I'd like to clarify that I scalp soley for tournament prizes.
I'm not opposed to scalping, generally.
But sometimes...
Can't be any worse than here.
Went to Toys R Us, Best Buy, and Target for those three. Asked everyone and they were all sold out. Come to find out the local comic store owner bought every one in stock. Overall he bought around 22 shipping boxes worth of Marth, Villager, and WFT.
Yes that's right, 22 shipping boxes.
Sometimes I want the power to force everyone to be as awesome as me.
I feel like theres a difference between grabbing an extra amiibo or two to resell if you're already there anyway and it's another when you drive on down to the store because you saw an internet rumor (which was confirmed 2 days later anyway) and load up your cart with everything you find in town. Technically thats the smart thing to do because if it works out, you just made a lot of money for little work. Doesn't make you less of a jerk though.
I mean, if I was going to pick up that Trainer amiibo, I'd probably grab the second one they had to resell, honestly. But since its a relative doing me a favor, I'm not putting them in that position.
I have 0 ability to fight/finish people off stage, far more likely to just kill myself.
But then I've never played against actual people.
I typically hang out on stage unless I'm really confident I can get the hit in. WFT's F-air has a great weird angle that makes it tough for people to trade hits with, but it's still risky to be off board.
Also, if they leave me alone I can slowly heal myself, and people hate that.
I only really risk jumping off the ledge if I'm Mario. He's the character I'm most comfortable in the air, anyone else is basically just guard the ledge.
When I play Sheik I feel like I'm driving really fast in a car showing off for something. I can make some pretty spectacular moves, but then I lose control and SD
I think half the reason I like both Mega Man and Shulk is that they can go ridiculously deep off the edge for a KO and still make it back safely. Jump Shulk has probably got the most absurd offstage game around.
One of the pains of playing Ganondorf is that his off-edge game requires a lot more prediction than for other characters, and his air-spike requires the enemy's last recovery stage be more vertical than horizontal
The up side? I can reliably spike the shit out of other Ganondorfs if I get them off-stage
The down-side? If the enemy doesn't get knocked into the explodo-zone, there are some characters who just will not die
So, I guess I'm now the only one on the boards insane or stupid enough to
unlock the "Complete All-star Mode with every character on Hard" challenge without using a hammer.
In case any of you were wondering, you can do it without finishing True All-star Mode with all characters.
I did runs on normal All-star with all characters but Ike and Duck Hunt, unlocked Duck Hunt, then beat True All-star with both of them. Works just fine.
Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS: The best-selling individual portable game in the U.S. so far in 2014, Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS has sold more than 1.5 million physical and digital units in the U.S. since it launched on Oct. 3.
November was also a strong month for Nintendo on the console side, as sales of Wii U hardware and software increased by more than 10 percent and more than 90 percent, respectively, over the same period in 2013. In fact, the week of Nov. 23 was the biggest single week of Wii U hardware sales since the system launched in November 2012. Other Wii U highlights for the month include:
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U has sold nearly 710,000 combined units since launching on Nov. 21. With a current Metacritic score of 92, the latest iteration in Nintendo’s venerable fighting franchise is one of the best-reviewed games in the current generation of systems.
Nov. 21 also saw the arrival of amiibo, Nintendo’s new platform where gaming’s most recognizable characters can be used in different ways in many compatible games. Sales of amiibo are approximately equal to sales of Super Smash Bros. for Wii U so far, while Link, Mario and Pikachu (in that order) have been the best-selling figures to date.
“This is a ringing endorsement from families and fans that Nintendo has the best variety, the best value and the best gaming experiences for sale this holiday season,” said Scott Moffitt, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. “We’re extremely confident in our holiday proposition and look forward to closing this year strong and starting 2015 with a full head of steam.”
Nintendo Console Codes
Switch (JeffConser): SW-3353-5433-5137 Wii U: Skeldare - 3DS: 1848-1663-9345
PM Me if you add me!
Smash Bros. isn't a terribly difficult fighting game to play competitively. The game features simple, uniform button combinations for special moves among all the characters, and a lot of the more fiddly advance techniques found in Melee have been removed from the game. This does mean that Smash won't ever be as super duper deep as the average fighting game, but it also has a significantly less intimidating barrier to entry.
First things first: pick a main.
Ideally your main should be a character you enjoy playing and you like them as a character. You will probably perform...not as well as you could if hearing Pikachu yell its name all the type bugs the living hell out of you. Then you need to play the hell out of that character. Yes, the game's controls boil down to A or B + direction, but every character has nuances that you need to know. Ganondorf's up tilt comes out super slow, slower than most fully-charged smash attacks, and unlike those you cannot cancel it early. So that's something you generally want to avoid! Link and Toon Link will take no damage from projectiles if their shields get hit, which can be fairly important in certain matchups.
The most important thing to learn about your main is their kill moves. You need to know what reliably kills and around what damage percentages they start to kill (note that this number is going to be a range since heavier characters will require more damage to KO before lighter ones). Ness is known for his deadly back throw, which can kill around 100%, but Olimar's up throw only kills around 120% and only if he's using a blue pikmin to perform the throw. Some attacks have "sweetspots" where hitting a certain part of their hitbox turns the move into a kill move. Captain Falcon's infamous knee aerial can kill, but only if sweetspotted. Learning ALL of the properties of your character's attacks are incredibly important, but knowing kill moves is a priority since, well, getting KOs are what win you games.
But what about the tier list?
