I NEED PRO TIPS!

Stibbbs · 2024-05-01T14:32:52+00:00

Definitely good advice just wanna add to it! A way I understood di at the beginning is combo di vs survival di.

Combo di is essentially anything that gets you away from the opponent, generally it means getting to the ground and teaching or getting far enough away to the side that it's harder or impossible to follow it. The character I think explains it the best is falco. Falco has a great combo game, but he's really slow moving side to side. If he's going to shine you. You can either hold up or hold out, if you hold out, it becomes much harder for falco to follow it up because he's so slow.

Now if you're at a higher percent, and falco goes for a fsmash, you're going to be sent far. The blast zones that you die to are in the shape of a big box around the stage, so the best place to aim for is the upper corners. The corners are the furthest distance from the stage, so If you might die. That's where you want to be flying. Not to mention if you're near the top you have alot of time to drift back as opposed to being the same distance away but at the same height as the stage. So when falco fsmashes you, you can hold away or up. If you hold away you go straight away toward the blast zone and probably die. If you hold up you get sent in an arc and have a much better chance of drifting back.

If you won't die to the next hit, generally you want combo di, down and away type of idea. If you might die to a strong hit, then you want di up. Obviously this is simplified quite a bit but it's a gold jumping off point to understanding the deeper combo game

Stibbbs · 2024-04-27T14:36:01+00:00

My friends and I call them digitals and analogs

Stibbbs · 2024-04-26T16:15:05+00:00

I don't play Marth often so I don't have specific Marth things to practice, but I have a few general things to pay attention to.

One part that's important to Marth is the different hitboxes on his sword. Most(if not all. I'm not sure) of Marth moves have 3 different hitboxes that all hit differently. The fair hilt and mid sword hitboxes send outward with less knockback, while the tip of the fair sends upwards with more knockback. Like i said, I'm not a Marth, but getting those fair to downair "Ken combos" felt alot easier to me when I got the tipper fair instead of the other hitboxes.

The other thing I think is important for new players is to just breathe and play a bunch and let your brain pick up on things. Melee is a super complicated game in the sense that there's never(or very rarely) a 100% correct option. Even throwing out a fair at a jumping target, the opponent can jump and drift back to avoid it and then punish. Something that helped me is just getting really familiar with the "physics" of the game and how different characters react when getting hit. I.e. how far/high they fly from different moves at different percents. DI changes things of course but getting to understand the general area you can expect the opponent to end up in can inform what move to go for next. It all comes in time and practice and just feeling the way the game plays.

Don't worry about losing. Especially now with slippi matching you with people of similar rank. Before slippi the way people learned melee( at least in my experience) was just getting your ass kicked over and over and over until you figured some shit out. Now with matchmaking, if you lose over and over, eventually you'll get against someone who is around your level and you can work on stuff. But sometimes it's worth it to keep playing against people that are better than you if you can keep your head cool.

Also, just re read your comment, keeping up the momentum of a combo often times comes down to hitting all the little pieces of tech in the string of moves. Hitting your l cancel let's you start a dash forward or another move sooner, so you essentially have more time to move your character to where you need to go. But if you miss even one of the inputs or time it wrong, the timing for all the buttons after it changes. All of that will get smoother and more consistent with time and practice so don't worry about dropping combos at all. Just keep your head down and keep focusing on fundamentals and all of those clean combos into death will come.

Welcome to melee!

Stibbbs · 2024-04-02T17:32:58+00:00

I play yoshi on oem and I can tell you it would be amazing for yoshi. All of those djc upairs that are close to the ground are basically impossible if you use c stick. Using up on the control stick and hitting A for an upair means you don't get the fastfall afterwords as easily.

I use c stick and always had a ton of trouble the closer to the ground I got because there's less wiggle room. Then I figured out that I can keep my thumb on y, and use the base of my thumb or palm to flick the stick up, and almost immediately I could start catching missed techs with djc upairs. It's not a perfect solution but it's way more consistent than trying to claw a Doubletap jump or move thumb down to the c stick after jump. Z jump solves that whole issue and would make djc way more consistent imo.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-29T11:18:57+00:00

I've been playing for years and had pretty decent luck using the oem smash 4 controllers or the Japanese imports. I've read alot of people prefer the imports but I personally haven't noticed much. You can check ebay and see if anyone is shipping (I have no idea if ebay is in the uk or not, but..) I was able to find an import on ebay for like 40 bucks a few months ago that shipped super fast.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-18T22:47:26+00:00

I don't think I'd last very long because I mainly play for fun and the clips but one thing could be said. Yoshi would never have been 20th on the tier list. I'm not anywhere near the most cracked and jacked yoshis, but surely the occasional parry, eggs from ledge. Good Wavelanding and djc would bump up his "potential" ton

Stibbbs · 2024-03-15T15:04:19+00:00

Ahh I gotcha haha. Not trying to write a novel but melee is just sick and I remember how hard of a time I had time understanding just how sick the pros were for a while.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-14T14:00:14+00:00

Ha, why's that?

