Some underused kill options

[Verduyn]

There are a couple of kill options with Pikachu that I have been experimenting with and finally got them recorded as part of a hype crew battle (which you can watch here (please excuse my SD, I missed the jump input))

First off is footstool to nair stagespike. A gif of this can be seen here. This works because if you input the nair immediately after getting the footstool the disjoint of nair is guaranteed to connect and if you get the correct hitbox, as I get in the gif, then you will send them into the stage. Obviously the drawback of this is that it can be teched but if the opponent is not on point with their techs then they are dead.

The second is grab release to dsmash or fsmash. A gif of this can be seen here. When you grab release someone over the edge of the stage the vast majority of the time they will immediately jump or otherwise attempt to get back to the ledge and not onto the stage. This means that if you do a grab release then immediately do a dsmash of fsmash (depending on which type of grab release you get) you will connect with it a lot more often that it feels you should. In the gif I was fighting someone who I had been doing this to in off-stream friendlies so he was trying to recover around it but because of Battlefield having thin ledges it meant that the inner hitbox of dsmash went through the stage and hit him while he was recovering. Getting the inner hitbox meant that Falcon was pulled up and in, usually meaning he gets hit my the following hit of dsmash on the opposite side of Pika's body, which caused him to get stagespiked. After going through the gif frame by frame I am fairly certain that this hit was untechable too as Falcon's body was going through the stage as the spike hit happened

 

[atv1992]

Personally I don't like relying on footstools too much, however I find the grab release technique quite interesting, nice find c:

 

[hotdogtaco4321]

I think that a lot of people would be focused on recovering from a footstool and would almost never tech the stage spike

 

[Deleted member]

I personally wouldn't go for the Footstool one, mainly because I don't actively try to, it seems situational, and I accidentally Footstool most of the time.

The grab release one seems to be a bit more useful and I think I will try that one out myself.

 

[Megamang]

I have stagespiked someone with the landing hitbox of dair. Also, I get like half my early kills with Fairs eating airdodges at the blast zone.

 

[Valamway]

In that first gif, wouldn't Lucina have died without the nair?
Footstools have a certain amount of time that you can't act out of, and her second jump is gone and her recovery isn't good.

I guess in general you'd want to try to stage spike though.

 

[Verduyn]

In the first gif Ellrazor (the Lucina) may have made it back but in all honesty I wasn't thinking about that mid game and the footstool to nair takes very quick inputs to get the nair to connect so at worst in that situation she would have died to the footstool if I had missed the nair input. But in general you want to get it on muscle memory so that you can get it on characters who would could make that back

 

[Pikabunz]

It looks like a nair without the footstool would've worked too. I don't really see the point of trying to go for the footstool. For a footstool to even happen, your opponent has to be doing nothing at all because you can't footstool someone who is in mid action.

 

[Uncle Honey]

I feel like a competent lucina player would use upb or fair to stuff out opposing gimp options. At the very least, air dodge. I can't help shrug the notion that outside of using a specific setup, going for a footstool is a bad gimp option.

 

[M15t3R E]

The only time people gimp with footstool is by complete accident or just to add insult to injury when the opponent is already in the helpless state, falling to their death.

 

[Valamway]

The only time people gimp with footstool is by complete accident or just to add insult to injury when the opponent is already in the helpless state, falling to their death.

Maybe with Pikachu that's true, but Zelda's FF sourspot dair gets a guaranteed footstool.
Which is better at killing at low-mid percents than the sweetspot.
Overall though, I agree.
Footstools offstage aren't as good as other, more purpose gimp attempts.
Even using footstools as combo tools is really hard to do on purpose.