First off: there are no tier lists. Not yet. Everything you've seen so far about tier lists in Smash Bros. 4 has been either useless opinion polls or just lists made up of tournament performance. We won't be seeing any real tier lists until we're well into 2015, so don't worry about that. Second: maining a character isn't a marriage vow or death pact. You can main pikachu and learn its every nuance until you feel that pikachu being kinda shit is holding you back. At that point you can find a sweet high tier character to play and, as a bonus, you will have pikachu to whip out as an alternative character just in case pikachu has a more favorable matchup against whatever character is beating your new fancy high-tier main. It's also worth noting that some players take advantage of playing lower tier characters because their absence in tournaments means few players are accustomed to fighting them, which does gives you a decent edge. And hey: tiers aren't set in stone. They are constantly changing as players find new techniques and tactics, and that's only done by playing the crap out of a character. Who knows, you could be the one to unlock Donkey Kong's hidden potential.
A final word on tiers: fitting your playstyle matters. Everyone knows Fox is the top tier character in Melee, but not everyone plays Fox in Melee. Why? Because for other players maybe Falcon, Marth or Peach fit them better. A lot of players picked Falco over Fox because Falco is considered easier to play so you can have more consistent results. A really good example of this are the Ice Climbers: a very technical character that not everyone is going to get. Rosalina is probably a similar character in that she'll be very highly rated but difficult to learn.
Build then KO
There are generally two parts to fighting Smash: racking up damage on your opponent, and then going for a KO. There are exceptions to this: many characters have spikes, moves that sent a character straight down at a very high speed. Mario's forward air is a good example of this, and it's a good way to get ahead in stocks or catch up from a deficit since it can kill at such a low percentage. Another example is Little Mac's KO Punch, a special move that, if it connects, will KO a character at under 50% damage. So always be aware of these low-percentage kill moves, but generally speaking it's all about building up the damage until you can reliably get some kills.
This process comes about fairly naturally. As your opponent takes damage, they get knocked back farther by your attacks. This will make it harder for you to follow up attacks with additional attacks, so your ability to stack on the damage gets reduced as time goes on. This is when you start going for kill moves. So example: Mario is well-known for his up tilt comboing into itself. Up tilt up tilt uptilt, maybe an up air to finish. It's really hard to get out of this combo when your damage is low, so it's a very effective way to soften up opponents. Once the damage is racked up, Mario can start going for kills with his forward smash or back throw. This varies for just about EVERY CHARACTER, and should be a reason why you need a main. Get a main, damn it.
I know this is really basic shit, but it's why a good Dedede will use down throws at low percents to follow up with an up or forward air, and then later on they'll switch to the higher damage back throw when follow-ups are no longer guaranteed. It's why Donkey Kong will switch to back air even though the range is lower than other aerials: back air kills, whereas at best forward air can spike.
The Myth of Priority
So you attack and Marth attacks. You end up taking damage and Marth gets out scot-free. Why? Some call this "priority" which leads to the misperception that attacks have some invisible number, and if your attack has the better number it has "priority" over the other attack and goes through. But this is dirty, filthy lies and is just shorthand for the stuff that is going under the hood.
First and foremost, priority is based on damage. If an attack does more damage (10% or so) then it has priority over the other attack. This can explain why you got thwacked by Bowser's forward smash despite coming in with a weak dash attack. If attacks are roughly the same damage, you get that cling effect you might have seen where both attacks cancel each other out. A common way to see this in action is with weaker projectiles, like Mario's fire ball cancelling out pikachu's thunder jolt. For aerial attacks, this cannot happen! If attacks are within the same damage range, then they will just keep on going until they hit their mark or get interrupted by the other attack. An aerial CAN be cancelled out by a ground attack, but this leaves the ground attacker in an advantageous situation because they get the fast cling animation from cancelling out whereas the aerial attacker has to finish their now useless aerial animation.
Next up are hitboxes and hurtboxes. Hitboxes are the actual geometry that the game uses to know if an attack whiffed or hit, and hurtboxes are a similar thing, but for telling when a character gets hit. These boxes tend to use far more simplistic shapes than the game art, and thus you cannot trust the character models to give the whole story on hitboxes! If an attack's hitbox hits your hurtbox, then you generally take damage. Simple, right?
But not all hit boxes are created equal! If an attack has a longer hitbox, then it can hit your hurtbox before your hitbox can hit theirs. This is why range is such a great property to possess on attacks!
Now we get into the subtle stuff: disjointed hitboxes, armor, and transcendent attacks. Disjointed attacks are pretty simple: it's an attack that has a hitbox that doesn't share your character's hurtbox. The easiest example of this are Dedede's mallet or Lucina's sword. These attacks are considered much safer because they'll trump most other attacks. Weapons are not the only disjointed hitboxes, as certain attacks (notably a lot of aerials) will make a part of the character's body invincible while throwing out the attack. A common example is a lot of aerials that involve kicks will make the legs invulnerable during part of the attack animation, effectively giving you a disjointed hitbox. It's worth noting that a disjointed attack can still be cancelled out. However, sometimes you can lose to a disjointed hitbox if your attack beats theirs (does way more damage) but because of the disjointed hitbox their attacks hit your hurtbox before you can do the same.
Armor means a character will not flinch or be knocked back so long as the damage/knockback is below a certain threshold. Some characters will simply ignore ALL knockback, and that is commonly referred to as super armor. Yoshi's double jump is known for having regular armor: you can knock him back but it requires a very heavy attack to do so. Bowser has a weaker form of armor, allowing him to resist knockback from weaker attacks. Little Mac is perhaps the most infamous for having super armor, gaining it on all of his smash attacks. This attribute is very important in priority, as an attack with armor is going to land against other attacks. The armored character still takes damage, but they will knock you back while they stay put. Needless to say, you do not want to try and trade smash attacks with Little Mac, and trying to perform an aerial on Ike while he is using his Up B can be very risky due to these properties.
