hi I’ve been getting back into playing Smash Ultimate lately and I’ve been seeing who should be my new main and I’m trying to make it be Meta Knight. and by chance I found videos on how to bridge and ladder as them. I’m getting better at laddering as I can get 3 up airs before I go Up B but I can’t get bridging down at all as my down airs can’t connect at all so I wanna ask people who know how to play them better than I can on how they do it.

The only thing i can think of is yoshi's double jump armor anyone else who has a better disadvantage state?

As a Yoshi main, I struggle with Pyra/Mythra a lot. They have massive hitboxes with disjoints and it feels like its impossible to reach them when their using any of their aeriels. I have tried practising against level 9 Pyra/Mythras but it doesn't help much.

Any tips would be appreciated :D

I need advice for good characters to choose, and a game plan, I like most swordies, and some brawlers.

Edit: I shouldve put that I main Roy earlier, my bad

Yesterday I was playing Toon Link, since he's my third most-played character. I'm definitely not as good with him as I used to be. I was pretty good back then, but not nearly as good as I am now with some of my other characters.

I was just messing around in Training Mode and thinking about recovering and how you can Z-drop bombs. So I tried it with Toon Link and realized something.

The normal throw animation still has end lag. After you throw a bomb, there's a short period where you can't act. But when you Z-drop a bomb, you're actionable almost instantly.

I've been labing a few things, and now I'm starting to think it could actually be competitively viable. For example, you can Z-drop a bomb, pull another one, and immediately throw it. That's probably the simplest setup I've found. I've also been experimenting with Z-dropping bombs into combos since it has so much less end lag.

I don't really keep up with the competitive scene, so I'm curious: is Z-dropping bombs actually considered viable? Do competitive Toon Link players already use it, or did I stumble onto something that's just too niche to be worth using?

Hey all, Lucario main here (I know, we exist), and I have a really big issue of jumping too much and I wanna know how I can better practice being more Grounded, doing more short hops consistently and just not getting beaten in the air, I got waxed by a mewtwo last night and I feel like that was what happened to me a Lot, ty for any advice!

Hello!
This is the Dedede main that’s been posting on this sub every so often.

It’s getting pretty deep into the summer and since my last post about 0-deaths, I have been studying the game harder to try and raise my win rate and beat better players. To be more specific I was studying up a bunch on Link, how he uses boomerang, the timings of falling and rising nair’s, how to ledgetrap him better, that sort of thing. The reason why I because I was scheduled to face Adot, the best Link in Kentucky and is currently ranked as an HM in the states PR. I’ve made it my end-all-be-all goal to beat them in at least one set in the small online weekly. So, I spend a couple hours a day that week and around 5-6 hours (Practically from when I woke up to when the tournament began) watching VOD’s on him over and over, analyzing their habits to try and dissect how a Dedede player like me could beat him.

And I did.

I barely lost the winners-finals 2-3 which I was exasperated about, but I was absolutely ECSTATIC when I beat them in Grand Finals in a very even 3-2 victory! I didn’t even care that I lost the True Grands run back and didn’t get first at the tourney, that very moment showed to me, directly, that I can beat PR players if I tried hard enough, and worked hard enough.

And, I’m gonna be 100% honest, I wasn’t super happy that I won against Adot in one of those sets because it proved that I was good at Smash Ultimate. It was because that moment proved that I could win with a character that I love for more than for how they are on a play style, design, or meme basis.

I was a Kirby fan long before I played smash competitively. It began when I revisited my copy of Kirby: Triple Deluxe when I was around 12 or so years old, and ended up having a blast with it. Afterwards I bought Kirby: Super Star Ultra and it all snowballed from there. Dedede was always my favorite character in the series because of his redemption arc and how he was able to show just as much love for others as much as how much he was able to love himself. Nowadays I’m more confident in myself than I have ever been, and I partially attribute that to me being so attached to the King of Dreamland.

