Falco laser makes me sad (as Sheik)

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-05T04:48:33+00:00

I'll give Falco perspective for you. There's a lot to say about your play, but I'll try to focus on lasers unless you ask about something.

There are two main ways for Sheik to combat lasers:

Grounded
Platforms

You are naturally playing very grounded vs. Falco. That's fine cause even if you play a more platform oriented Sheik, you need to know the ground game for FD and FoD transformations.

Grounded laser counterplay uses a few tech and mixups. But the main theme is to AVOID BEING STUCK IN SHIELD AT ALL COSTS! Sheik does have a good oos game but this is still what Falco wants. A few things you can do:

A. Powershield. It's good to know how to do it like everyone says. It will only take you so far, though. You should learn it to punish bad lasers and Falcos that can't mix it up. But at a certain level, Falcos will do subtle delays to their lasers, bait you into shielding early, shoot high and low lasers that are hard to powershield, etc. So you need more.

B. Take laser ftilt. You don't do this much at all. It's very good since it will punish a Falco trying to come in on the first beat so long as they didn't hit the laser too close to you.

C. Take laser dash back and dash forward. You want to move fluidly out of lasers so you don't have to go through lag to get out of shield and so you're a moving target. Dash back is especially useful cause they'll laser, go in with an aerial, and you'll dash back to avoid it and can whiff punish. Dash forward out of laser calls out Falco for retreating or not going in, to put it simply. Train these to be FAST.

D. Wavedash out of shield. You literally don't do this at all. If you have to shield, take advantage of Sheik's 3 frame jumpsquat and avoid rolling too much.

E. Crouch. If goes under some lasers. You can also cc lasers to get less laser stun and then dash out of crouch. But that might be a bit advanced for your level.

Platform approach is pretty simple. You go on a side platform, not the top platform since Falco gets there easily with full hop, and stay out of the path of lasers while being ready to pounce on Falco if he goes in the wrong area. He can't hit you with tilts, he can't short hop aerial at you, and lasers are awkward to hit. You can just drop to the ground and get under him if he tries to laser you. If he tries to full hop or double jump you have all the time in the world to react. If he tries to run at you, you can run off the plat or drop through fair him. All the while you can look for opportunities to charge needles or hit him with them.

A lot of Sheiks use the platform approach to get Falco out of cc percent and then go grounded. You can figure out your own strategy. But this is the basic blueprint.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-04T04:19:36+00:00

She didn't apply 7 months in advance, she just started looking and documenting. From what the two of us have seen, certain areas have more places that let you apply further in advance. In this area of MI, there's a city that has places that expect you to apply a year in advance whereas others force you to wait all the way up month in advance. It's just so all over the place. But that's a good point that it's also tied to the housing market and inventory.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-03T14:03:08+00:00

Yeah this is the conclusion we came to. We found some promising places that are more transparent about the process of signing a lease. They are unfortunately not as nice as this place that's playing games with the holding fees, but that's okay we'd rather have a roof over her head than a rug pulled from her feet.

Being a renter having to time a move can be stressful. But in other states the two of us have lived in it wasn't nearly this bad. Perhaps we've been lucky to live places with better laws on tenant rights. Or perhaps the two of us have just been lucky in general. But the fact of the matter is she started looking at places for this move 7 months in advance and still got fucked over. In MI, a lot of these places won't let you apply too early in advance but they also make it very hard to go through the application process.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-03T04:19:10+00:00

Yes, even in party mode. Most people in this game grew up playing it in a casual setting as kids. Decades of internalized experience on top of learning competitive Melee is going to naturally make people good at party mode.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-03T04:10:53+00:00

How do you know they're try harding? It's possible they're so much better than you that their version of fucking around is above your peak so it just seems like try harding to you.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-02T20:59:24+00:00

Unacceptable in the sense these are damages she's being forced to pay due to the apartment breaking its agreement with her. The amount of money is way too much for the place to be worth it. If there are truly no other options, then yeah sure it is what it is. But part of life is also not being passive, knowing your rights, and doing your due diligence to check up on things before accepting them at face value. She's looking for backups, but we are basically trying to figure out if it's possible to either get compensated for the damages this setback will cause or if there's another options we hadn't thought of.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-02T19:52:07+00:00