Transcendent attacks sound fancy, but are very simple: they basically do not interact with other attacks. If you fire a transcendent projectile at a regular projectile, then they will go through each other with no issues. This is offensively advantageous, as you have attacks that can only be defended against via things like shields and dodging. Defensively it is rather poor since you can cancel out things like projectiles or other enemy attacks since they go through each other. Falco's blaster shots are an example of a transcendent attack.
Spacing, Zoning, & You
So now we have the general stuff out of the way. You got a main, you know your game plan is to BUILD DAMAGE and then KO, and you know how attacks interact with each other. Now you need to learn how to properly space and zone.
Spacing is generally about keeping yourself at the maximum range where you attacks still effectively either BUILD DAMAGE or KO. I am emphasizing effectively because some attacks have multiple hitboxes usually known as sweet or sour spots. A sweetspot is where the attack does lots of damage and/or knock back, and the sourspot is basically the part of the attack that doesn't due the awesome stuff. Marth is well-known for just about all of his sword-based attacks having sweetspots on the tip where they do increased damage and knockback. So when I say "maximum range" I mean "max range where the attack is worth a damn" and not just the farthest away you can hit.
Anyways, spacing is done so you can BUILD DAMAGE OR KO while still being far away enough that the opponent has a reduced chance of retaliating. Attacks that do this are generally called "safe" because you can throw them out and your opponent has very few opportunities to "punish" or attack back should your attack fail to land. Little Mac's forward tilt is a good example of a good spacing move: it comes out quickly, it has little ending lag so you can perform another action quickly after using it, it can KO at high percents, and the distance is just wide enough so that it outranges the grabs of any player that shields it. Spacing and safe moves vary heavily on the matchup, however, and in the case of Mac's forward tilt it can be considerably less safe against opponents with long-range "tether" grabs like Link or Pac-Man.
Zoning is kinda the opposite of spacing: you use attacks that force your opponent to back off and leave an area where their attacks could hit you. Projectiles are perhaps the easiest way to zone, as they force opponents to back off or use defensive measures in response. Typically long-range, disjointed attacks make for excellent spacing tools. Zoning is also important for recovering to the stage, as something like Ganondorf's forward air is fairly potent and can scare an edgeguarding opponent to air dodge or retreat, allowing Ganondorf to safely recover. While the point of zoning attacks aren't to necessarily KO opponents, at high percentages kill moves can become effective at zoning since your opponent may not want to risk losing a stock.
FAQ
This is really basic stuff, but this whole guide is made for people just crawling into the competitive scene all naked and crying for air.
Why are items banned?
To make this really simple: they are too random and their effects are generally too swingy. Nobody wants to see the Grand Finals of a thousand-dollar tourney end because someone got lucky and grabbed a Heart Container while their opponent was respawning.
But...Final Smashes!
Experiments to make Final Smashes work flatly failed. They spawn way the hell too often, even on low frequency, and there's still the whole randomness factor. It turned games into "grab the Smash Ball" which isn't very competitive or fun to watch.
Why are so many stages banned?
Because they either have a hazard that dominates play (Pyrosphere is all about getting Ridley on your side) or they have features easily abused by certain characters (Hyrule Temple is so huge that fast characters can get one KO and then spend the rest of the match fleeing their opponent until time runs out). It's worth noting that other fighting games tend to not even have hugely variable stages as a thing, so Smash having about 10 or so legal stages is not that weird.
Why not timed matches?
Because it tends to lead to ties, whereas that is significantly harder with stock matches (you have to end the match with even stocks and damage).
I grabbed the ledge and immediately got hit. WHY?
In Smash 4 you can only get ledge invulnerability on your first ledge grab. After that you must wait a short period or else you will be vulnerable when you grab the ledge. This was done to stop the incredibly boring and awful tactic that was planking.
What is DI? Vectoring?
Directional Influence allows you to change the trajectory of you character when hit by holding the stick in a certain direction when struck. You don't change the force of the hit, but by changing the angle you can turn a once lethal attack into something survivable. The best way to survive an attack is to move the stick in a way that is perpendicular to where you are being launched, preferably in a direction closer to the stage. More advanced techniques include using DI to make it so you launch farther away in order to limit the ability of your opponent to combo you.
Vectoring was a new system similar to DI that was removed in the last patch. It was basically a more intuitive system that had the drawback of making matches take longer.
How does seeding in tournaments work?
Basically the first round puts "the best" players up against "the worst" so the top ranked player fights the lowest ranked player and so forth. This may seem unfair, but the point of seeding is to create progressively more exciting matches as the tournament progresses. Having half of the top ranked players eliminated in the first two rounds makes for a very poor tournament where the remaining good players fight very easy matches against the less skilled players. If there's any consolation, in double-elimination tournaments the first round of losers should be the bottom half of the players if the seeding is accurate.
Stage selection scares me. How does it work?
Your first match has the stage randomly selected from a pool of "starter" or neutral stages. Basically, they don't favor any characters too much (no stage is truly neutral). Matches after that use the following process:
1. Winner of the last match bans up to however many stages the tournament rules allow (usually 1 or 2)
2. Loser picks a stage that A. wasn't Banned and B. they haven't won a match on in that set. The loser can pick from the starter stages as well as special counterpick stages that are known for given particular characters easier or harder times.
