PPMD's Falco Discussion Thread

[Druggedfox]

You don't *have* to SDI to shield DI, so shield DIing a shine shouldn't be particularly difficult

 

[Jake13]

Good post bones

even without shield di certain chars can grab falco in between double shine

I think Strongbad made a gif of it somewhere...

 

[JPOBS]

wd oos is secretly the best thing in the world against falco pressure.

 

[Niko45]

pc shine grabs all the time.

so does twebb actually

idk it seems pretty good to me

 

[ShroudedOne]

Yeah, excellent post, Bones. It gives me a different outlook on shield pressure, and I learned quite a bit.

 

[Bones0]

pc shine grabs all the time.

so does twebb actually

idk it seems pretty good to me

I read that as "platform cancelled shine grabs all the time." lol Those are pretty nifty on BF though, just cause the platform cancel is so easy. People are like, "WTF brah... you didn't waveland???"

 

[Aber]

wd oos is secretly the best thing in the world against falco pressure.

lol? Is this news? Is this a secret?

 

[JPOBS]

lol? Is this news? Is this a secret?

Well for whatever reason, surprisingly few people do it. I remember seeing m2k do it at Rom1* vs mango and being really surprised by how effective it is. People usually just opt to roll because its way easier, invincible, solves the same basic purpose and doesn't require any skill.

I mean, WD oos isn't perfect. It obviously has faults, namely you're vulnerable as hell while doing it and frame-wise, its pretty slow compared to other thing. But I think its really underused and pretty fantastic.

*disclaimer: im not saying m2k was the first one to do it or first did it at rom1. just specifically remember him using it a LOT at the time.

 

[Beat!]

WD OOS is very very good against Falco.

 

[Rubyiris]

I shine grab boatloads with both characters, and apparently I'm a "Joke." *Shrug.*

 

[Kaffei]

Spoiler

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.

Very interesting. Thanks bones.

 

[Mew2King]

I can imagine double-shine being really good in falco dittos

btw if you are afraid they will shield DI and grab, just make your 2nd shine an aerial one instead of 2 ground ones.

The more I think about it the better I think it is

any character who needs to jump OOS (Peach, Sheik, Falco dittos, Fox) to punish you would get hit by your 2nd shine

(just make sure your 2nd shine is an AERIAL shine)

then you can start a LARGE COMBO from there.

Super good, I can see why this would be amazing in falco dittos. One hit like that and it's super-combo.

 

[EWC]

The biggest problem with double shining that I think pretty much everyone overlooks is uhh... what if they just shield the second one. Then unless you do a perfect grounded shine every time you'll have to double jump above them and that's really bad usually. If there's a platform there you can waveland and at least get away safely probably, but you still sacrifice position and lose your opportunity to apply pressure.

 

[Winston]

Waveland off the platform with a laser, Axe-style. WHAT NOW.

In seriousness though there are plenty of Falco players who are capable of doing grounded double shines on command.

And nobody was saying that it's a catch-all. (At least I really hope nobody was.) It's a safe, high-reward mixup though.

 

[EWC]

Oh yeah it's still a good option in a lot of situations for sure. Just pointing out something that I think is often overlooked.

 

[Bones0]

That's not really a problem with double shining in itself, but more of a risk in the case that you mess up... I DON'T.

lol, jk obviously. But seriously, double shines are MAD easy if you practice them, especially with the added hitlag. Also, so few people double shine frequently that no one holds shield expecting a second grounded shine. If they didn't try to move OoS after the first, they usually won't react to the second one in time to punish (plus Falco can dair and out-prioritize almost everything even if they do). If they start to expect two shines, if you bring it back to one they'll be moving much slower out of shield because they're more afraid of getting shined. If they are beating both of those mixups, that's when I whip out mai triple shynezzzzz... sexy.

 

[Druggedfox]

If you double shine too quickly they never leave shieldstun and it doesnt matter what they tried... You won't hit them. On the other hand, if you do an aerial shine for your second shine you can't follow up if they DI it. Because of that I mainly only use it to wear down shields a bit more, or to theyre off their OoS timings.