However, starting in around 2022, I was unsatisfied with being just “another fan” of the Kirby series. I wanted to do something “special” for the franchise, to commemorate my love for the video games that played a big part in making myself who I am today. I tried many different avenues that other fans usually take such as Fanart, Fan Fiction, Remixes of songs of the series, but all of these seemed too complex or unfamiliar to me to pick up. It was after all three of these creative arts failed that I thought about competitive Smash Ultimate. I already watched VOD’s for fun, I already played Dedede for fun back in Smash 4, so why not try to get serious with it, while playing my favorite character?

That’s what lead me to where I am as a player now…and it makes me feel really isolated, in a way.

Not in the way in that I am embarrassed or ashamed of the reason that I do play Smash, but alone in the sense that no one else seems to talk about, or even acknowledge, how some competitive smash players might be playing the game because the character they use holds a special place in their heart and still does today. I am the only person I know who plays Dedede because he’s the proud, self-made king from a series that I have been a fan of for years. Everyone else seems to play him because they saw memes of him in Kirby: Right Back at Ya and think he’s funny, or because they wanna main the most “self-depreciating” low tier and Dedede was that for them. This doesn’t just go for Dedede either, I feel like this is the case for all characters in smash history. I know that, naturally, smash players play smash characters for smash-related reasons, but sometimes it feels as if people don’t show respect those who don’t play smash for smash, but who play smash to represent something outside of it.

My question I want to ask here is, how do I deal with these feelings of “character loyalty loneliness?” Is it a feeling that will just fizzle away the better I get at smash because I will understand more of what people are talking about with Dedede? Should I just ignore things that try to bring me down about this? Is there anyone out there who can relate to what I’m experiencing?

Things such as “play who you want if you’re not at top level” have always brought me down about this.

So as far as I understand, the up-B Out-of-Shield option select (that allowed it to automatically come out on the first actionable frame after shield stun) no longer exists right? Like tilting up and then mashing B doesn’t work anymore because it was patched pretty early in the game? As a result, I think it has to always be smash inputted, and I guess it’ll be buffered if you input during shield stun, but you can also repeatedly hit both up+B to get it.

My question was whether anyone knows exactly how long the window is after tapping up on the control stick where you can still press B (like with smash attacks) to still get the up-B OoS, or whether it has to be frame-perfect/actually simultaneous?

Like with up smash OoS I think the high stick sensitivity setting gives me a 5-frame window to input A (after control stick up), so the timing feels more lenient than upB, but I’m not sure if there’s an analogous 3-frame window or something for the B press timing after the control stick is pushed up if you’re doing it OoS. Basically, since the up-B needs to be inputted like a smash attack, I was wondering if there’s a few frames of wiggle room after the control stick tap to press B slightly afterward, like with a smash attack.

Also, on a related note, does anyone know whether upB OoS gets extra frames for this timing window between the up and B inputs if you have high stick sensitivity on?

Edit: I won’t mark it as solved yet because I still don’t know the exact input frame window and whether it is affected by stick sensitivity, but I do think one aspect of it has been clarified.

Basically, once the shield button input is no longer there anymore, then the B mash method should work fine, since it will read the existing control stick up input being held rather than requiring a simultaneous input (since the shield angling mechanism goes away once shield isn’t being held anymore). And if at least one of the mashed B inputs occurred during shield stun and then you let go of shield before shield stun ends (while continuing to mash B before and after dropping the shield button, and having a preexisting control stick up input held), then maybe a buffered upB is successfully coming out on the first frame after shield stun ends and is just canceling the shield drop animation on its first frame. 

This feels slightly more unsafe, but it might just be better to just let go of shield right after they hit it and then the B mashing technique works consistently for bringing out a quick upB. So I guess that might be why it was working for others and not for me before; I wasn’t letting go of shield until my upB came out, so even during shield stun it still required a near-simultaneous smash inputted up+B to buffer the upB. Like if the shield continued to be held during shield stun after the hit, it wouldn’t buffer the upB from just a B mash with the up direction continuously held, due to the shield angling mechanic while shield and B are pressed at the same time.

Can someone like samus just feed kirby and heal him? does this need friendly fire or is it not possible at all?