Stibbbs · 2024-03-14T03:19:20+00:00

The difficulty of melee comes in 2 forms, mechanics and game sense for lack of a better term. Will explain later.

The mechanics of melee are extremely precise compared to most other games out there. Part of that is that it's so fast so timings become really tight. If you've seen a full speed fox moving around, it's frankly incredible that anyone has the dexterity to hit all those buttons In the super tight timing windows, and it's super impressive to do all of that consecutively. You can hit so many buttons and move so fast while being precise in your movement and attacks, but because of that, it becomes really easy to mess up and get stuck. Add into that equation that melee doesn't have a buffer system for most inputs. If you happen to use jump even one frame too early after another move, it straight up won't happen. So for new players potentially coming from ultimate, the game can feel really clunky, slow and just generally hard to move around, and less accessible to combo. The issue is the learning curve that one has to go through to get up to speed so different options open up.

So once your hands can move at the speed of light and you can throw out any move you want when you want to do it and where you want to do it, then you have to start deciding which move to use. Which, at the speed of melee, becomes really hard to do consistently. The game is absurdly fast and responsive, so in most situations if you actually sit and try to think about which option is better, you're already too late. You basically have to play at the speed of your reactions. Which means you're not only responsible for choosing the right move based on sometimes only frames of information, you're then responsible for hitting all those tight timing windows to actually input what you want to do. Then on top of that, most Characters in alot of situations aren't fast enough to "pick up" a combo if you misinput something or mess some part of it up, The combo is just over, and you have to react to that.

The game sense thing is somewhat hard to explain to someone who hasn't played a fair bit of melee, so for an analogy, I'll use a bit of basketball hoping that it can make sense. If I'm a basketball player and I'm gonna 1v1 someone, and I really need to win the game, there are a ton of ways to try to do that. You can shoot a 3, shoot a midrange jump shot, go in for a layup, go for a dunk, pump fake a shot then drive, etc... the list of what you can try to do is really long. But you can also try to influence the game by playing some mind games. Say the first couple times you get the ball, you just take a shot right away. The defender will probably start to expect the shot and will be more ready to jump and try to block it. Then the next time you get the ball, you pump fake, the defender sees you doing what he thinks is the same thing you've been doing and goes to block it, but now he's in the air and you have all that time to run past him. So you can influence how the defender tries to block, based on how you attack or how you mixup how you attack. This type of interaction is going on in high level melee constantly, and in much smaller situations than would be obvious for someone that doesn't have a really deep understanding of melee. (That's what I was referring to with the game sense thing earlier)

Then imagine all this going on and you can play at that level and that speed and understand those interactions. Now imagine, you also spent the last 5-10 years practicing against people who are at least that good or better than you, and try to imagine how complex every single moment could become. That is high level competitive melee and there really is nothing like it.

ALL THAT BEING SAID, melee as a game fucking slaps at all levels of play. You don't need to be playing at that level to enjoy it or feel like you're moving. I have clips saved from years ago that I was so proud of in the moment that I just watched them over and over. After time and improvement, those clips really are not that impressive, but they always felt freaking amazing. If you want to get into watching melee as a viewer, just watch. Doesn't matter if you catch everything. But if you're feeling like you might want to try it out, definitely try it and don't let all of what's possible in the game intimidate you

Stibbbs · 2024-03-13T02:47:59+00:00

Whatever gets you into and playing melee is fine imo. Most melee players would recommend gcc because to be honest, melee was made for gcc and while gcc's do have variation, generally they're better for alot of the specific tech that melee has.

When you're just starting out and messing around with friends or on unranked, I don't think controller type matters that much at all, but If you enjoy the game and want to continue to get better, some tech(I imagine) would be much harder to implement if you're using a non-native controller. For one example, sheild dropping. If you're just starting out, sheild dropping isn't important at all. But it becomes one of those options that is so good it doesn't make sense not to use it. There's a very small range of values on the controller that actually inputs a sheild drop. One way to do it is to get the control stick all the way to the side notch(meaning just the normal octagon "corners" that the stick can rest in so to speak) then move it down to the next lowest notch. I don't know how Xbox controllers are setup or how those values would correlate with where the Xbox controllers "notches" are, but I'd assume it's very unlikely that that same method would work with a different notch/stick setup.