You can do the axe style (and I guess mango too nowadays) waveland to mitigate this, but you really do relieve a lot of pressure if the opponent just waits it out >_>

 

[Bones0]

Then you just shine grab.

/yomi'd

 

[Druggedfox]

Real talk, back when sleepy used to play more... it wasn't infrequent for me to get shield grabbed out of double shine grabs >_>

 

[danieljosebatista]

Dr. Peepee, I was looking through Umbreon's thread "drastic improvement" and noticed that you never said anything about the aspect of focusing only on one character at a time. I was just wondering, what's your opinion on that idea? I main Marth, but I'm also reaaallly starting to like Falco. Do you think that focusing on both at once would limit my overall ability to become better as a player, or make me improve more slowly? Sorry if that's a lot of questions all at once

 

[Bones0]

The discussion was brought up a while ago. He seemed to mostly be on the side of sticking with one character, and I think that's reflected pretty heavily in his dedication to going all Falco in tournaments. I'll let him add w/e he wants though, or just quote his old posts about it.

 

[danieljosebatista]

Thanks, guess I dropped the ball on this one sorry about that

 

[Bones0]

Not really, lol. It was a couple months ago, I think...

 

[Dr Peepee]

Dr. Peepee, I was looking through Umbreon's thread "drastic improvement" and noticed that you never said anything about the aspect of focusing only on one character at a time. I was just wondering, what's your opinion on that idea? I main Marth, but I'm also reaaallly starting to like Falco. Do you think that focusing on both at once would limit my overall ability to become better as a player, or make me improve more slowly? Sorry if that's a lot of questions all at once

Okay, so I just did some thought rearranging in my head on this, and I think I remember all of the stuff I wanted to say about this topic.

For you personally, it may be better to wait until you're better to work on both characters EQUALLY. However, there's nothing stopping you from indulging in Falco whenever you want to because he can help your overall game as well as keep you interested in Melee/inspire you(which is good for the improvement process as well). When you're better, I've kind of noticed that people seem to go about this differently, and a lot of the top players seem to use multiple characters well on a tournament level. I myself am considering playing Marth in tournament at some point, for example.

There are two main arguments that line up in my head for why you should and why you shouldn't play characters beside your main.

1. Sticking to one character essentially makes you a master of that character(in time of course) and more well-equipped to handle any situation. Melee is such a deep game, with so many options available to both you and your opponent, that mastering them all with one character while learning most matchups(depends on how far down the tier list you decide relevant matchups are) usually takes years to do. Why would you split your time between multiple characters when there is so much to accomplish with one character?


2. Playing multiple characters allows you to have an edge in any situation vs any player. With the willingness to pick up at least one extra character in tournament, you get an extra weapon going into a set: surprise. If someone doesn't know who you will use against them then they have to prepare for each of your characters. This could lead to uncertainty and possibly discomfort when people like to plan ahead to face you. Additionally, the counterpick system exists, which allows you to pick stage and character combinations to have leverage on your opponent even when you are the one being counterpicked. Having the flexibility to play multiple characters also could make one more ready to pick up a character a good player isn't fond of(like Mango and Ganondorf) or other such creative ideas.


Sure once all is said and done it's about what people feel more comfortable doing, but even with my personal experience saying it's a great idea to play one character I can't deny how many stellar players use at least 2 characters in tournament. There's a little more to issue in terms of when to pick up a second/third/etc character but I think this is enough information for now haha.

 

[Rubyiris]

I can imagine double-shine being really good in falco dittos

btw if you are afraid they will shield DI and grab, just make your 2nd shine an aerial one instead of 2 ground ones.

The more I think about it the better I think it is

any character who needs to jump OOS (Peach, Sheik, Falco dittos, Fox) to punish you would get hit by your 2nd shine

(just make sure your 2nd shine is an AERIAL shine)

then you can start a LARGE COMBO from there.

Super good, I can see why this would be amazing in falco dittos. One hit like that and it's super-combo.

Axe/Vman/Me all do this.