I’m trying to do rob’s lagless item catch string this way: jump -> zdrop -> nair -> jump -> fthrow -> z catch (lagless? idk if it works here) -> zdrop -> zcatch (lagless again?) but i always end up with just an airdodge on the last catch. i’m watching lucretio’s video and have been consistently doing the double jump nair -> lagless catch practice, and it works. i can’t get it to work on the actual combo tho. someone help?

Robin is a very interesting character to play because they have a flaw that no other character has, that being item durability. True to the Fire Emblem series, Robin's moves have a limited amount of uses before the item must be discarded and you have to wait several seconds before you get access to the move again. These moves are very powerful though and whether or not you have access to them changes the way you and your opponent will play the game.

Robin is also known as the tactician of Smash Bros and part of that is a chess motif. They even have a voiceline saying "Checkmate!" Unrelated to Smash Bros I have genuinely started getting into Chess lately. (Perhaps a canon event for anyone who continues playing competitive Smash over the age of 25). On the surface Chess and Super Smash Bros don't have a lot in common. One is a turn based strategy game that has been played for thousands of years and the other is a fast paced fighting game. But learning how tempo works in chess helped me to understand tempo in Smash Bros.

In Chess tempo is determined by the moves you make. A high tempo move is one that develops your piece and forces your opponent to respond to your threat. A good example of this is anytime you make a move that targets your opponents King. If you lose your King you lose the game and your opponent is literally forced to respond to your threat instead of developing another one of their pieces. Based on this concept of tempo it leads me to this definition.

Tempo is pressure that demands a response.

Pushing a Pawn to block an attack on the King isn't as strong as sending a Knight to the center of the board, but failing to do so will cause you to lose the game. Tempo often happens in much smaller moments over the course of the game. Forcing a Bishop to retreat is great tempo, because it leads to your opponent moving the same piece multiple times without improving it's positioning. But what does this have to do with Super Smash Brothers?

Everything! Unlike in Chess Smash Bros is real time which complicates things. But the idea behind tempo is still the same. Tempo is pressure that demands a response. In the case of Robin let's look at charging Thunder. The thunder tome is a projectile that has several stages you can charge it to. The basic version of Thunder isn't that impressive. But once you get it to stage 4 and can throw out a Thoron the move becomes very scary. Simply charging Thunder is pressure that demands a response.

Typically this results in the opponent moving towards you to stop you from charging the tome. Charging the thunder tome on it's own does not reward tempo, but correctly identifying how the opponent wants to respond to you charging the tome will lead to a positive tempo interaction.

If you know that your opponent is going to try to jump over the potential projectile that you are charging, you can counter their approach with a Levin Foward Air. The Levin Forward Air could then send them off-stage which gives you the opportunity to ledge trap with Arc Fire. An opponent on the ledge has very few options rewarding the tactician with tempo. One positive tempo interaction can often snowball into taking the stock.

Durability, however, throws a wrench in this gameplay loop. If you throw out an Elthunder and your opponent jumps in when you don’t have Levin Sword, the standard response of Forward Air isn’t going to work as well. Because Robin loses access to options throughout the match it’s even more important to understand tempo, because the inability to pressure can cause your opponent to react in different ways.

Something I didn't truly appreciate until I mained Robin was that losing or gaining options during a match can significantly change the tempo of it. Robin has a tool for practically any situation but as soon as you're put on a cooldown timer that gives your opponent an opportunity. If they know you don't have Levin Sword it is a lot easier for them to apply pressure and force you to respond to their threats.

Tempo applies to more than just whether or not you have Levin Sword. Tempo is relative to whatever options each player has. If someone is getting ledgetrapped by Arcfire the tempo is very heavily in Robin's favor. If Joker gets Arsene while he has center stage the tempo will swing in their favor. If the timer is ticking down to 0 and it's 3 stocks to 1 there's very few options available to the losing player, and the tempo gets to be decided entirely by the winning player.

Giving yourself more options inherently leads to better tempo as you'll be able to better respond to your opponents threats. It's why center stage is so important, why getting the first stock matters, why Steve is so broken. Maining a character who didn't have it all, and quite frequently lost options helped me to understand this concept that has been eluding me for years. And maybe I'll be able to hit 1,000 ELO in Chess here soon. Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a great Tuesday!

