superglucose
Smash Apprentice
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2008
- Messages
- 127
(this is a summary of the theory behind brawl that I've been able to glean from these forums and personal experience. I'm perfectly willing to admit I'm wrong, and would be glad to be wrong! In fact, please point out things I may have missed, I'm always hungry to learn more)
A thesis on American brawl:
I know next to nothing about Japanese Brawl. I am not Japanese, I do not know many Japanese, and I've never played brawl against a Japanese player. I have heard that they play a more aggressive game than Americans do, and I'm quite curious to see how the two styles fare against each other.
American Brawl is a very defensive game. It's all about not getting hit... if you're hit, even by a jab that deals 1%, you failed. Hard. Every single move is punishable in this game, and late deaths are significantly more common than in Melee, where an early death meant 30%. Now it means 70%. There are very few true combos and overall the name of the game is to punish your opponents mistakes while making very few of your own. Hit them, but never EVER get hit.
So why attack in a game of Brawl? Very simple. While most attacks can be punished (some very easily) there are a few notable attacks that cannot. Try punishing Pit's arrows if he's a long way away from you. Try punishing Snake's grenade spam, or falco's shdl. It isn't going to work if the distances are right. Plus you need to rely on kill moves that are generally easily punished to get the ko, and frankly you need the ko to win the game.
To this extent, American brawl is about the jabs and grabs. Why? Generally speaking jabs come out fast enough and hang around enough (AAA combos, the only jab that can be spot-dodge spammed is Marth, off the top of my head) to punish the crap out of spot dodging. Also you grab people out of their attacks and out of their shields. So jabs, for the most part, eliminate spot dodging as a defense and grabs utterly eliminate shielding as a defense. Since there are really (aside from proper spacing, which we'll get to later) just four main types of defensive maneuver, shield, spot-dodge, roll, and air-dodge (short hopped normally) removing one of them means that you've effectively eliminated 25% of your opponent's defensive options. Now, the Arial game is a different game entirely, but for now I'm just talking about the ground game.
Shielding:
Shielding is very effective against characters with disjointed hit boxes or attacks that linger about a bit. A good example is practically anything Game and Watch can throw at you. The turtle, ****ed thing it is, is one of the greatest attacks Brawl has to offer. It is very difficult to punish as it eats air-dodging, side-stepping, and rolling alive. But when it comes to shielding it's pretty weak. Everyone over on the G&W portion of the Smash Boards will talk your ear off about 'shield pressure' but I've become convinced none of them know what that means.
I play a game called Allegiance, and one of the major tenants of driving bombers in that game is that your shields are only a buffer so your repair ships can get oriented in combat. In Brawl, your shields are only a buffer so you can orient yourself and space out. Shielding is the best option available to you defensively, if you know your opponent isn't going to grab. It doesn't normally get you a free attack afterwards and you can't counter well unless you're perfect shielding (an application of shielding), but I promise that very few attacks will get through your shield, and most attacks that hit your shield will automatically space you.
What is this perfect shielding? Perfect shielding is timing the shield perfectly (duh) so that there's no damage and no knockback on your shield. It's why shielding is amazing. It's why shielding is the most important technique to know. Marth's shield breaker will eat shields alive, give you hit stun, and knock you back. But if you power shield, it does no knockback whatsoever, and deals no damage to your shield. All kinds of useful. Now perfect shielding isn't very applicable in some situations, like the aforementioned Turtle, because it only really works against the first hit. But it's **** funny to watch a fully charged shield breaker bounce off the shield and do nothing!
Shielding doesn't have many punishing options (bah, jump canceled shields, I guess...) because usually you're knocked back and spaced so that neither side will hurt the other. This is one of the awesomesauce perks of shielding. It's also sometimes annoying because again, Brawl is all about punishing. But there is one major punish available to those who are shielding... remember how I said that “jabs and grabs” are important to Brawl? Well, shielding lets your grab. Easily.
Imagine Lucario is coming in for some Dair nonsense. That move is such utter cheese and amazingness that it gives me headaches to think about it. I love using it and I hate playing against it. Fortunately for all of us facing off against lucarios, the idiots usually don't space it right. So they hit my shield and I grab 'em. Seeing as I normally main Falco, it ends up quite painful for them (dthrow to dac, dthrow to sutter step fsmash (works amazingly with prediction)) and not so much for me. So I've turned their attack, which is one of the greatest attacks in the game (and widely considered one of the best, if not the best, down air in the game), into a nice and easy 30-40%. On them.