3. If someone has yet to win enough matches to end the set, then return to step #1.
If you have the option to switch characters between matches, then that is done before stage selection, starting with the winner. Once they've picked or declined to pick a new character, the winner tells the loser their character choice and then the loser can opt to switch or not. From there you proceed to step #1.
What's a meta?
Basically what is being played in your area/tournaments. Sometimes you can play around this to your advantage, but it's typically a poor idea to try and counter the meta with characters you never play. An example may be a meta where Mega Man is exceedingly popular. You might want to play a character with reflectors like Fox or Pit to counter a lot of Mega Man's moves. Meta can also describe just the general playstyle of your area, such as a tournament scene with lots of aggressive players that will tend to opt for riskier maneuvers more often than not.
Rorus, you said this wasn't terribly difficult to get into and then wrote a short story worth of words about it. You suck.
At least you don't have to remember a dozen quarter motions?
So, I guess I'm now the only one on the boards insane or stupid enough to
unlock the "Complete All-star Mode with every character on Hard" challenge without using a hammer.
In case any of you were wondering, you can do it without finishing True All-star Mode with all characters.
I did runs on normal All-star with all characters but Ike and Duck Hunt, unlocked Duck Hunt, then beat True All-star with both of them. Works just fine.
It is really that much easier to do it that way? Sure, you fight a couple fewer enemies, but there also aren't as many healing items, right?
So, I guess I'm now the only one on the boards insane or stupid enough to
unlock the "Complete All-star Mode with every character on Hard" challenge without using a hammer.
In case any of you were wondering, you can do it without finishing True All-star Mode with all characters.
I did runs on normal All-star with all characters but Ike and Duck Hunt, unlocked Duck Hunt, then beat True All-star with both of them. Works just fine.
It is really that much easier to do it that way? Sure, you fight a couple fewer enemies, but there also aren't as many healing items, right?
I'm not sure. The trade off is that you have to fight the 8 additional unlockable characters, but you gain an additional heart healing item, which heals you for all damage (while losing one of the 2 maxim tomatoes you get in normal All-star but who cares). I think True All-star MIGHT be easier purely due to there being 2 hearts rather than 1.
I wouldn't recommend doing what I did necessarily, because at the end of the day it isn't really that much easier, if it's easier at all. But if you're going for this challenge and you completed a few runs of Hard All-star before unlocking True All-star, don't sweat it.
A couple of questions about this saturday's tournament:
-When is the latest I can sign up for it?
-When creating the brackets, do the new players get the lowest rating, which matches them up against all highest ranking players?
The tournament is now full, but you can be put on a waiting list. We always have a couple people go AWOL so your chances to get in are good!
New people are the lowest ranked, so they will be facing "the best" in round one. But we have like five new people so that range is kinda broad. But hey, maybe you could be some kind of Smash savant we don't know about. But I just assume new people are more likely to have no Smash experience, so I rank them last.
If anything I would hope everyone starts out with a neutral ranking and it will shift up or down based on performance. With people already ranked being seeded accordingly.
I also love seeing talk about tier lists. Mainly because they never apply to the majority of people who look at them. With that being said, I feel like more than ever the tiers are very compact for this game, save for those characters who might have a harder time confirming kills.
I think looking at match ups are much more useful, since it compares 2 characters directly based on their available tools.
I'd like to clarify that I scalp soley for tournament prizes.
When I talk about scalpers in this context it's people who purposely buy up stock to increase rarity and flip them at a significant mark up. If you pick up a Marth and sell it to someone here on the forum looking for one at a slight increase, to cover additional expenses like shipping, and maybe a bit extra for the trouble, that's fine by me. But when the lowest price on Amazon is over 80, you're just an prick. Although Nintendo is equally at fault.
Unranked people being at the bottom is pretty standard for seeding. It's less than ideal for when a good player suddenly jumps in, but there's no perfect way to handle that. Double elimination somewhat cleans up the issue of a good player having to lose in the first round, anyway.
So out of curiosity, how are players being ranked for this tournament? As, is there some point system that's being used? Or just based on overall placing in previous tournaments? I've helped with a few local tournaments for various things, but with us not really having a ranking system, and it also being the first time some of us knew of each other, we just did random seeding. How should I go about starring to rank my local players for future tournaments is basically what I'm asking.
Thats a pretty good write up @Bobkins Flymo . I am familiar with other competitive fighting games, but not smash all that much. This is the first time I am really paying attention.
Any online resources that I should be looking at? I have always favored big characters (Bowser, ganondorf, now charizard), but I kinda like Bowser Jr. even though I am awful with him.
Then again using the Wii u pad is just uncomfortable (wife gets the real controller). Gotta play around with button configs
I thought retailers would impose quantity limits on how many of one type item you can buy, I've seen signs that say "limit 2 per customer" before around the holidays. But I guess money is money if some dude wants to buy out your whole stock.
The tournament is now full, but you can be put on a waiting list. We always have a couple people go AWOL so your chances to get in are good!
New people are the lowest ranked, so they will be facing "the best" in round one. But we have like five new people so that range is kinda broad. But hey, maybe you could be some kind of Smash savant we don't know about. But I just assume new people are more likely to have no Smash experience, so I rank them last.
So, I guess I'm now the only one on the boards insane or stupid enough to
unlock the "Complete All-star Mode with every character on Hard" challenge without using a hammer.
In case any of you were wondering, you can do it without finishing True All-star Mode with all characters.
I did runs on normal All-star with all characters but Ike and Duck Hunt, unlocked Duck Hunt, then beat True All-star with both of them. Works just fine.