Forward does normal grounded double shines, though.

@DruggesFox: You give up immediate pressure but gain positional advantage, and if the shine hit, you get larger combo.

 

[Bing]

I think that using characters such as Fox/Falco help to improve the general performance of all characters. They may not help comboing,recovering etc. But they do help in learning how to properly dash dance, wave dash better, spacing timing and just general technical fundementals. Im going through this right now myself, I was a Marth main, but recently switched to spacies because my style didnt suit Marth style(im heavily aggro) Now the more I practiced with spacies, the better my reads, spacing, dash dancing and other things have improved with Marth.

I think that newer players should stick to one character for basically as long as they can, and then pick up another character when they start to get bored.

 

[Deleted member]

2. Playing multiple characters allows you to have an edge in any situation vs any player. With the willingness to pick up at least one extra character in tournament, you get an extra weapon going into a set: surprise. If someone doesn't know who you will use against them then they have to prepare for each of your characters. This could lead to uncertainty and possibly discomfort when people like to plan ahead to face you. Additionally, the counterpick system exists, which allows you to pick stage and character combinations to have leverage on your opponent even when you are the one being counterpicked. Having the flexibility to play multiple characters also could make one more ready to pick up a character a good player isn't fond of(like Mango and Ganondorf) or other such creative ideas.

I used to think this too but while you're still learning it just lets you make terrible CPs even if you don't think they are that bad at the time you pick them. At some point you overcome this but until then it's just a way to get easy losses that are fairly easy to avoid. I like to think of playing a second or third character as going back to the "abuse the character, not the player" argument that's been beaten to death.

If you think of it that way, playing say Fox against Peach instead of Falco seems like a decent move, but melee ends up so well balanced at the top end of play that it doesn't usually matter and you're better off playing the character you're more comfortable with (Falco) and focusing on better CP decisions or working on the match-up more instead of practicing the secondary character (Fox).

Intelligent creativity in this game is very good, but creativity itself is HIGHLY overrated. Mango using Link or "red Falco" isn't good creativity, it's just being a dick.

 

[Warhawk]

I used to think this too but while you're still learning it just lets you make terrible CPs even if you don't think they are that bad at the time you pick them. At some point you overcome this but until then it's just a way to get easy losses that are fairly easy to avoid. I like to think of playing a second or third character as going back to the "abuse the character, not the player" argument that's been beaten to death.

If you think of it that way, playing say Fox against Peach instead of Falco seems like a decent move, but melee ends up so well balanced at the top end of play that it doesn't usually matter and you're better off playing the character you're more comfortable with (Falco) and focusing on better CP decisions or working on the match-up more instead of practicing the secondary character (Fox).

Intelligent creativity in this game is very good, but creativity itself is HIGHLY overrated. Mango using Link or "red Falco" isn't good creativity, it's just being a dick.

There are instances where a well designed counterpick works though. Like Mang0 vs Taj at Genesis 2 where Mang0's Falco is actually beaten by Taj's Marth so when they meet again in the tournament Mang0 goes Fox as that's not a matchup Taj is as good at. Also M2K even in matchups where he typically will go Sheik will counterpick Marth if he gets to pick Yoshi's Story as the stage because his Marth is so good on that stage. I feel like well done and thought out counteropicks still can be an effective option.

 

[Divinokage]

I used to think this too but while you're still learning it just lets you make terrible CPs even if you don't think they are that bad at the time you pick them. At some point you overcome this but until then it's just a way to get easy losses that are fairly easy to avoid. I like to think of playing a second or third character as going back to the "abuse the character, not the player" argument that's been beaten to death.

If you think of it that way, playing say Fox against Peach instead of Falco seems like a decent move, but melee ends up so well balanced at the top end of play that it doesn't usually matter and you're better off playing the character you're more comfortable with (Falco) and focusing on better CP decisions or working on the match-up more instead of practicing the secondary character (Fox).

Intelligent creativity in this game is very good, but creativity itself is HIGHLY overrated. Mango using Link or "red Falco" isn't good creativity, it's just being a dick.

