It's about time that people come to terms with the fact that if you want speedy ultra combos with Samus, you equip the Zero Suit. These specials are meant to be fully incorporated into her game, instead of an afterthought in favour of dash attack combos.
time for an essay to shoot out my opinions and frustrations about the lack of hope other people have for Samus right now for some reason.
It honestly surprises me how negative people are about Samus in the comments of the video even though the analysis video specifically mentions many points against it such as how premature many people's opinions are about Samus, mainly being about how the dash attack no longer combos while also pointing out many of the the positive changes she has gotten so far.
If anything, we should be feeling quite hopeful that Samus might be overall higher in terms of viability than she was before considering the changes we have seen so far. Lets go the main points step by step, starting with the main adversary
dash attack and its changes:
- no longer combos as it used to from a non-sour hit
+ kills earlier
+comes out faster
in other words the move traded the potential to combo effectively for even more value as a mix-up tool alongside your spacing tools. Its definitely overall a nerf, but the move still holds the value of letting samus go into the offensive when the rest of her best tools are mainly aimed for spacing and keep-away at mid-range distance such as f tilt and zair. Its still capable of doing the same things it did in smash 4 as a tool of keeping your opponent constantly on their toes for it, just with far less reward from hitting it outside of dash-attack's new kill%. would love to see how the sour spot looks like now to see how well that can combo still though...
now the positives that people seem to completely undervalue for some reason:
* you can now charge in the air.
this change is HUGE when it comes to dealing with characters that generally did not give much time for you to get your charge up in neutral, mainly fast characters such as fox, captain falcon, sonic and so on. With the change you now have FAR more opportunities to get it up. The value of a fully charged shot cannot be understated. Its a massive source of pressure for your opponent to constantly worry just by existing, making them far more cautious and more prone to mistakes if they focus on it too much over your other tools. Considering the overall pressure of the charge shot and its tendency to make opponent shield alot we go to the next big change:
* OMG the grab changes
In many of my matches against opponents who know what their doing vs samus, the biggest flaw i always found with her was the inability to truly punish shield effectively and loss of the guaranteed shield break from super missile+ charge shot early on did not help this one bit. I always felt this lack of a decent grab was one of the biggest things holding samus back, as any decent opponent would heavily focus on using shield to deal with both zair and dash attack pressure effectively while making finishing the stock far more difficult as the grab cannot combo at high% or even kill until it gets unreasonably high. This all changes with 1 MAJOR change:
*the throw CAN kill at a reasonable % now.
This change to me is absolutely massive considering how effectively Samus conditions her opponents to rely on the shield to deal with many of her best tools. Now that the throw actually can actually kill without needing to go over 200+%, they simply cannot rely on the shield as much as before compared to when grabbing essentially did jack-**** before against high% opponents while making you vulnerable to a hard punish by a spot-dodge.
And it gets even better for the grab:
*d-throw combos more reliably now.
Many of the characters in smash 4 are capable of making comboing from d-throw very difficult as long as they DI away correctly, essentially making throw as a combo tool unreliable against anyone who knew what they were doing. Looking at the new d-throw this should no longer be a thing so you can very reliably get your damage off from any d-throw now while keeping the value at high% as a tool to get your opponent into a disadvantage state
So essentially the changes made a fairly bad grab into far more serviceable one. Its nothing outstanding compared to grabs like Ness or Mewtwo has, but i no longer get the feeling that it will be the biggest flaw Samus will have in this game, especially considering how majority of the grabs in this game have gotten the nerf treatment while samus gets a whole 10 reduction on her standing grab.
Honestly these changes alone should be giving hope for Samus' chances in this game compared to the previous entry. But there are even more changes that i don't consider as big but still very welcome additions such as:
* morph ball bombs from timed to proximity (while still keeping timed for locking down the opponent into shield like in the video!)
this essentially elevates the bomb from a tool that i mainly used for:
'mixing up getting back to the ground from air
' risk-free low reward edgeguarding tool
' gimmicky grab setups
To an actual neutral spacing tool. The current morph ball is essentially quite bad as a spacing tool as long as the opponent knew how the move works as they could literally just run past it and punish you for using the move. with proximity rules this is no longer possible and will instead likely give Samus an advantage state now as the opponent is either forced to shield or jump to get past the bomb if they want to get to you while the bomb is out.
* F-air has far less landing lag compared to before
this change for me is far more difficult to predict as i have not touched the game, but the move can very likely now be used more effectively as a neutral spacing tool now while still keeping its overall value as a ledge getup and air to air tool. It did lose some of its value as a good way to catch air dodges thanks to the new airdodge system. Overall i expect to see far more uses out of this move outside of its current uses now as the only real disjointed hitbox aerial samus has in neutral.
and lastly in short
* super missile waiting a little bit before moving
hello setups to a move i considered quite bad in all honesty before. (what else can i say?)
There are still more changes you could go over, but i feel i got the point across by now. there is no way Samus is worse than before if the only real nerf she got was the loss of losing her combos from dash attack while gaining so much more to many of her main flaws she was plagued by.
I for one im looking forward to this new Samus and figuring out all the new ways i can keep my opponents at the optimal distance while actually having far better tools to punish dash-shielding with better grab and morph ball bombs.
How have you been?