It is really that much easier to do it that way? Sure, you fight a couple fewer enemies, but there also aren't as many healing items, right?
Yeah. Instead of a tomato, a fairy and two hearts, you get two tomatoes, a fairy and one heart. It goes by faster, though.
Oh, if anyone's wondering, there's trophies that you generally get via trophy rush and classic mode, and trophies that you generally get at the shop. I went to the shop to celebrate getting the Dr. Mario trophy rush challenge (100,000G) and discovered that's where all the alt form trophies were.
I have family stuff tomorrow, so won't be around for the Tournament, but if people add me I am almost always available during the late PST hours for general smashing.
Wii Fit Trainer is shaping up nicely. Went 22 - 2 on 1v1 For Glory last night. Only losses were to a Palutena, because fuck Palutena. Managed to ransack everybody else including a damn good Diddy Kong.
I definitely need to get some experience against good Wii Fit Trainers, because fighting against them is still confusing. Their hitboxes and hurtboxes are just so weird.
I should be around tonight if anyone wants to practice against my Mega Man or Shulk.
So, I guess I'm now the only one on the boards insane or stupid enough to
unlock the "Complete All-star Mode with every character on Hard" challenge without using a hammer.
In case any of you were wondering, you can do it without finishing True All-star Mode with all characters.
I did runs on normal All-star with all characters but Ike and Duck Hunt, unlocked Duck Hunt, then beat True All-star with both of them. Works just fine.
It's me, I'm trying to do that and I didn't think to do it before unlocking all the characters
Though it hasn't been that bad once I "figured it out", the AI is very inconsistent where sometimes it'll combo you and follow up in the air with kill moves and other times it'll stand around and take smash attacks in the face all day so my strategy is to only pick up a healing item after the first three rounds so that every round after that I can pick up another healing item, that way if things go bad and all three computers gang up on you at high percentages you're going to lose quickly instead of trying to survive the last match at over 200% and dying to the last guy. It's way less frustrating at least.
Oh my god I am so out of practice it has been too many years since I've played a Smash Brothers game.
I couldn't even get all of the rewards on the initial battles in Event Mode. The one with Mega Man vs Pac-Man Pickachu and Yellow Devil fucked me over so many times and I barely won after dying on it ssoooo many times.
So out of curiosity, how are players being ranked for this tournament? As, is there some point system that's being used? Or just based on overall placing in previous tournaments? I've helped with a few local tournaments for various things, but with us not really having a ranking system, and it also being the first time some of us knew of each other, we just did random seeding. How should I go about starring to rank my local players for future tournaments is basically what I'm asking.
Currently I'm just ranking people based on the average place they finished each tournament. In general this has worked out pretty well for seeding, but a major drawback is the fact that our tournaments have inconsistent numbers. This means a person who gets last place in an eight-person tournament can actually increase their average if they've been doing poorly in 16-person tournaments. I'm thinking about doing a new system shortly here where you get points for wherever you finished, with last place always being one point. This keeps last place the same value for ranking regardless of numbers, and it also has the benefit of finishing in higher ranks more valuable as the tournaments get larger. First place with ten people is worth more than first place with seven.
Dang-o-Darn, I didn't realize there was a participant cap on the tournament. Missed last week because I wasn't home, missed this week because too many people want to play. lol
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I'm not opposed to scalping, generally.
But sometimes...
Sometimes I want the power to force everyone to be as awesome as me.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
Sounds good to me @Wyborn, i'll be around for most of tomorrow and saturday actually so just name a time and i'll be there.
But then I've never played against actual people.
I mean, if I was going to pick up that Trainer amiibo, I'd probably grab the second one they had to resell, honestly. But since its a relative doing me a favor, I'm not putting them in that position.
.
I typically hang out on stage unless I'm really confident I can get the hit in. WFT's F-air has a great weird angle that makes it tough for people to trade hits with, but it's still risky to be off board.
Also, if they leave me alone I can slowly heal myself, and people hate that.
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
Selling Board Games for Medical Bills
The other night's All-Star marathon renewed my interest in a few characters that I wanna mess around with.
The up side? I can reliably spike the shit out of other Ganondorfs if I get them off-stage
The down-side? If the enemy doesn't get knocked into the explodo-zone, there are some characters who just will not die
I'm up for some matches if you're still interested.
NNID: Glenn565
Ah, too late. I just signed off. I'll ask again tomorrow night.
unlock the "Complete All-star Mode with every character on Hard" challenge without using a hammer.
In case any of you were wondering, you can do it without finishing True All-star Mode with all characters.
I did runs on normal All-star with all characters but Ike and Duck Hunt, unlocked Duck Hunt, then beat True All-star with both of them. Works just fine.
You know, eventually
Gonna be a while
Switch (JeffConser): SW-3353-5433-5137 Wii U: Skeldare - 3DS: 1848-1663-9345
PM Me if you add me!
Smash Bros. isn't a terribly difficult fighting game to play competitively. The game features simple, uniform button combinations for special moves among all the characters, and a lot of the more fiddly advance techniques found in Melee have been removed from the game. This does mean that Smash won't ever be as super duper deep as the average fighting game, but it also has a significantly less intimidating barrier to entry.
First things first: pick a main.
Ideally your main should be a character you enjoy playing and you like them as a character. You will probably perform...not as well as you could if hearing Pikachu yell its name all the type bugs the living hell out of you. Then you need to play the hell out of that character. Yes, the game's controls boil down to A or B + direction, but every character has nuances that you need to know. Ganondorf's up tilt comes out super slow, slower than most fully-charged smash attacks, and unlike those you cannot cancel it early. So that's something you generally want to avoid! Link and Toon Link will take no damage from projectiles if their shields get hit, which can be fairly important in certain matchups.
