Red lightning syndrome.

[Rango the Mercenary]

As Ike, do you ever face these two problems?

1) Enemies get hit and red lightning appears, and despite all possibilities, they don't die.
2) You get hit by a Smash attack you should survive (no red lightning) and you die at an absurdly low percent.

Does this happen as frequently when you use other characters?

 

[Arrei]

Well, it's more like some attacks have a tendency to do this a lot. Dthrow and bad angle Usmashes do this often for Ike, since DI seems to have such a massive effect on the trajectory for those two moves. It seems like the red lightning will appear as long as the attack is capable of killing while only partially accounting for DI. In recent memory, I remember the same thing occurring with Dedede's Uair in one of my matches, as my foe wasn't quite beaten up enough to launch them at high velocity yet. It also happens quite frequently with his Gordos, now that I think about it, as they have considerable base knockback but scale quite slowly.

 

[san.]

1 is good DI
2 is bad DI

Hold towards the stage for horizontal attacks and away from the hit left/right for vertical attacks. If you're on the ground, hold down to crouch cancel some knockback even more. And definitely never hold up if you're hit by a kill move.

Ike is also prone to staling his moves if he relies on a few of them too much.

Ike is ~#6 or so in overall survivability in the game, so good DI is essential to maximizing his output.

 

[Mario766]

Holding up only affects horizontal knockback, against vertical knockback it has zero effect.

 

[~ Valkyrie ~]

TBH, take a note of what is said about the red lightnings by the game tips:

A red and black flash of lightning when an attack lands means that the victim has been hit with enough force to launch them off the screen.

I think this means the move is basically enough to kill them now, but not guarantee a KO if DI:ing is involved. Just an indicator that it can kill for the remainder of your opponent's stock. Mostly this means it's a guarantee kill if it didn't KO despite the lightnings going off.

 

[DysfunctionalHex]

Holding up only affects horizontal knockback, against vertical knockback it has zero effect.

I don't really understand DI all that much when it comes to surviving hits that you otherwise wouldn't. I generally just point the control stick to the center of the stage. Is it better to angle up to get the extra altitude?

 

[Arrei]

In simplified terms, envision a flat horizontal 10-yard line. Now angle it slightly up, still 10 yards long. Now you don't travel as far horizontally but more vertically. In the same vein, angle that upward line back down and you travel more horizontal distance but don't go as high up.

In other words, DI lets you shift the angle you're knocked at in order to potentially avoid crossing either a horizontal or vertical blast line. But if you DI badly, you might send yourself even closer to the line or to a different blast line and kill yourself.

This picture from ssbwiki illustrates the difference perfectly: http://www.ssbwiki.com/images/9/96/Directional_influence_example.png


However, Smash 4 introduced another type of DI, vectoring, which let players directly fight against the amount of knockback you receive by inputting the opposite direction. It doesn't work for vertical knockback anymore as of 1.0.4, but apparently still exists for horizontal knockback. This means for the purposes of surviving, you should always try to DI left or right, so that you'll directly fight against horizontal knockback, and do the angling thing described above against vertical knockback. That is separate from trying to DI out of combos or away from followups, of course, as that's all up to the flow of the battle.

Also, I'm not sure about this part but against certain attacks that aren't going to make you cross the blast line but will send you at an inconvenient angle, it might still be worth doing an upward angle to make your subsequent recovery easier.