Is rolling really that good? I mean can't they read the roll and punish you hard for it (or even react to it)?
Someone help me out lol
I like to view options in a sort of percentage form. Like there is a sort of advantage in decision making that leans towards one spacing/attack/dodge over another. For instance, if I dair-shine your shield, you only have so many options.
1. Stay shielded
2. Grab
3. Spot dodge
4. Jump
5. Roll left
6. Roll right
7. WD
Obviously that is a bit linear because there are many different timings and nuances, but looking at stuff like this helps me figure out what to expect in different scenarios. It helps me to both predict rolls OoS, as well as use them. It really sort of comes back to the whole "Yomi" deal where it's one player's choice vs. the other's, but Melee just makes sub-Yomi decisions for everything. lol
So you have the six options, but not all of them are equal in popularity, effectiveness, easiness, risk, etc. For instance, staying shielded is often considered one of the least risky options. If your shield is a decent size, you can shield and just anticipate the grab until you can react to what your opponent chooses to do. When their only option is to grab, you can deal with being grabbed much easier than if you were grabbed unexpectedly. Melee's awesome little complexity for this situation is that your shield gets smaller. This means that over time, it introduces new options into the equation that you have to consider. Not only do you have to worry about shield grabs, but now they can shield poke, and eventually break your shield. So before you only were worried about getting grabbed, but with each passing frame, you have to increasingly worry about tilting your shield to avoid pokes (which direction to tilt comes into mind), and further along you will be worried about a shield break (switching to light shield to squeeze out a bit more time, and eventually you have to pick an OoS option).
From there, you can sort of get an idea of how often someone will hold their shield, and you can assign a % to it. There are A LOT of factors you have to consider though. If I am playing a Fox and I initiate shield pressure, him holding shield is probably down at around 10-20%. Fox has a good variety of solid OoS options he can use, and he tends to take a good amount of damage from grabs. Falcon, on the other hand, has very few solid OoS options. As a result, you can expect Falcon players to hold shield more often, around 30-40%. To clarify, I don't actually think out %s in my head, it's more of a subtle note I keep in the back of my head at all times. Once you can come up with these general %s in your brain and develop game plans around each reaction, you sort of feel like you are pseudo reacting+predicting because of how quickly everything happens. I know many times I wonder if I actually reacted to rolls or if just hard-read it and was right.
Anyway, I sort of went off on a tangent, but the point was to explain that rolls tend to be a pretty effective escape compared to the other options because they are hard to cover with the other options. Simply looking at spacing, you can tell holding shield, spot dodging, and grabbing all keep you in the same place. If a Falco is shield pressuring, staying still is often a bad idea because he does not feel threatened at all, and none of those options do anything as long as you time your aerial late enough to not get grabbed. So then that leaves jumping, rolling, and WDing OoS. Jumping can definitely work, but it is also quite dangerous because it sort of stays in the same spacing as not moving at all. It also has a high risk because you can easily be hit out of it.
So that leaves rolling/WDing, which I think are definitely the best ways out of
Falco's shield pressure. I say Falco's specifically because some characters have much better punishes on those options and much worse punishes on others. I tend to roll less vs. Marth/Falcon because they have great dash dances and they are often going for grabs out of shield pressure as opposed to hits. From what I can tell, WDing OoS is almost perfectly safe unless the Falco early aerials without fading away too much. I play vs. Marth 95% of the time, so it definitely seems like he can WD OoS without getting hit by dair if I fade away even a little because Marth crouches low when he jumps and his WD goes really far. As far as WD vs. rolls, it mostly comes down to character. Fox/Falco have really quick rolls, and WD OoS often doesn't give you the distance needed to avoid followups, so they will tend to roll. Characters with the longer WDs like Marth/Samus/Luigi will obviously prefer to use their WD because they go far and are generally just fast rolls that don't turn you around.
A final thing to keep in mind is that even when people read rolls, they will often not hit you before you are able to get your shield up again. Your shield decay won't have added up too much during that time, so you can often get a second chance to play OoS mindgames with them even if they read your roll.
This is just my take on the whole system, so if any good players want to talk about how they view OoS, or any other type of options, I'd be really interested in it.