The most important thing to learn about your main is their kill moves. You need to know what reliably kills and around what damage percentages they start to kill (note that this number is going to be a range since heavier characters will require more damage to KO before lighter ones). Ness is known for his deadly back throw, which can kill around 100%, but Olimar's up throw only kills around 120% and only if he's using a blue pikmin to perform the throw. Some attacks have "sweetspots" where hitting a certain part of their hitbox turns the move into a kill move. Captain Falcon's infamous knee aerial can kill, but only if sweetspotted. Learning ALL of the properties of your character's attacks are incredibly important, but knowing kill moves is a priority since, well, getting KOs are what win you games.
But what about the tier list?
First off: there are no tier lists. Not yet. Everything you've seen so far about tier lists in Smash Bros. 4 has been either useless opinion polls or just lists made up of tournament performance. We won't be seeing any real tier lists until we're well into 2015, so don't worry about that. Second: maining a character isn't a marriage vow or death pact. You can main pikachu and learn its every nuance until you feel that pikachu being kinda shit is holding you back. At that point you can find a sweet high tier character to play and, as a bonus, you will have pikachu to whip out as an alternative character just in case pikachu has a more favorable matchup against whatever character is beating your new fancy high-tier main. It's also worth noting that some players take advantage of playing lower tier characters because their absence in tournaments means few players are accustomed to fighting them, which does gives you a decent edge. And hey: tiers aren't set in stone. They are constantly changing as players find new techniques and tactics, and that's only done by playing the crap out of a character. Who knows, you could be the one to unlock Donkey Kong's hidden potential.
A final word on tiers: fitting your playstyle matters. Everyone knows Fox is the top tier character in Melee, but not everyone plays Fox in Melee. Why? Because for other players maybe Falcon, Marth or Peach fit them better. A lot of players picked Falco over Fox because Falco is considered easier to play so you can have more consistent results. A really good example of this are the Ice Climbers: a very technical character that not everyone is going to get. Rosalina is probably a similar character in that she'll be very highly rated but difficult to learn.
Build then KO
There are generally two parts to fighting Smash: racking up damage on your opponent, and then going for a KO. There are exceptions to this: many characters have spikes, moves that sent a character straight down at a very high speed. Mario's forward air is a good example of this, and it's a good way to get ahead in stocks or catch up from a deficit since it can kill at such a low percentage. Another example is Little Mac's KO Punch, a special move that, if it connects, will KO a character at under 50% damage. So always be aware of these low-percentage kill moves, but generally speaking it's all about building up the damage until you can reliably get some kills.
This process comes about fairly naturally. As your opponent takes damage, they get knocked back farther by your attacks. This will make it harder for you to follow up attacks with additional attacks, so your ability to stack on the damage gets reduced as time goes on. This is when you start going for kill moves. So example: Mario is well-known for his up tilt comboing into itself. Up tilt up tilt uptilt, maybe an up air to finish. It's really hard to get out of this combo when your damage is low, so it's a very effective way to soften up opponents. Once the damage is racked up, Mario can start going for kills with his forward smash or back throw. This varies for just about EVERY CHARACTER, and should be a reason why you need a main. Get a main, damn it.
I know this is really basic shit, but it's why a good Dedede will use down throws at low percents to follow up with an up or forward air, and then later on they'll switch to the higher damage back throw when follow-ups are no longer guaranteed. It's why Donkey Kong will switch to back air even though the range is lower than other aerials: back air kills, whereas at best forward air can spike.
The Myth of Priority
So you attack and Marth attacks. You end up taking damage and Marth gets out scot-free. Why? Some call this "priority" which leads to the misperception that attacks have some invisible number, and if your attack has the better number it has "priority" over the other attack and goes through. But this is dirty, filthy lies and is just shorthand for the stuff that is going under the hood.
First and foremost, priority is based on damage. If an attack does more damage (10% or so) then it has priority over the other attack. This can explain why you got thwacked by Bowser's forward smash despite coming in with a weak dash attack. If attacks are roughly the same damage, you get that cling effect you might have seen where both attacks cancel each other out. A common way to see this in action is with weaker projectiles, like Mario's fire ball cancelling out pikachu's thunder jolt. For aerial attacks, this cannot happen! If attacks are within the same damage range, then they will just keep on going until they hit their mark or get interrupted by the other attack. An aerial CAN be cancelled out by a ground attack, but this leaves the ground attacker in an advantageous situation because they get the fast cling animation from cancelling out whereas the aerial attacker has to finish their now useless aerial animation.
Next up are hitboxes and hurtboxes. Hitboxes are the actual geometry that the game uses to know if an attack whiffed or hit, and hurtboxes are a similar thing, but for telling when a character gets hit. These boxes tend to use far more simplistic shapes than the game art, and thus you cannot trust the character models to give the whole story on hitboxes! If an attack's hitbox hits your hurtbox, then you generally take damage. Simple, right?
But not all hit boxes are created equal! If an attack has a longer hitbox, then it can hit your hurtbox before your hitbox can hit theirs. This is why range is such a great property to possess on attacks!