Shielding is great, but not always applicable. It's a spacing tool, certainly, and has a great punishing option, but overall your opponent can always own a shield with a grab. This is why rolling exists. Rolling gives you some frames during which you can't be hit while you move a certain distance in whichever way you chose to roll. Hold the shield button and tap the joystick one direction or the other, and be amazed, as you have discovered what a great many new players never learn on their own! At least, not for a long time.
Rolling:
When I first played brawl, I was a very inexperienced melee and SSB64 player, but I'd learned how to roll in that time. My friends had owned the game for a week, and had been playing their hearts out. They had unlocked every character through playing enough matches against each other, to give you some indication as to how much they out-experienced me. I showed up with them weilding Metaknight, Wolf, Pikachu, Toon Link, and Marth like knives. These characters went on to be some of the best in the game.
My first time, well, I played a lot of Zelda back in Melee. I loved her magic (I also played Mewtwo, **** the tiers, I just had fun with those two :D Fox was my tourney character, not that I was any good) back in Melee, so I figured I'd try her again. I got used to the controls (we used classic controllers), and won the first game. Then we had an in-dorm-room tourney between the four of us. I played sheik, and remembered the two uber techs from Melee: rolling and air dodging. I was very pleasantly surprised the first time I airdodged... sure wavedashing was gone but I couldn't wavedash anyways. Rolling... rolling gave these guys fits. I didn't lose a game of Brawl for two months, despite not owning the game and their frantic and never-ceasing training to catch up to me. Yes, we were noobs and may very well still be noobs, but my point still holds: rolling is an effective defense.
There are characters that rolling just doesn't work against (lookin' at you, Game and Watch mains), but overall rolling is an amazing defensive option. It eats Link and other tether grab users alive (hahaha... Samus), and rolling into people who are tether grabbers can lead to free down smashes. You can roll away to retreat from a bad position (and retreating is NEVER a bad option) and you can often times roll forward to get into a good position (this is significantly more situational). When my friend and I are playing our Lucario and Falco games at our top levels, we do more roll spam than you'd normally see. Why? Because we're always rolling and walking trying to get into position for a grab. Granted, this anecdote doesn't make rolling powerful, but it's an example of it's application. You roll past a grab, and you're behind them, maybe in range for your own grab. If not, take a step forward and grab.
Rolling's greatest issue is that it's pretty easy to punish. Lucario's Dair owns rolling. Game and Watch's... very existence owns rolling. There is a certain type of attack that hoses rolling, and it's those attacks that tend to hit either an area, have a lingering hitbox, have range, start up lag, or hit both in front and behind the attacker. Whew, that leaves a lot of them, doesn't it? It sounds worse than it is though, because rolling's a good way to get out of jabs from characters not named Metaknight. Most tilts can't deal with rolling either (G&W's dtilt being the main exception, with a few others, like Marth's utilt), and smashes (except clearing moves, but even most of those can be avoided) are exceptionally hosed. Rolling is also almost foolproof when it comes to avoiding arials, especially stall and falls. Rolling's second greatest issue is that it's the hardest of your options to counter attack from. You usually end up just out of range (which is kinda the point), and have to move back into range before attacking, and the time it takes to do that usually clears the lag from whatever attack you were dodging.
Spot Dodging:
Rolling's ******* cousin is spot-dodging. While rolling takes you away from your opponent (or into your opponent, I guess) spot dodging is normally done when your opponent is in your face and trying to hit you. Most animations show the character leaning back and wagging their torso in their opponents face, an almost taunt that kind of says, “HAHA! MISSED ME!” Then you pop back up, and usually punch 'em in the face (if you're snake, that is). Spot-dodging is the answer to grabs. The answer. You try to grab me? Well I spot-dodge, and then grab right back! In the last tourney I went to, there was about a ten second moment with nothing but two players foiling each other's grab attempts with spot dodges. In the finals match. Spot-dodging has the same weaknesses as rolling, +1. Jab combos, which don't really match up well with most rolling, utterly own spot-dodging. My friend claims he can perfect spot-dodge Snake's jab combo, and surprise surprise, he hasn't done it yet. I main Falco, and my other friend is a notorious spot-dodge spammer. AAA(hold A) gets him every time because he tries to spot dodge, and then cries as he takes ten, fifteen percent. In exchange for this weakness, spot-dodging has much less lag than rolling does making it easier to punish from. It's good, very good. Use it.