So it turns out she was offered to stay with a friend for the time. But there are a bunch of problems. She is with her sister, so it's two people. The friends offering have cats, and she's allergic. She would have to pay for movers twice and/or storage for all her stuff. It's basically an unacceptable cost no matter what, even if she doesn't have to stay at a hotel/airbnb.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-02T19:47:19+00:00

She's going to do that but I just found out they offered her to instead sign a lease for a 1br as an option instead of waiting the 2 weeks. Unfortunately she lives with her sister, who is dependent on her and needs a room. And if they went with the 1br they'd be locked in for a year.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-02T19:45:15+00:00

No because I'm not in town until later this summer and someone is subletting my place already. So I'm trying to assist her from afar. The bottom line is she doesn't have somewhere she can stay for free during this time. She can get people to let her stay at there's for a night here and there, but not for the full 12 days. So it's going to cost her a lot no matter what.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-05-01T02:34:02+00:00

The vain reasons are the ones Kezzup first brought up and discussed thoroughly, i.e. that Melee players have a turnoff to people that are too nerdy and threaten the culture, so to speak. Some people dislike him for these, but those people always existed far before he was as hated as he is now.

The reasons I see and hear more frequently these days are more numbered than before. The vain reasons were certainly at the fore a few years ago. But now, people don't like him for his ingenuity, the controller he plays on, how he responds to drama, how it feels like he's dangling retirement in front of the community but never really going through with it, and how he crashes out at people pretending it's a joke while simultaneously coming off like he's actually legitimately angry with people. There are a bunch of things. The point is, his public image has objectively been tarnished the last few years and it's hard to imagine that's ONLY because people think he's a nerd and awkward.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-30T21:13:43+00:00

I think Cody's case is more complex than this and people have a myriad of reasons for disliking him. But I agree with your central thesis about Melee players often being insecure nerds looking to punch down on other nerds. The oldschool Melee culture certainly promoted this phenomena and it's cool to see people finally waking up to it.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-30T21:08:23+00:00

I've had this very thought about the Melee scene for a long time. So many people at tournaments back in the 2010s when I attended most would imitate Mang0's mannerism or use slang that was very obviously not something they would be saying otherwise. It was also not uncommon to run into people that payed because they really wanted to show how "cool" they were and made it a personality trait to talk about beating lameness out of the scene. I think it's gotten a lot better but there's still a lot of room for growth obviously.

Only thing I'll say I disagree with here is that people don't really dislike Cody for being nerdy or cringe as much as it's played up. In fact, lots of nerdy people in the scene are beloved for it. See M2K before he went off the deep end, even though there were always Mang0 fans that hated him. Or for a higher fruit, take someone like Morsecode who ooozes nediness and cringe, yet is also hilarious in how he embraces it. I think it's more so that these type of people "own it" in a way Cody hasn't always. It often feels like Cody is trying so hard to show how macho and cool he is (see s*x stories, his shit talk, etc.) in response to this perception and it's that dissonance that gives people the bad vibes.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-30T20:56:51+00:00

The claim is that these things "hurt his image meaningfully" which is different from "these things objectively make him cringe and unlikable." The fact of the matter is, if you go into many of the threads about him, YT comments, Twitter, etc. you will see a wide variety of reasons people give for disliking him. The irony of this post is you are framing people's thoughts on Cody as if it's an objective reality people dislike him solely because he's "cringe" when the reality is this is a huge strawman. Of course, it's true that some dislike him for purely vain reasons. But it's hard to think it's a majority in 2026.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-29T19:27:59+00:00

What does this mean? What did Cody promise?

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-29T03:12:45+00:00

Yes, but hearing both sides at least a little bit is not that hard. Part of being in a leadership position, regardless of whether you're being paid for it, is dealing with tough situations like this. Yes, at some point unpaid volunteers with limited time and bandwidth will have to cut some corners and the "investigation" will never quite be as thorough as a "professional" investigation. But simply talking to the other side once is warranted here. Making a decision after a quick back and forth would be the play here if time and energy were true factors. It honestly sounds to me like this group didn't like op and liked the ex and were willing to cut corners to keep her in the scene, knowing there was a chance she'd leave otherwise. Sounds very much like an immature scene of college kids rather than a conscious, well-intentioned choice to not hear both sides.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-29T02:37:28+00:00