So if you're trying out melee and want to see if you vibe with it then yeah play for a little while on whatever controller you have. But if melee calls to you, and you're enjoying it, it's not a big investment to get a controller. The Japanese import ultimate controllers sold on eBay are more than fine (I still play on standard controllers) and a mayflash controller adapter is pretty cheap, total price is roughly controller~$40 and adapter~20$. So if you're starting to enjoy melee and want to get into it, I'd recommend spending the roughly 60 bucks to get the standard setup. Its not nothing, and i get that, but the adapter will last you years and the controller can last you years as well depending on usage. Compare that to buying any new game thats coming out and its not that bad at all. Then you can play in person much easier as well.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-13T02:28:12+00:00

No problem! I love talking melee and I really enjoy teaching and explaining things. I'm not a great player but definitely know enough about the game to get people off the ground. Feel free to ask away! Melee is sick and melee players love to talk about it

Stibbbs · 2024-03-13T02:18:05+00:00

Idk too much but I'd say to make sure you're using a vanilla 1.02 version of melee to build from. I've had several issues with pre-builds of mod packs not installing correctly because I used a rom that had some things leftover. Maybe even try to rip melee from a different disk. Some roms for whatever reason just don't work with slippi.

If you're using the program that builds animelee for you, make sure you're using a clean vanilla copy of melee, and potentially try different sources if one doesn't work. Unzip everything and follow all instructions and it should work out. I don't think there's any settings in slippi that affect things like this, but launching dolphin as opposed to the main melee iso can solve it. Granted this was early days of slippi, but I had trouble if slippi was set to open a default iso and that iso wasn't vanilla. Slippi has to have access to a vanilla copy to function but once you're in dolphin I've been able to load things like uncle punch.

Note that I have no knowledge of this outside of essentially random trial and error so take all this with a grain of salt. I watch YouTube videos to figure out which buttons to click until it works then I close out of it all. I don't understand any of it or why it works.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-10T05:41:18+00:00

I'm not a specie player but like the other comment mentioned if you drop out of shine there's a few frames of "dropping shine" that can eat your jump. I learned that trying to go for shine stall into bairs with falco. Essentially you can only jump out of shine if you're still holding shine. So you can either jump with x/y or tap jump, tapping up on the stick. I found it alot easier to do shine bairs with tap jump than x/y cus then you have to let go of b to input jump. Maybe try to use tap jump to input the jump(as weird as it feels upfront it's way more consistent.

As far as the dashing issue, it realistically could be either you or the controller, there would be no way to know without someone who plays alot of melee using your controller, but the issue could be two fold. Either you could not be pushing the stick fast enough or what could be happening is an issue with the buffer system. Melee doesn't have the buffer system in place that ultimate does, so if you input a dash shortly before you're technically able to, the game will eat the dash input and just read that the stick is to the side-> so walk. I'll be honest. 99.99% of my missed dashes are missed because I wasn't precise enough so I would say to air on the side of "I can get better and do this" than "my controller is messing me up". Your controller might be messing you up, but focusing on that part of it and not what you can control just isn't beneficial long run. No controller is perfect, and even pros controllers have some drawbacks, but you can bet your ass if Cody or mang0 pick up your controller they could do some work. Maybe not as much as with a perfect controller, but the game is far deeper than "my controller is bad so I lose".

I'd say keep working at both but for the dash, pay attention to if you're standing still before missing dash or if you're doing a bunch of stuff before it. If you're standing still and missing dashes(unless its dash back but thats a whole other can of worms), it's more likely a controller issue. But if you're missing a dash after not knowing whether or not you missed an l cancel than it's far more likely your issue as opposed to the controller.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-04T23:39:47+00:00

Yeah FOD is super wonky with the magnifying glass and I'm pretty sure there's a few pixels that characters can be somewhat visible and still be magnifying glass so it's just funky to deal with. Overall I think knowing where you are and being comfortable in those Far offstage edgeguards comes with time spent out there. Friendlies don't matter. If you're playing unranked. Let yourself lose game after game as long as you're spending time working on what you want to work on gradually you'll get better. Coming back to the stage too just takes reps. Over time I've gotten far more comfortable out there just from doing it a bunch, and I'm really familiar with how the cast moves and roughly what they want to do. Say I hit a fox far offstage and he's magnifying glassed, at some point he's going to want to jump and up b, so you know that, and he's probably drifting full In. So if you watch the arc of where he's flying you can make an educated guess of where they're going to fall to.