The final of the major defensive maneuvers is air-dodging. Final not because it's the hardest to master (it's not, it's probably the easiest) or because it's the best (I think it might be the weakest defensive option available to you). Final because it has to be done in the air, which means that you're probably screwing up.
There are a lot of good applications for airdodging. Din's Fire should never, ever connect. Pit's arrows while you're off the stage? Hell, shading isn't quite what it was in Melee but is still a great technique, especially since you can autocancel into a tilt or smash. That being said, airdodging can't handle hitboxes that linger, such as the infamous turtle. You'll dodge the first, maybe second and third attacks but you'll get hit in the end. Admittedly if they're coming at you with a turtle and it's your only option, then airdodge to take less damage. But as good as air dodging is, it won't save you from your own spacing mistakes in the same way rolling away and shielding can. If you outrange your opponent with your arials, or out prioritize, screw airdodging (most of the time). Still, chances are Marth's fair out ranges and out prioritizes you, and in fact Marth's fair is one of the greatest examples of how airdodging can and should be used.
General Defensive Theory:
So there we have it, the four main defensive maneuvers. Now, when to use them? Well we've all screwed up our spacing before. Even Ken screwed up his spacing in Melee on occasion, it happens. You may find yourself in the following situation: somehow Game and Watch is right next to you. Who cares how you got there? It happens to the best smashers from time to time. Well, what do you think GW is going to do? One of his smashes is pretty sure to come out. If it's the usmash you can pretty easily roll away, but any other smash stands a good chance to eat your roll alive. As an example, rolling away from this situation as Pit puts you right in the sweetspot of his downsmash. Spot dodging works fine against the upsmash if you're good with timing, but the match will still hit (though it won't be nearly as powerful) and I'm fairly sure the dsmash will hit as well. Shading will leave you hit by the fsmash and the usmash. Shielding will leave you hit by none, and you'll be pushed away. Now you can roll out and be perfectly safe!
Each of your defensive options has its time and its place. The thing about brawl: the game creators don't give us moves with zero application. Some, like Ganondorf's utilt and b (wow, no wonder he's low tier!) have almost no application, but they do usually have some application. The defensive options are no different. If you're playing a character with mediocre grabs (Sheik, for instance) you'll want to roll out of grabs, if you're against someone who's attacks can be easily punished (DK or Ganondorf) you'll want to spot dodge, and if you're against Game and Watch you'll want to shield. Learning the time and place to defend is what separates those who can actually win matches at the competitive level from those who get three stocked. My friend went into a GW ditto and shielded very rarely, mostly using rolls and spot dodges. He got horrifically owned the first match. I told him to shield more, he listened, and in the second match lost by a handful of percent on the final stock (different than the easy two stock that had occurred on the first match). All I did was outline the defensive options every character bar none has. Sure, Pit's got his shield, the Spacies have their reflectors, Mario's got a cape, and a handful of characters have counters, but these four are the moves every character has.
Make sure to learn the range of your character's roll. Make sure you learn the time on their spot dodge (I'm pretty sure they're not the same). Make sure you memorize how long you can take shield damage, and have a good general idea of how much shield you have left as well as how much you can afford to lose, how much each attack will do to the shield, and how long before your shield recharges.
Spacing:
“Wait,” you say, “You're a scrub! How can you say there's only four defensive maneuvers?” No, there's a fifth. It's called 'spacing' and is by far the most reliable of the defensive options available to you. But spacing is an entire thesis unto its own, and is so very different for every matchup. Your shield is constant. It'll take the same amount of damage for each character.
The theory behind spacing is that you're at the place that a) maximizes your damage and b) minimizes your opponent's damage. In Brawl, b is far more important than a. It is always always ALWAYS better to give your opponent 1% and to take 0% than to give your opponent 5% and take 3%. That being said, perfect spacing (by this definition) is the place where you take no damage and your opponent takes damage. Hence, Pit has the easiest spacing game of any character in Brawl: he can essentially always damage you with proper arrow control.
