Shulk: The Scrub killer and ultimate teaching tool.

[JBarwick]

Playing online you are bound to come across people who aren't very good at smash bros and often use tactics they generally think are good. Most commonly this is a over use of rolls and spamming of characters like Dark Pit with his hammer and Little Mac for his speed and strength on the ground.

Recently I was playing online using random characters and came across a player I can only assume is new to Smash Bros. Every character he used he would use a move what most as first think is good like Bowser's Bowser Bomb and Kirby's Stone. Out of coincidence (maybe I was really feeling it) I picked Shulk and began to fight him. Now though I can predict obvious moves like a Bowser bomb or Stone I am no M2K or Mango so I would sometimes get fooled by his constant roles, despite knowing I should down smash. But when I started using Shulk I realized that Shulk is the king of punishing habits a noob normally gets.
Shulk's down smash is slow and has large range so it is very useful to punish someone who constantly rolls and the size of the sword is a great way to show someone that they should learn how to poke properly and learn spacing. His Monado arts are excellent at showing someone how to deal with different types of fighters be it a fast character like Sonic or a heavy like Ganondorf. The jump art and shield art will show how to gimp with a characters like Falco who are heavy and characters like Pit who have a lot of options on the air.
I'm not saying he's OP because he's not and I'm not telling you to use Shulk online or anything. I'm trying to say that out of all the characters in the new game Shulk is the best character to use as a teaching tool for new players.

So thoughts? Do you agree or do you think there are better characters to use to teach newer players like Mario?

 

[erico9001]

Playing online you are bound to come across people who aren't very good at smash bros and often use tactics they generally think are good. Most commonly this is a over use of rolls and spamming of characters like Dark Pit with his hammer and Little Mac for his speed and strength on the ground.

Recently I was playing online using random characters and came across a player I can only assume is new to Smash Bros. Every character he used he would use a move what most as first think is good like Bowser's Bowser Bomb and Kirby's Stone. Out of coincidence (maybe I was really feeling it) I picked Shulk and began to fight him. Now though I can predict obvious moves like a Bowser bomb or Stone I am no M2K or Mango so I would sometimes get fooled by his constant roles, despite knowing I should down smash. But when I started using Shulk I realized that Shulk is the king of punishing habits a noob normally gets.
Shulk's down smash is slow and has large range so it is very useful to punish someone who constantly rolls and the size of the sword is a great way to show someone that they should learn how to poke properly and learn spacing. His Monado arts are excellent at showing someone how to deal with different types of fighters be it a fast character like Sonic or a heavy like Ganondorf. The jump art and shield art will show how to gimp with a characters like Falco who are heavy and characters like Pit who have a lot of options on the air.
I'm not saying he's OP because he's not and I'm not telling you to use Shulk online or anything. I'm trying to say that out of all the characters in the new game Shulk is the best character to use as a teaching tool for new players.

So thoughts? Do you agree or do you think there are better characters to use to teach newer players like Mario?

To add to this, counter is great for punishing things like warlock punch, Ness's up B, Ness's B, bowser's butt slam, Bowser's side smash, Falcon punch, etc.

Also, Nair towards the direction people are rolling is a nice punishing tool. Or, nair for people trying to roll around you.

Shulk isn't too great at punishing repetitive approaches though. Other characters would be better for that. He's pretty bad at punishing projectile spams, too.

Also, I'm not sure how much Shulk would show people how to take care of characters like Sonic and Bowser.

 

[MarioFireRed]

Aside from the specifics erico mentioned I'm inclined to agree.

Playing Shulk (along with Mega Man in the demo/1-2 weeks after launch) made me drop out of my old habits from the past three games and allowed me to experiment and add in more characters to my roster than I never would've dreamed of even touching in the first place (Marth, Sheik, and especially Falco).

 

[Berserker.]

If you play speed like you're Sonic like how I implied it in this post, then you might be able to give them a bit of a gist on how to deal with those types of approaches/defensive plays

Shield Shulk is NOT a way on how to teach players on how to deal with heavies (Bowser in that regard).