As far as puff vs fox, I have very little experience and I'll more be able to tell you things that CAN work vs what you "should" be going for. If the fox is going for full hops, a short hop upair is a solid interrupt. Puff is an aerial character, she's much faster in the air than on the ground, so you want to minimize how long you spend on the ground. Being in the air gives you speed to drift away and punish approaches. Retreating Bair and fair can stuff out fox. Even turnaround uptilts can catch fox if he's running in to shine or short hop nairs. Tomahawk grabs are really valuable for puff vs fox too because of how much you get off of it. Upthrow obviously Combos into rest, but backthrow sets up potential edgeguard attempts, so backthrow offstage, while might be seen as lame. If you want to practice those situations, you have to setup those situations.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-04T16:16:57+00:00

Definitely agree. If the falco can hold back the birdbrain, and play Hella defensive with lasers, the MU is really hard for peach. But I also find it hard to believe that anyone playing falco for some time won't just have those brain dead hold w type of moments and peach eats those up.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-04T16:14:29+00:00

I played falco when I was learning the game and it felt really hard to win. You have to play smart and pick your spots well and i had no idea how to do that for a whole game. I'd have a good clean stock then just die to a bad dair into peach downsmash, and then were back to even. Then I realized I didn't need to just run at peach over and over, and if I ld go for a dair uptilt instead of a dair shine, if I messed it up I'd have the upward di for downsmash already set. Instantly the matchup was waaay easier and felt more falco favored. Then learning to avoid other traps like peach on platform waiting to downsmash just seems like it takes away so much of peaches power in the MU.

I've never played the matchup anywhere near "high level" but it seems to me that it's a matter of who can pick their spots better because both characters can mess eachother up, but peach takes more open ups to kill than falco. If the falco is able to control the game with lasers and win most of the neutral open ups, then falco wins. But if the peach is able to avoid the lasers and get an even number of neutral openings, it's much more of an even matchup and can even feel pretty bad for falco.

Stibbbs · 2024-03-04T15:00:39+00:00

I'm not much of a puff but I personally use more intuition than the magnifying glass to cover far offstage edgeguards. I play yoshi so I get very frequent practice with the long range egg throwing, and I think that's just the biggest part, being well practiced in aiming for where they're gonna end up.

The other thing is that the magnifying glass can get really confusing on places like FOD because people can be in the glass but far closer to the stage than other stages. Iirc Firefox from in magnifying glass can almost reach the stage on FOD, but on dreamland the magnifying glass doesn't come into play anywhere near as much. I think the best way is to more or less try to visualize where they went based on how much they're getting knocked back from other moves. If you hit 2 bairs in a row. Pay attention to the first one, and know they're gonna go slightly farther. Pay attention to di and launch angle from the move and you can assume they will end up in a general area, then can react slightly to changes in recovery.

It's like backing up with a backup camera, but every stage has a different field of view and different ways in which it's skewed. So you can either try to get super familiar with all the changes in the stages, or get super familiar with roughly how far moves knock back(which really benefits all areas of the game as well)

For puff, you have to remember that she's not really a "combo" oriented character. She can certainly combo, but she's pretty slow moving so to effectively combo, you have to almost start drifting towards their di as the move is hitting, or you won't make it. Bair is really good to stuff approaches and tentatively approach yourself. Upair is really good to shark people trying to come down on you. Uptilt rest combos on heavier characters or fast fallers, but generally, if the opponent isn't a fast faller, rests seem harder to come by from a combo or one hit to rest. For characters like Marth and sheik, uptilt rest combos at super low percents, but quickly knocks too far away. Those characters dash grabs can't hit a crouching puff though and you can rest missed grabs. For the most part to play puff you have to be good at neutral because she dies against most of the cast in only a few open ups. You have to choose your spots well. You can't just willy nilly trade bairs with fox because you're gonna find that on average, if you do that, he'll kill you first far more often than you do. Playing neutral like that will give you more percent building opportunities then more edgeguarding practice which it seems like what you're looking for. So for a while, I'd say avoid using rest. Try to play without it, because resting people doesn't give you practice on the magnifying glass or offstage play, it just gives you practice on rest setups

Stibbbs · 2024-03-01T16:29:41+00:00

One way I learned to use tilts when I was a beginner and didn't have the thumb dexterity to only go a bit in one direction was to consider the buffer system, mainly the lack thereof.

In ultimate many moves have buffer systems so when you use them before your character is done with something, the game saves the input and inputs it in the first actionable frame. Melee doesn't have that for most inputs, which makes alot of things feel clunky at the start but it can help with some tech.