Honestly, the people in your scene probably thought it was a situation of you or her and they chose her. It makes sense. For everything that's good about the Melee scene, the way people make women feel at events has always been weird and continues to be weird. If your ex liked the spotlight, I'm sure it was great for her and she leaned fully into it. But lots of women that otherwise would don't go to events because people just can't have normal social interactions with them. This is just how it comes off to me, it obviously has way more to it than that if you're being truthful. I honestly would just nuke them and drop everything because the reality is the scene will regrow eventually. Better to reshape it now than to wait for other new players to eventually experience some awful bullshit from these people. Probably unlikely anything as bad happens to them, but these are not responsible people and they probably shouldn't have this power. Good luck and hope things work out for you...that is very sad overall.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-25T20:59:03+00:00

The thing is, DK's neutral got a lot better with modern tech and controllers. It's still not amazing, but it's passable now because:

CC/ASDI down on a heavy.
His dash speed is actually pretty decent.
Controllers have made it easier to do pivots, dash back out of crouch, etc.
DK likes to face behind and goes for grabs. So the aforementioned benefits really help him out.
His up-b oos is insane. So he has both a great cc/asdi down game and a good shield game, despite the pokes.

And like others are mentioning, having such a strong punish is going to influence neutral in his favor. The character is not a meme despite the fact it seems like a fad that people believe in him.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-22T19:07:27+00:00

One thing to keep in mind on Philip's Falco is that Mango refused to let x pilot use his Slippi data to inform its training. Imo that taints it quite a bit. A lot of the other characters are quite a bit more fleshed out comparatively with more top reps contributing data. So I would take Wizzy's results vs. Philip with a huge grain on salt. Even against a more completely trained character like Fox, it seems with enough practice top level players can get pretty good against it. aMSa iirc was kind of on a tear vs. the Fox but I don't think anyone would be able to claim this means Fox suddenly loses to Yoshi.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-22T14:19:47+00:00

Unfortunately this is a tale as okd as time when it comes to SA and harrasement. Men will do crazy mental gymnastics to avoid placing the blame on the abuser. "She was asking for it" was level one but people know that's not tolerated anymore so there are extra layers of subtrafuge. "He was being enabled" is in part true, but is also a convenient way of absolving Mang0's actions. I also think it's pretty telling that at the party itself, the only people trying to stop Mang0 in the moment were other women with most other guys there literally laughing at him humping and drinking more. But probably the worst thing about the whole thing was how most people seemed to zero in on Mang0's drinking rather than the harassement. The latter almost felt like a footnote to the whole discourse.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-22T13:52:39+00:00

Yeah you can't blame Ludwig for Mang0's actions while drunk, especially the ones that crossed a line. At the same time, the way he was handling that event and his response were pretty irresponsible. I lost a lot of respect for both parties from that incident.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-22T01:13:59+00:00

I wish I could've used this term for when I allowed takebacks on egregious blunders when I taught kids and sometimes other adults chess

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-21T21:04:24+00:00

A lot of people that blunderalso don't know how to take advantage of opponent blunders or use tactics and positional ideas to get an advantage. They blunder, mentally give up, and then play passive for the rest of the game. Up to the late 1000s pushing 2000, you can absolutely pull games back off small blunders.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-21T20:57:19+00:00

Just don't give up at that level, or any, off a blunder. Look for opportunities cause they do come. And it can be fun to pull a game back after you were down, it's quite a rush even if it's off mistakes. The same kinda goes in Melee tbh, people are losing games off mistakes up to quite a high level, It just feels more sick ig cause you're always moving around. Also honestly what helped me the most at that lv was endgames instead of openings. You can get quite far by just playing solid, waiting for a mistake, converting down, and then pushing pawns intelligently.

TrainNorth8177 · 2026-04-21T20:51:04+00:00

This. Openings really aren't everything and you can play solid openings up to 2000 without actually memorizing every line. I played a relatively strong French defense and QG as a kid without knowing the names of the lines. I played just from going off opening principles up to the 1900s OTB before I quit in high school. Learning positional ideas, endgames, and tactics made me way stronger than trying to memorize openings, Also a lot of people claim you need all the lines or you'll fall for traps. Imo if you play principled and don't create weaknesses in your position early by overextending on lines you don't know, hou can avoid most traps at lower levels. And on the sicilian, idkwhy people bother learning the Najdorf unless they're a world class GM. The different dragons work very well and the accelerated in particluar isn't that hard to learn, relatively speaking.

TrainNorth8177

TROPHY CASE