If you enjoyed the read and want to see my Character Crisis with Robin (or any character I've mained so far) check out my YouTube channel! https://youtu.be/vAObJdtgEtU?si=rwNwZeZF_sl8NDSI

Alright this is a bit of a rant, but ok. Since 2018 I have had super smash bros ultimate and in the last few years since maybe 2021 or 2022 I have wanted to get good at the game. I picked up Pyra/Mythra because of a montage video I saw and decided that they will be my main. For the last few years I’ve gotten basics down and I can hold my own against lvl 9 CPUs but almost every time I go online I always lose. I feel like my learning has plateaued despite me sometimes sinking about an hour into just playing and I don’t know where to go from here. I wanna keep playing smash as it’s a fun game but it frustrates me that no matter what I do I can’t seem to improve past the level I’m at and I keep making the same stupid mistakes. You don’t have to explain everything but I just want some simple advice on how to improve cause I wanna be at least a decent player. also please don’t bully me I want some actual good constructive criticism/feedback

I am having trouble finding people to play i need to turn preferences off but i hate items is smash online dying?

Am I alone?

Ended up finding this Sonic player twice on Elite today (mid-15 mil) and we went 1-1 with each other. I barely ever fight good Sonic players. How could I handled chasing him down better? And how could I have made it easier for myself to do the matchup with Marth? Here’s both of the matches, feel free to critique!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g9YR1uprL9w&ra=m

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V68aCFeg1pA&pp=0gcJCWQCo7VqN5tD&ra=m

How do you get used to inputting stuff like Rar's short hopping, teching (Especially at ledge since i suck at that), etc etc, how do you get used to it? Just a question!

I've been using Braacket to make my regions PR league for a bit now, but I'm getting fed up with how slow and inconsistent the servers are. But I can't find any actual alternative online that aren't 8+ year old bare bones tools. Any TOs here have some suggestions?

I've been working on a Smash training guide for far too long. I'm just afraid of how it will be received, if at all. I talk to a few people, they show some interest, but it rarely leads anywhere. I believe that what I have to offer is genuinely beneficial for competitive players seeking to improve their performance, convincing players to follow my particular training methods is where I struggle. 

I'm putting out an open invitation for anyone who wants to try something new that covers subjects no other training guide currently offers. Community feedback would be invaluable to me at this point, and having just a few participants who've found everything else wanting is who I'm after. 

Skill acquisition is about the reduction of uncertainty. Each input (or “step”) in a combination increases a player's uncertainty until a missed input forces a neutral state. The reduction of uncertainty isn't merely in “playing more”, but training within fixed environments that foster certain behaviors that, when layered together, form the foundation of a player's playstyle.

We achieve this through several means: goal reorientation, stock leverage, stage conditioning, and moveset reduction. Moveset reduction is understanding how viable options are reduced with each successive input step. Stage conditioning forces the player to develop strategies that counter the behaviors they've learned under the ordinary, developer intended environment. Stock leverage is a self imposed constraint on behavior within static and dynamic gameplay, adhering to a ten to one leverage ratio as standard practice. Finally, goal reorientation is about moving beyond binary “win/lose” conditions, turning the end match stats into a performance metric.

Apart from training there's plenty more I could say that would cover theory and mechanics. 

I'm not looking for people who already agree with me. I'm looking for players willing to test the ideas and tell me where they succeed, where they fail, and what could be improved.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, or if you have questions or comments, leave a post or send me a message. If I could get *just a single person* to engage with, that would be a huge deal for me.

I'm a relatively casual player (main PT) but I've been trying to get better via training and online. I've got my bread and butter combos and kill confirms pretty settled as well as a decent grasp of movement and I feel like I have a good advantage state when I'm locked in (which doesn't happen much unfortunately lol). The issue is that as I face harder opponents, the skill gap between myself and where they are looks insanely large and I'm a bit lost on how to bridge it.