Now we get into the subtle stuff: disjointed hitboxes, armor, and transcendent attacks. Disjointed attacks are pretty simple: it's an attack that has a hitbox that doesn't share your character's hurtbox. The easiest example of this are Dedede's mallet or Lucina's sword. These attacks are considered much safer because they'll trump most other attacks. Weapons are not the only disjointed hitboxes, as certain attacks (notably a lot of aerials) will make a part of the character's body invincible while throwing out the attack. A common example is a lot of aerials that involve kicks will make the legs invulnerable during part of the attack animation, effectively giving you a disjointed hitbox. It's worth noting that a disjointed attack can still be cancelled out. However, sometimes you can lose to a disjointed hitbox if your attack beats theirs (does way more damage) but because of the disjointed hitbox their attacks hit your hurtbox before you can do the same.
Armor means a character will not flinch or be knocked back so long as the damage/knockback is below a certain threshold. Some characters will simply ignore ALL knockback, and that is commonly referred to as super armor. Yoshi's double jump is known for having regular armor: you can knock him back but it requires a very heavy attack to do so. Bowser has a weaker form of armor, allowing him to resist knockback from weaker attacks. Little Mac is perhaps the most infamous for having super armor, gaining it on all of his smash attacks. This attribute is very important in priority, as an attack with armor is going to land against other attacks. The armored character still takes damage, but they will knock you back while they stay put. Needless to say, you do not want to try and trade smash attacks with Little Mac, and trying to perform an aerial on Ike while he is using his Up B can be very risky due to these properties.
Transcendent attacks sound fancy, but are very simple: they basically do not interact with other attacks. If you fire a transcendent projectile at a regular projectile, then they will go through each other with no issues. This is offensively advantageous, as you have attacks that can only be defended against via things like shields and dodging. Defensively it is rather poor since you can cancel out things like projectiles or other enemy attacks since they go through each other. Falco's blaster shots are an example of a transcendent attack.
Spacing, Zoning, & You
So now we have the general stuff out of the way. You got a main, you know your game plan is to BUILD DAMAGE and then KO, and you know how attacks interact with each other. Now you need to learn how to properly space and zone.
Spacing is generally about keeping yourself at the maximum range where you attacks still effectively either BUILD DAMAGE or KO. I am emphasizing effectively because some attacks have multiple hitboxes usually known as sweet or sour spots. A sweetspot is where the attack does lots of damage and/or knock back, and the sourspot is basically the part of the attack that doesn't due the awesome stuff. Marth is well-known for just about all of his sword-based attacks having sweetspots on the tip where they do increased damage and knockback. So when I say "maximum range" I mean "max range where the attack is worth a damn" and not just the farthest away you can hit.
Anyways, spacing is done so you can BUILD DAMAGE OR KO while still being far away enough that the opponent has a reduced chance of retaliating. Attacks that do this are generally called "safe" because you can throw them out and your opponent has very few opportunities to "punish" or attack back should your attack fail to land. Little Mac's forward tilt is a good example of a good spacing move: it comes out quickly, it has little ending lag so you can perform another action quickly after using it, it can KO at high percents, and the distance is just wide enough so that it outranges the grabs of any player that shields it. Spacing and safe moves vary heavily on the matchup, however, and in the case of Mac's forward tilt it can be considerably less safe against opponents with long-range "tether" grabs like Link or Pac-Man.
Zoning is kinda the opposite of spacing: you use attacks that force your opponent to back off and leave an area where their attacks could hit you. Projectiles are perhaps the easiest way to zone, as they force opponents to back off or use defensive measures in response. Typically long-range, disjointed attacks make for excellent spacing tools. Zoning is also important for recovering to the stage, as something like Ganondorf's forward air is fairly potent and can scare an edgeguarding opponent to air dodge or retreat, allowing Ganondorf to safely recover. While the point of zoning attacks aren't to necessarily KO opponents, at high percentages kill moves can become effective at zoning since your opponent may not want to risk losing a stock.
FAQ
This is really basic stuff, but this whole guide is made for people just crawling into the competitive scene all naked and crying for air.
Why are items banned?
To make this really simple: they are too random and their effects are generally too swingy. Nobody wants to see the Grand Finals of a thousand-dollar tourney end because someone got lucky and grabbed a Heart Container while their opponent was respawning.
But...Final Smashes!
Experiments to make Final Smashes work flatly failed. They spawn way the hell too often, even on low frequency, and there's still the whole randomness factor. It turned games into "grab the Smash Ball" which isn't very competitive or fun to watch.
Why are so many stages banned?
Because they either have a hazard that dominates play (Pyrosphere is all about getting Ridley on your side) or they have features easily abused by certain characters (Hyrule Temple is so huge that fast characters can get one KO and then spend the rest of the match fleeing their opponent until time runs out). It's worth noting that other fighting games tend to not even have hugely variable stages as a thing, so Smash having about 10 or so legal stages is not that weird.
Why not timed matches?
Because it tends to lead to ties, whereas that is significantly harder with stock matches (you have to end the match with even stocks and damage).
I grabbed the ledge and immediately got hit. WHY?
In Smash 4 you can only get ledge invulnerability on your first ledge grab. After that you must wait a short period or else you will be vulnerable when you grab the ledge. This was done to stop the incredibly boring and awful tactic that was planking.
What is DI? Vectoring?
Directional Influence allows you to change the trajectory of you character when hit by holding the stick in a certain direction when struck. You don't change the force of the hit, but by changing the angle you can turn a once lethal attack into something survivable. The best way to survive an attack is to move the stick in a way that is perpendicular to where you are being launched, preferably in a direction closer to the stage. More advanced techniques include using DI to make it so you launch farther away in order to limit the ability of your opponent to combo you.
