I think you're misunderstanding me. And being condescending lol, did you read what I said lol?
Notice three things: I introduced this as a mixup, it's relatively passive, and I said in my last post that this is good because you don't forgo your advantageous positioning/situation. Which is me saying that that's typically the goal because you should not expect to get a pure hit whenever you hit someone's shield in the vast majority of good player & and good character situations. What you want to do is abuse your good moves or even plain abuse the fact that you're more actionable than they are to stay on top of the situation. Not hope for a death combo/shield break.
So why are you lecturing me on pushing buttons when I never said you should?
The goal of wd back out of shield pressure is to move out of the way so that if your opponent commits to something (grab, nair, or Usmash oos) you can just punish it. Interrupting their lag with a laser is a weaker way to accomplish this goal.
This is a valid point and yes that is all true and well established. But this why the meta matters. 99% forms of shield pressure (passive or multi shining w/e) are contingent on mixups. You probably already know that just about no string is entirely safe (or even applies real pressure) if your opponent knows exactly what you're going to do.
If you think about in game situations and how often WD back is used you will probably see that the person being "pressured" isn't immediately and constantly going for shield grabs and offensive options OOS lol. This is probably the case if you watch any decent level match. So to be honest it just looks like you kind of undercut the scope of what I was saying.
90% of the time at higher levels unless your opponent is in a corner they aren't going to try to shield grab a falco nair->shine (followed up by standard ways of making it safe).
So this is like, why I'm talking about adding a safe mixup to a common situation that proposes different challenges and timings for your opponent, yah? Especially because a ton of standard Falco pressure is rhythm based or built on common queues.
Which is why doing things like empty hops and cross ups can be effective (they take certain queues away from your opponent) although they are strictly speaking not safe. But blah blah you know that.
Unless you're terrible at this game, you shouldn't think shield pressure is always good, or all about just using tech skill to get free openings. There is good shield pressure and bad shield pressure, and even good pressure always has a weakness.
Right that's what I said lol. I literally said (traditional) shield pressure is getting worse and worse and it is requiring more and more tech skill if you want to pressure like 2012 falco and still be effective.
Crazy shield pressure never was considered optimal, you're only just now realizing the weaknesses it has. I'd bet 'crazy westballz-espue pressure' will only become less of a thing over time, and small strings of safer shield pressure will probably become more dominant.
Right yes. No I didn't just realize this lol. It's one of the first things I said. I also said the next two points.
- common/conventional shield pressure is not sustainable
- that's what I was trying to get across in layman's terms with the PP and mango comment
PP makes great use of empty hops--a lack of a button push lol--and short safe strings and mango is well known to be great at baiting OOS options, and usually punishing them.
One thing that makes them so effective though is how insanely good their movement is, especially PP. PP doing a nair shine WD back has a different context than Purpletuce doing the same thing. Probably because PP won multiple positional battles before going in, flustered his opponent slightly, tried their patience, used a different approach the last time he went in, and substantiated his pressure by being able to combo extremely well.
Since you know, "pressure" is about scaring and confusing people.
Those types of things make their mixups, reads, and basic fundamentals more effective. So yeah that's a thing too.
I get that, which is why I am trying to add on to the idea.
Also, a good alternative to wd back or fade back laser is early fade back nair or dair. It gives you more if it works, it will actually hit them if they try to attack you before your attack (laser/aerial) comes out. People have been using this forever, and it is decently safe.
Yes that is a great, well documented, alternative and a standard part of the meta. If you actually play a falco match vs. someone who is confident with their shield and comfortable in standard & very common falco situations then you're not going to get much off of your shield pressure if you're only doing aerial WD back and 2 aerial fade away. Anyone good isn't taking that bait constantly lol. Do you know/think that?
This is like me saying "hey guys use more empty hops" and you saying "fade away nair is safe". Yes that's great and everyone knows that. What value did that add and at what point did I say that you should only use this? It's a ~mixup~ like every single falco pressure string is.
Maybe calling the shine->fade->laser an "improvement" was too harsh of a word for you but I say that in the same way that using shorten is an improvement on your side B. It's a meta thing because if you shorten 100% of the time it's bad and useless. It adds from the base option/idea. It doesn't invalidate it lol.
All this is is introducing a new set of problems where most of them work out in your favor. You juggling safe options that cover common responses exclusively or inclusively (/w different timings) = hard for your opponent to deal with.
Dr Peepee
since you're around, mind if I ask you something? I'm comfortable with my technical execution which pretty much allows me to always beat my friends, but my mental game is terrible and I almost always autopilot. Just wondering, when you were new to Smash and the mental game in general, what things did you think about during games in order to exploit opponents? I'm just looking for some basic starting ground here and I'm curious as to what your experience was,
, f throw sets up positioning/possible edge guards, b throw can be a DI mix up but I'm not the one to ask about that and I believe d throw has some merit vs fox at low % (don't remember the details) and can be useful at high percents where you may try to go for a tech read punish.