Clearly Pit isn't the best character in the game though, and that's because long distance spacing (camping) is owned by another type of spacing known as approaching. In fact, all movements you make should be a type of spacing. If you aren't specifically choosing how close you are to someone then you're screwing up.
Example: Pit is camping you, and you're playing Marth. Pit has a super advantage at this range because Marth lacks projectiles, and Pit has one of the game's best projectiles. You are losing this spacing game, because Pit has spaced you into a situation where you cannot do damage. So you move forward (shading, shielding, rolling, whatever) to get in tipper range. Now you're perfectly spaced, and pit is not (because you've maximized damage, and Pit can't reach you). Pit will now space in response, probably moving closer (since he's up against a wall in this example) to get inside your tip range. As he moves closer to you, your damage potential lowers and his rises, meaning that your spacing has become worse. Now he's next to you and his quicker speed means he's going to hit you before you hit him. Pit now has great spacing on you because your damage is minimized while his is maximized, but not perfect spacing because you can still deal damage to him. In response to this, you space by increasing the distance between you two, and in all this moving you and pit are desperately trying to get damage and hit stun to space and set up for a kill while at the same time doing all the shielding, rolling, spot dodging, and air dodging necessary to avoid getting hit.
Many people take 'spacing' to mean 'moving.' This is, quite simply, a very flawed mentality, and one that loses games. Every attack you have spaces to some degree or another, with a couple exceptions. Some space so much that you knock your opponent off the ledge and into the side wall, koing them. Others have no spacing at all, of which the best example is Fox's laser. When playing Marth, I use his jab as a spacing tool as it tends to push them into tip range for the next jab, and then out of range so I can approach. With only a few exceptions, moving is the only way to decrease the space between two players. Notable exceptions are some tether grabs and the returning of Link's boomerang, as well as some tricky explosion applications.
Another aspect of spacing that gets lost in the translation is two dimensional spacing. Lots of people work their spacing in terms of left and right, and that's fair because it's impossible to maintain good y-axis spacing (thanks to gravity). But even if just for a moment, you can get out of range of attacks by using all that expanse of the stage that's above the floor. In fact, if there's platforms, y-axis spacing is an amazing tool, and why characters like Marth, Snake, and Metaknight do so well on the stages like Battlefield: they destroy y-axis spacing.
Conclusion
To summarize: Brawl is mostly about dealing significantly more damage than you take. To win a game of brawl your opponent will have to deal damage to you at some point, which means if you can avoid damage for the whole game you will win the game. Avoiding damage is done through application of spot dodging, rolling, air dodging, and shielding, as well as being careful in your spacing. The player with the better spacing will probably win the match.
This is how I interpret the Brawl competitive scene, discuss! Please point out things I may have missed/mistakes I may have made, as I'll be a better player for it.
Also: go read cwjalex's thread, cause that thing is all kinds of awesome.
A thesis on American brawl:
I know next to nothing about Japanese Brawl. I am not Japanese, I do not know many Japanese, and I've never played brawl against a Japanese player. I have heard that they play a more aggressive game than Americans do, and I'm quite curious to see how the two styles fare against each other.
American Brawl is a very defensive game. It's all about not getting hit... if you're hit, even by a jab that deals 1%, you failed. Hard. Every single move is punishable in this game, and late deaths are significantly more common than in Melee, where an early death meant 30%. Now it means 70%. There are very few true combos and overall the name of the game is to punish your opponents mistakes while making very few of your own. Hit them, but never EVER get hit.
So why attack in a game of Brawl? Very simple. While most attacks can be punished (some very easily) there are a few notable attacks that cannot. Try punishing Pit's arrows if he's a long way away from you. Try punishing Snake's grenade spam, or falco's shdl. It isn't going to work if the distances are right. Plus you need to rely on kill moves that are generally easily punished to get the ko, and frankly you need the ko to win the game.
To this extent, American brawl is about the jabs and grabs. Why? Generally speaking jabs come out fast enough and hang around enough (AAA combos, the only jab that can be spot-dodge spammed is Marth, off the top of my head) to punish the crap out of spot dodging. Also you grab people out of their attacks and out of their shields. So jabs, for the most part, eliminate spot dodging as a defense and grabs utterly eliminate shielding as a defense. Since there are really (aside from proper spacing, which we'll get to later) just four main types of defensive maneuver, shield, spot-dodge, roll, and air-dodge (short hopped normally) removing one of them means that you've effectively eliminated 25% of your opponent's defensive options. Now, the Arial game is a different game entirely, but for now I'm just talking about the ground game.