Vectoring was a new system similar to DI that was removed in the last patch. It was basically a more intuitive system that had the drawback of making matches take longer.
How does seeding in tournaments work?
Basically the first round puts "the best" players up against "the worst" so the top ranked player fights the lowest ranked player and so forth. This may seem unfair, but the point of seeding is to create progressively more exciting matches as the tournament progresses. Having half of the top ranked players eliminated in the first two rounds makes for a very poor tournament where the remaining good players fight very easy matches against the less skilled players. If there's any consolation, in double-elimination tournaments the first round of losers should be the bottom half of the players if the seeding is accurate.
Stage selection scares me. How does it work?
Your first match has the stage randomly selected from a pool of "starter" or neutral stages. Basically, they don't favor any characters too much (no stage is truly neutral). Matches after that use the following process:
1. Winner of the last match bans up to however many stages the tournament rules allow (usually 1 or 2)
2. Loser picks a stage that A. wasn't Banned and B. they haven't won a match on in that set. The loser can pick from the starter stages as well as special counterpick stages that are known for given particular characters easier or harder times.
3. If someone has yet to win enough matches to end the set, then return to step #1.
If you have the option to switch characters between matches, then that is done before stage selection, starting with the winner. Once they've picked or declined to pick a new character, the winner tells the loser their character choice and then the loser can opt to switch or not. From there you proceed to step #1.
What's a meta?
Basically what is being played in your area/tournaments. Sometimes you can play around this to your advantage, but it's typically a poor idea to try and counter the meta with characters you never play. An example may be a meta where Mega Man is exceedingly popular. You might want to play a character with reflectors like Fox or Pit to counter a lot of Mega Man's moves. Meta can also describe just the general playstyle of your area, such as a tournament scene with lots of aggressive players that will tend to opt for riskier maneuvers more often than not.
Rorus, you said this wasn't terribly difficult to get into and then wrote a short story worth of words about it. You suck.
At least you don't have to remember a dozen quarter motions?
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It is really that much easier to do it that way? Sure, you fight a couple fewer enemies, but there also aren't as many healing items, right?
I'm not sure. The trade off is that you have to fight the 8 additional unlockable characters, but you gain an additional heart healing item, which heals you for all damage (while losing one of the 2 maxim tomatoes you get in normal All-star but who cares). I think True All-star MIGHT be easier purely due to there being 2 hearts rather than 1.
I wouldn't recommend doing what I did necessarily, because at the end of the day it isn't really that much easier, if it's easier at all. But if you're going for this challenge and you completed a few runs of Hard All-star before unlocking True All-star, don't sweat it.
-When is the latest I can sign up for it?
-When creating the brackets, do the new players get the lowest rating, which matches them up against all highest ranking players?
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
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New people are the lowest ranked, so they will be facing "the best" in round one. But we have like five new people so that range is kinda broad. But hey, maybe you could be some kind of Smash savant we don't know about. But I just assume new people are more likely to have no Smash experience, so I rank them last.
I also love seeing talk about tier lists. Mainly because they never apply to the majority of people who look at them. With that being said, I feel like more than ever the tiers are very compact for this game, save for those characters who might have a harder time confirming kills.
I think looking at match ups are much more useful, since it compares 2 characters directly based on their available tools.
When I talk about scalpers in this context it's people who purposely buy up stock to increase rarity and flip them at a significant mark up. If you pick up a Marth and sell it to someone here on the forum looking for one at a slight increase, to cover additional expenses like shipping, and maybe a bit extra for the trouble, that's fine by me. But when the lowest price on Amazon is over 80, you're just an prick. Although Nintendo is equally at fault.
Any online resources that I should be looking at? I have always favored big characters (Bowser, ganondorf, now charizard), but I kinda like Bowser Jr. even though I am awful with him.
Then again using the Wii u pad is just uncomfortable (wife gets the real controller). Gotta play around with button configs
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Cool, thanks for the quick response.
Nintendo ID: Pastalonius
Smite\LoL:Gremlidin \ WoW & Overwatch & Hots: Gremlidin#1734
3ds: 3282-2248-0453
Yeah. Instead of a tomato, a fairy and two hearts, you get two tomatoes, a fairy and one heart. It goes by faster, though.
Oh, if anyone's wondering, there's trophies that you generally get via trophy rush and classic mode, and trophies that you generally get at the shop. I went to the shop to celebrate getting the Dr. Mario trophy rush challenge (100,000G) and discovered that's where all the alt form trophies were.
Oh well. I should be around for next week's, maybe.
Wii Fit Trainer is shaping up nicely. Went 22 - 2 on 1v1 For Glory last night. Only losses were to a Palutena, because fuck Palutena. Managed to ransack everybody else including a damn good Diddy Kong.
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I should be around tonight if anyone wants to practice against my Mega Man or Shulk.
It's me, I'm trying to do that and I didn't think to do it before unlocking all the characters
Though it hasn't been that bad once I "figured it out", the AI is very inconsistent where sometimes it'll combo you and follow up in the air with kill moves and other times it'll stand around and take smash attacks in the face all day so my strategy is to only pick up a healing item after the first three rounds so that every round after that I can pick up another healing item, that way if things go bad and all three computers gang up on you at high percentages you're going to lose quickly instead of trying to survive the last match at over 200% and dying to the last guy. It's way less frustrating at least.
3DS: 2019-9671-8106 NNID: RamblinMushroom
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I couldn't even get all of the rewards on the initial battles in Event Mode. The one with Mega Man vs Pac-Man Pickachu and Yellow Devil fucked me over so many times and I barely won after dying on it ssoooo many times.
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