That's a little different, even if he was being a **** it was a great mindgame before the game even started. Use whatever tools you have to win? Why the hell not.. as for Link at that time it was something he needed to prove it wasn't being a ****.

 

[-ACE-]

I can imagine double-shine being really good in falco dittos

btw if you are afraid they will shield DI and grab, just make your 2nd shine an aerial one instead of 2 ground ones.

The more I think about it the better I think it is

That's good, technically falcon/Ganon can still grab the sh aerial but hardly anyone can do it consistently so it doesn't really matter.

I wish there was a CPU with near TAS level defense that we could practice approaches on lol

 

[Dr Peepee]

I used to think this too but while you're still learning it just lets you make terrible CPs even if you don't think they are that bad at the time you pick them. At some point you overcome this but until then it's just a way to get easy losses that are fairly easy to avoid. I like to think of playing a second or third character as going back to the "abuse the character, not the player" argument that's been beaten to death.

If you think of it that way, playing say Fox against Peach instead of Falco seems like a decent move, but melee ends up so well balanced at the top end of play that it doesn't usually matter and you're better off playing the character you're more comfortable with (Falco) and focusing on better CP decisions or working on the match-up more instead of practicing the secondary character (Fox).

Intelligent creativity in this game is very good, but creativity itself is HIGHLY overrated. Mango using Link or "red Falco" isn't good creativity, it's just being a dick.

Most of this stuff is related to my last blurb where I said the timing of all of this is something I didn't write about haha.

I agree though.

 

[bossa nova ♪]

*channeling DJN*

costa rican


nice hair


v-neck


little d***

 

[Mew2King]

I think you should do more

shine -> jump shine (double shine but 2nd one in the air) -> waveland on platform

i can see you getting away with this a lot and no one ever punishing you for it ever

and if you hit you get a bit combo

and it's pretty safe

 

[Problem2]

I think you should do more

shine -> jump shine (double shine but 2nd one in the air) -> waveland on platform

i can see you getting away with this a lot and no one ever punishing you for it ever

and if you hit you get a bit combo

and it's pretty safe

Dude, I like this. I've been thinking about what options Falco has underneath a platform.

 

[Dr Peepee]

I think you should do more

shine -> jump shine (double shine but 2nd one in the air) -> waveland on platform

i can see you getting away with this a lot and no one ever punishing you for it ever

and if you hit you get a bit combo

and it's pretty safe

Man I don't want to copy Mango <.<

*I know that's a bad statement and not valid it just sucks right now lol.*

I guess I'll start messing with it after TO7.

 

[Mew2King]

Yeah but dude, think about it

-shine is safe
-your 2nd aerial double shine is safe
-should your 2nd shine hit, (or EITHER of those shines hit), you get a LARGE COMBO
-no way will he punish platform shenanigans unless he's totally expecting exactly what you're going to do so you can spam it over and over pretty much

this isn't just good in falco dittos, it's good vs most every character that has to jump out of shield

anyone who needs to jump OOS you can easily intercept with your aerial shine (which is invincible).

just make sure u don't do your 2 shines right away cuz they can't even leave shield stun

so unless you're planning on doing like 10 shines in a row, then make sure your 2nd shine is in the air so you intercept them and can easily double jump to follow up or waveland on the platform

 

[tarheeljks]

seems pretty slow. what if they just wait until you waveland onto the plat and attack out of shield

 

[Divinokage]

Rofl PP, then instead of copying Mango use it better than him. =P

 

[Dr Peepee]

seems pretty slow. what if they just wait until you waveland onto the plat and attack out of shield

It's definitely for when people are conditioned to try and attack after seeing the first shine hit their shield(which lots of people do now). It's also useful for shield stabbing.

It's a great tactic when used appropriately. I'm just being lame and salty. I'll need every tool I can use to perform up to my expectations in the future so I have no real reason not to use that double shine trick. I'll get to work on it after TO7 unless I go boss mode for some reason beforehand.

 

[Mew2King]

well everyone and their mom likes to nair OOS after blocking shine, so jump in the air and shine them.