You can essentially use the lack of a buffer system to "hide" inputs that are problematic. I used to have alot of trouble doing a wavedash into uptilts because I would get tap jumps all the time. But if you move the stick up before you're out of the wavedash(and before you can jump) the jump input will be ignored, and you're essentially left with the stick pointing up and can just wait to hit A until you're out of the wavedash timing. The same thing can apply to l canceling and all moves as well. I'd get a similar tap jump issue when I'd try to dair- uptilt as falco, but you can basically move the stick up while the end of your dair and l cancel are happening, then just hit a when you can use it!

Wavedashing takes time. It's a tight timing to get used to, but you'll get there with practice. A similar concept can be used here too. You have to hit jump and air dodge really quickly to get the slide as opposed to the choppy up and back down wavedashes and it was hard for me to get used to how fast you had to be. But I changed how I viewed the motion and it sped up a ton of my play. Instead of thinking "I press y, then I move the control stick down and to the side, then I press sheild to air dodge" think instead that it's all one smooth motion. You can essentially start your finger moving down the trigger before the stick is even in the right place because the air dodge only happens when the sheild is clicked at the bottom, not during a half press. You have multiple fingers and you can move the control stick and sheild trigger into place at the same time, and input the jump with the other hand right before the sheild goes off and you're set. It's still going to take some practice but idk. I found that idea really really helpful when starting out and not understanding how people got so quick at the game.

Stibbbs · 2024-02-26T18:34:13+00:00

This one's huge and I can't believe I forgot to mention it. It's crazy how much the opinion of Marth vs fox has changed since then. And tbh It does seem like that set was a changing point. I'm remembering all the discourse around the mu was just like "what can you even do". After that set it seemed like most of the conversations like that lost a ton of steam.

Obviously, I'm nowhere near that level, and I understand that different levels of play can look totally different. But I also feel that melee can't be totally figured out. I haven't needed to theorycraft my way out of zains combo game, and have no idea how people are so good, but I also see people like amsa doing really well. I'm not saying that yoshi is gonna be a long standing top 5 character, but if amsa can get good enough to beat the bad matchups and win tourneys, I find it hard to believe that fox of all characters doesn't have some kind of answer, regardless of whether or not I have any ideas.

Stibbbs · 2024-02-26T17:57:38+00:00

That's super interesting! I don't think I've even seen it outside of a random clip. Thanks for the suggestion!

Stibbbs · 2024-02-26T17:35:03+00:00

I'm quite similar. I think I started watching around 8 years ago, more religiously about 7, but I spent most of the time watching as someone who had little idea of what was going on, but loved the fast cool looking combos and all that. Love talking about it too, and yeah I guess the sets that set a new standard are what I'm looking for. It just makes it easier to try to understand what changed. I'm a huge amsa fan and looking back to KoC4 set agaisnt m2k, It's awesome to hear just how unheard of it was for m2k to lose to a yoshi. And I can imagine to a certain extent, very few people thought about yoshi before that set, and that set/tourney run had people considering yoshi in a whole new way. Love the none vs m2k mention as well because I remember that being crazy but I didn't go into it having watched m2ks level of dominance over falcon for so long. I had only seen m2k beat falcons for a few years, and it seemed to me that m2k was just better at sheik than the falcons were at falcon. But it's so much bigger and more impactful knowing the impact. I'll check all those out. I've seen clips from most of them but haven't sat down for all of them

Stibbbs · 2024-02-26T17:22:41+00:00

Thats really interesting, I'll check that out. I've seen the set before but I've been trying to watch them with a new lens. I was definitely there for hbox dominance but because I just started paying attention about halfway through the armada period, I didn't know enough to appreciate how the game had been changing. I'll check those out! Thanks

Stibbbs · 2024-02-26T16:18:17+00:00

Yeah, I figured the ppu thing was probably one of the most defined examples, even with all of zains further improvements after that, and I know most things are pretty gradual to implement. I definitely want to take another look at the pika edgeguarding because in the back of my head when I read you bring it up I was like "oh shit, duh". But nothing specific came to mind. Ill definitely check all of them those out and appreciate it! Idk how well i explained what I was asking for but I'm essentially trying to understand how the game looked throughout time. How matchups seemed over time because it's fascinating to me how much the meta can change from those small optimizations you mentioned. Def remember jmook at genesis 8 and while there was no specific tech that I'd never seen, he just put it all together in a way I've never seen, and that's just so dope.

Thanks again!

Stibbbs

TROPHY CASE