in a large way: that's namely Peach's Dsmash, Zelda's Fsmash, G&W's Fsmash (no comment), and once released, *everything* Ice Climbers do as a team. As said before most of those other multihits have very little shield pushback to begin with. None of the top tier character of Melee have an issue with this change as they have no moves like this. Yet, they can take advantage of it on characters that do. It makes no sense to me that Peach and Zelda would be indirectly nerfed the most by this (it would be disingenuous to omit the fact that they are among the characters I play), yet I can lame out people with Sheik or Falco, overall better characters, and be none the wiser about this change because they have no moves like this and have effective frame trap abilities on shield even their approaches are powershielded often.
One might be thinking, "Why aren't single hits hit hard by the Brawl-like powershield changes like multihits?" That is partly due to how a match plays out in general. Smash favors a heavily aerial based approach, and in the air you have a great deal of control over your spacing against an opponent in shield, unlike the ground moves mentioned previously. Good SHFFL approaches that are seen so often in high level play will frame trap people even in powershield, leaving not much benefit of a powershield to actually counter these approaches in a meaningful way that is not countered themselves by CC or running out of range.
As for single hit ground moves, there are too many factors to account for, but in practice there's a lot of single hit moves are not heavily countered in all given situations of powershielding even against a high frequency of it (in short, let's say "improved character design" seems to be at work here). Less can be said for the multihits hit hard by this change, because of the sheer amount of time you have in shield to react to them. One obvious point to make is that some moves which generate large amounts of shieldpush to be negated by powershield have other risks attached to attempting to powershield them and potentially failing (high shield damage, high shieldstun, high kill power/damage, etc.), where it smarter to avoid shielding entirely and counter with non shield options due to their effectiveness against shields. You can apply similar logic to multihit moves with shieldpush, except more often than not, blocking them normally or heaven forbid, getting hit by them, isn't the worst thing that can happen to you in that you won't die at 60% or suffer 1/2 shield damage.
2. It's an unnecessary wrench in the shield game.
The shielding game prior to this was honestly, fine without this effect. Those moves that do shield damage and significant pushback even past a powershield are very few, enough for players who do simple homework to be aware of when entering a match against a particular character. In addition, those moves from Melee have genuine ways of getting around them, either by some flaw in the move itself or a limitation of the character possessing it. The moves mentioned are ground moves on slow moving characters which very much limits how well you can abuse them on shield in comparison to say, Fox SHFFL'ing aerials on you that frame trap into Shine. Thus, they were never a balance concern despite being having reliable pushback on shield. If you don't believe that at face value, remember that 11+ years of Melee metagame is behind those moves. People have been getting around them just fine with Melee like shielding.
It is fine that some moves are not ideally counterable by some options. That is simply something that deepends a fighting game's complicated R/P/S strategy. Some moves counter dodges and rolls (GW ftilt), some moves are effective against CC (shines), some moves are more easily punished out of shield than on whiff (character dependent), and other moves are dangerous to even try to shield let alone powershield (Bowser). Catch-all defensive options make for a dull game. The multihit moves in question from Melee have significant flaws that prevent them from being on the level of a top tier's safe bread and butters. I would be accepting of this change if such moves that were effective against the pushback negation of powershielding actually ran rampant in many character movesets, had next to no weaknesses otherwise, or were on ridiculously good characters that were more deserving of an overall balance check. None of this applies in this case, which makes its very presence give off a forced aura of "because we can" leaving players thinking "why?"
Powershielding as it works in general is rather unclean, due to how it works favoring those who can displace their hurtboxes with a low crouch to "force" more powershields to happen. As much as I like to abuse that myself with a character like Sheik and advise others to do the same I can admit it's an imbalanced effect and would say that the powershield game doesn't need to become any more imbalanced by circumstances a character was born with. If one changes that because they feel like it then those moves can also be changed to not shield lock and be a total pain to manually powershield in a manner like DK's Down B is to retain their reliable shield push in critical moments. Such moves are few to the point where it could actually be warranted, but that would be a stupid thing to do to counteract a change that affects such a small portion of moves on a small portion of the roster.
4. It looks and feels aesthetically off. This is rather subjective, but it is quite jarring to have a moves of those degrees have a large amount of pushback nullified to that degree. In Melee, shield pushback was not nullified by powershields at all. In Brawl, powershielding negated pushback (and shieldstun) for single hits but was still ineffective for negating multihit shield pushback. For a Melee or Brawl player to expect reliable pushback of moves that are more or less specifically designed to work that way, not having it function like that in P:M for any reason is a pretty big shock as it's not Melee-like nor Brawl-like. Peach's Dsmash, on the extreme end, generates enough hitlag to make lunch on powershielding all 5 hits and punish it with a Smash, which is unprecedented in any Smash game.
5. As far as I can tell, no one really wanted it in the first place.
I value having contact with the player community in many guises. With my time spent reading the forums, in stream chat channels, chatrooms, etc. having general chat about Smash concerning what players like and don't like in regards to Project:M, many subjects have been brought to the table. Usually, these subjects are related to specific characters and moves, but there is a fair share of discussion concerning general mechanics and flow of the game, both on its own and in comparison to other Smash iterations. Shield interactions concerning the reward of a powershield has never been one of those subjects brought up. I'm a firm believer of of happy players being quiet players, and there not being any kind of negative voice about this previously, to me means that it was fine. After the change though, people not limited to myself have been reacting to it negatively. However, because less popularly used characters are adversely affected by it as such, there hasn't been as much discussion about it brought to light like, say... the space animal nerfs. If changes are controversial and not critical then one needs to be careful. When said change is in the guise of a "global" mechanical change that honestly only affects a few of many characters, it is controversial.
I WELCOME YOUR FLAMES AND REGRET NOTHING
