Why does frame data matter?

[ecstasy]

I'm just wondering how and why frame data is considered to be essential for competitive play. What are it's applications, and how do I learn it?

 

[Furret24]

You can check out each character's frame data here.

 

[Mario & Sonic Guy]

Frame data gives you an idea on how quickly a fighter's moves will execute. For example, it takes longer for Ganondorf to use Warlock Punch than if he used his f-tilt instead.

 

[LightLV]

I'm just wondering how and why frame data is considered to be essential for competitive play. What are it's applications, and how do I learn it?

You're going to get alot of simplified answers here, but i'm just going to start by saying it's really difficult to understand the importance of frame data (and the context of its importance) if you've never played another fighting game.


And to give a simplified answer, frame data is basically telling you the programming behind each attack. How fast it is, its damage/KB properties, how long it lingers on the field, earliest you can recover, whether it makes you invulnerable or not, ect ect. it's like a tool for better learning the specifics of your character's strengths.


For example, say Superman has a 3 frame jab and Batman has a 4 frame jab. Assuming they both press the attack button at the exact same time at point blank range, you know for a FACT Superman is always going to hit first. This is useful information to know, since the visual difference between 3 and 4 frame activation is 1/60th of a second and pretty impossible to see. However, without proper context (positioning, size of hitboxes, crouching, whether or not the enemy uses an invincible attack), this information is pretty useless. You use it as a tool to micromanage your playstyle, but learning and memorizing it in full is almost never going to help you.


"good" frame data in Smash 4 is almost always referring to autocancel frames and attack startup speed, and on occasion actives. This is because there isn't really a concept of defensive pressure in Smash 4, so the other values are somewhat moot.

 

[DungeonMaster]

Ignoring special qualities of moves like super-armor, etc... If we both have moves that will hit each other and we both press the button at the exact same time, the one with shorter startup will win.
Ex: shulk and sheik try to jab each other, sheik will win. It's frame 5 vs. frame 2.
Although it sounds like a small variance, it's absolutely critical, you will feel like you just can't get a hit in, all things being equal.
The other important aspect is cooldown, a slow startup may not be that bad of a thing if the frame at which you can next act is very quick after the move's active hitbox. Ex: Ganno's up-smash. You do not have opportunity to punish gannon's up-smash on reaction, it's 23 frames between hitbox being out and his first actionable frame. Human reaction is about 15 frames and if it hits your shield, you can't do anything fast enough.
If you play a character like Shulk, the worst frame data in the game, versus a character like Sheik, the best frame data, any move Shulk does will get punished, if he even gets the opportunity to throw out a move at all. In greatly simplified terms that is not far from the truth: Sheik can simply throw out hitboxes and win.

The final aspect is combos, but that is also tied to knockback.

 

[YoshiYoshi]

I just want to elaborate on a few things in a very unorganized manner.

'Frame data' should just be considered 'data', since there is a lot of important technical information that doesn't have to do with frames. Someone else pretty much said this though. It is absolutely always a good thing to memorize data of all moves, all characters, all interactions. The more you know, the more you can do.

Like, how many frames are you in the air on a short hop or full hop? Like, if you know your full hop is roughly 50 frames and ZZS whiffs a grab beneath you, it is safe to fastfall in a n-air because she's got to sit in lag for something like 60 frames.

It's also very useful to know exactly how many aerials and combination of aerials you can pull off in a short hop, full hop, full hop double jump, full hop attack double jump, etc. All of this is bound by data and by knowing the data allows you to assess things analytically.

A 23 frame move might be hard to react, but not impossible if you have a frame 3-7 move to respond with. Even better, if you predict the move and know you have a powerful frame-7 punish, you can use your knowledge of data to punish something that should be impossible for our terribly inefficient human brains.

In data, faster =/= always equal better. A frame 3 move with no range can be consistency out-spaced by a frame 5 disjoint. The range on character's attacks isn't reflected in commonly used data. Just because Shulk has unappealing numbers on a sheet doesn't mean his moves are all strictly worse than everyone else's. He has the range to out-space character's with faster moves. If there were a way to quantify the strength of disjoints in a way that data quantifies speed, the game would seem a lot more balanced to analytical observers.

 

[Mario & Sonic Guy]

One final note to keep in mind is super armor. Even if an attack takes longer to execute, if it has super armor, it's almost impossible to stop without grabbing the fighter or delivering an attack that's powerful enough to bypass the super armor.

For an example, as slow as Donkey Kong's Stubborn Headbutt is, its super armor properties mean that even a series of jabs from Little Mac can't stop it from burying him into the ground.

 

[#HBC | Red Ryu]

Most people covered or well here but frame Dara is mostly the start up, active frames, cooldown and special properties of moves.

In a nutshell, a lot of this matters since it affects all of their moves and determines along with damage and hitboxes how good or bad a move is.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

As a practical matter, frame data is really useful to just understand what options are best in certain situations. Like generally, if your opponent is right in front of you, you likely want to throw out some kind of a move to disrupt them. Which move? For most characters it's jab. For Rosalina with Luma out of position or dead, dtilt is faster, and hitting with that dtilt in situations my jab would have been too slow has saved games for me. You're Diddy Kong, and someone did something to your shield you think you can punish but you don't have much time. Do you try to grab? Well, grab is frame 6, and for Diddy Kong in particular, an up smash out of shield would hit on frame 5 so you can hit faster and likely do more damage by going for it (since usmash is, of course, a stronger move than grab in most situations). On the other hand, Rosalina's usmash feels pretty fast... but it's actually frame 8 so grab would actually hit faster so if you have minimal time that little bit of extra sloth might make your move unsuccessful.

In a neutral situation, you also have to keep the following general values in mind when it comes to frame data...

Moves with 10 or fewer frames of start-up are impossible to react to. If an opponent blocks these or otherwise evades them, it's only because they anticipated them before you started your attack and took pre-emptive action (you may have tells in your movement and such to make their guesses easier).

Moves with 11-20 frames of start-up are possible to react to but really hard, generally only will be dealt with on reaction by an opponent specifically looking for them. Moves on the faster end of this are physically impossible for some players to react to (human reaction time varies person to person; 11-13 frame moves are the kind of moves only some people can react to).

Moves with 21-30 frames of start-up are generally reactable but are fast enough that opponents who are surprised by them generally won't be able to react. Being surprised adds considerable thinking time to a response. Of course, you won't be able to surprise a skilled opponent too many times so make those surprises count.

Moves with 31 or more frames of start-up are generally so slow that they can only realistically hit if punishing something. Opponents will consistently react to the fact that you're doing them in almost all situations, but sometimes, your opponent has committed to some sort of movement or action that makes it very hard for them to avoid these slow moves.

For smashes as well, remember there are two reaction points: reaction to starting up the move and reaction to the charge being released. As a user of a smash attack, you can hold a charge for a bit to make the total move easier to react to but the precise timing of the move harder to react to; depending on situation, that can really catch people, and it's very important to understand your charge release frame data for this reason.

For aerials especially, remember your movement generally represents huge tells. If I'm above you and you're jumping straight up at me, I have a pretty fair guess well before you get there that you're thinking about doing an up aerial. Maybe you'll mix me up and do something else, but in that situation, the speed of your up aerial isn't super helpful because your tell of your movement is letting me understand the situation well before you get to me and start hitting buttons. On the other hand, if I do evade it, the cooldown of your up aerial will greatly dictate how good the situation is for each of us; if your up aerial has very low cooldown, you might actually still have pressure. This is why most people look at start-ups primarily for grounded moves and cooldowns (landing lag, auto-cancel windows, aerial finish time) for aerials as the most important data.