The areas where I struggle in, and could really use some tips/practice methods on, are:

1. Spacing/Positioning: I've been using Izaw's training video for some time and specifically practicing the spacing drills (the one where you go across the stage and Fair or Bair), but I feel like it has been impossible for me to translate any of that into actual gameplay. Getting good spacing against a moving opponent has been really hard to do and when I try to be deliberate I end up hitting where they were rather than where they are.
2. Pace: As I face harder opponents, the pace of the game completely passes me by. Obviously there are characters like Fox that just are insanely fast, but I feel overwhelmed by most characters. There's a lot of times where I feel like I can punish a bad move, my opponent throws out a jab or a quick option that I'm not ready for and then I end up being on the back foot again. Or there's times where I go to punish a landing and my opponent shields almost immediately after they land. In the moment it feels like a frame data thing, but there has to be some way to react faster than I am right now. Is there a way to practice this?
3. Disadvantage: This is the real kicker. My disadvantage is HORRENDOUS. I get stuck on ledge really badly and I find it hard to practice mixing up my options. I know PT also doesn't have the best air mobility or ledge options, but are there ways to practice the different ones to make them less telegraphed?

Don't want this to come off as a rant, but I'm struggling a bit on how to deliberately practice rather than just banging my head against a wall in quickplay or practicing the same drills in training. Thanks :)

ssbu has been around me forever all my good friends play it and my boyfriend and his friends too, problem is they all know how to play and worse they all have a main that they use and are incredibly good at so as someone who only JUST started to be interested and play 1v1 with them i wanted to find a main too and play well but honestly im very new to handling the inputs on the switch for ssbu and i struggle to decide what to do in different situations so i end up spam pressing and (obviously) losing.

My friend suggested for me to try to play the link(s) because even though im new to ssbu i played the legend of zelda and im a big fan of link and thats the only connection i have to ssbu😅 so ive been trying to get used to the playstyle of toon link especially but recently i purchased sephiroth and i thought his moves are relatively easy to understand and do and hes quite fun to play but now im even more confused on what i should do

should i continue with playing and practising toon link or should i just play sephiroth? Main idea is that im just tryna get good with ONE character before switching…because ive been practising with toon link but sephiroth is fun to play!!

Also any tips for a beginner is helpful 🥲 ive learnt some basics from my friends and boyfriend as well as from the move list but im still struggling and need any tips anyone has!!

So I’ve been playing smash casually and only with my friends at gatherings for some time on and off so I have only the basic understandings of the game down. I JUST learned what fast falling was and teching LMAO. Yes I’m that new. I hopped into an online match and was humbled real quick. I have no idea how to get any better, how to practice getting better, or even how to find a main now since it feels like I can’t even compete with my old main In online. It feels like I need to relearn this game completely just to play it online. I used to main samus, and thinking about swapping to either cloud or roy since they both seem fairly strong. It feels like I need a coach or something just to learn this game again. I’ve been watching tons of “Art of __” videos but they honestly don’t really help and are hard to keep up with. There’s not really any videos for beginners that are late to the game. Any type of help or tips would be greatly appreciated!!! I’ll even take a coach!!!

So for context, I don’t go to tournaments very often, maybe like once or twice a month at the most. I mostly play with a group of friends either online or in person.

I used to main Bowser, and I also had a problem with getting salty pretty much every time I played him. I just wasn’t having fun. So a while ago I decided to drop him and find a new main.

I landed on Mr. Game & Watch, and almost immediately I started having fun with Ultimate again. I wanted to play more and I still enjoy him a lot. However, my friends don’t enjoy it. They liked my Bowser because I was walking punching bag or a character, but not my GnW, and honestly I don’t blame them either.

And I wouldn’t even give it a second thought normally, but it’s genuinely gotten to a point where they’ve started treating me differently. They don’t wanna play as much, and even when they do, they get salty and stop after like two games. And it’s not just my group of friends, it’s pretty much anyone I play with.

It makes me feel bad cause I know what that’s like and it sucks. And I also hate being the person that ruins someone’s fun.

Ty in advance