Shielding:
Shielding is very effective against characters with disjointed hit boxes or attacks that linger about a bit. A good example is practically anything Game and Watch can throw at you. The turtle, ****ed thing it is, is one of the greatest attacks Brawl has to offer. It is very difficult to punish as it eats air-dodging, side-stepping, and rolling alive. But when it comes to shielding it's pretty weak. Everyone over on the G&W portion of the Smash Boards will talk your ear off about 'shield pressure' but I've become convinced none of them know what that means.
I play a game called Allegiance, and one of the major tenants of driving bombers in that game is that your shields are only a buffer so your repair ships can get oriented in combat. In Brawl, your shields are only a buffer so you can orient yourself and space out. Shielding is the best option available to you defensively, if you know your opponent isn't going to grab. It doesn't normally get you a free attack afterwards and you can't counter well unless you're perfect shielding (an application of shielding), but I promise that very few attacks will get through your shield, and most attacks that hit your shield will automatically space you.
What is this perfect shielding? Perfect shielding is timing the shield perfectly (duh) so that there's no damage and no knockback on your shield. It's why shielding is amazing. It's why shielding is the most important technique to know. Marth's shield breaker will eat shields alive, give you hit stun, and knock you back. But if you power shield, it does no knockback whatsoever, and deals no damage to your shield. All kinds of useful. Now perfect shielding isn't very applicable in some situations, like the aforementioned Turtle, because it only really works against the first hit. But it's **** funny to watch a fully charged shield breaker bounce off the shield and do nothing!
Shielding doesn't have many punishing options (bah, jump canceled shields, I guess...) because usually you're knocked back and spaced so that neither side will hurt the other. This is one of the awesomesauce perks of shielding. It's also sometimes annoying because again, Brawl is all about punishing. But there is one major punish available to those who are shielding... remember how I said that “jabs and grabs” are important to Brawl? Well, shielding lets your grab. Easily.
Imagine Lucario is coming in for some Dair nonsense. That move is such utter cheese and amazingness that it gives me headaches to think about it. I love using it and I hate playing against it. Fortunately for all of us facing off against lucarios, the idiots usually don't space it right. So they hit my shield and I grab 'em. Seeing as I normally main Falco, it ends up quite painful for them (dthrow to dac, dthrow to sutter step fsmash (works amazingly with prediction)) and not so much for me. So I've turned their attack, which is one of the greatest attacks in the game (and widely considered one of the best, if not the best, down air in the game), into a nice and easy 30-40%. On them.
Shielding is great, but not always applicable. It's a spacing tool, certainly, and has a great punishing option, but overall your opponent can always own a shield with a grab. This is why rolling exists. Rolling gives you some frames during which you can't be hit while you move a certain distance in whichever way you chose to roll. Hold the shield button and tap the joystick one direction or the other, and be amazed, as you have discovered what a great many new players never learn on their own! At least, not for a long time.
Rolling:
When I first played brawl, I was a very inexperienced melee and SSB64 player, but I'd learned how to roll in that time. My friends had owned the game for a week, and had been playing their hearts out. They had unlocked every character through playing enough matches against each other, to give you some indication as to how much they out-experienced me. I showed up with them weilding Metaknight, Wolf, Pikachu, Toon Link, and Marth like knives. These characters went on to be some of the best in the game.
My first time, well, I played a lot of Zelda back in Melee. I loved her magic (I also played Mewtwo, **** the tiers, I just had fun with those two :D Fox was my tourney character, not that I was any good) back in Melee, so I figured I'd try her again. I got used to the controls (we used classic controllers), and won the first game. Then we had an in-dorm-room tourney between the four of us. I played sheik, and remembered the two uber techs from Melee: rolling and air dodging. I was very pleasantly surprised the first time I airdodged... sure wavedashing was gone but I couldn't wavedash anyways. Rolling... rolling gave these guys fits. I didn't lose a game of Brawl for two months, despite not owning the game and their frantic and never-ceasing training to catch up to me. Yes, we were noobs and may very well still be noobs, but my point still holds: rolling is an effective defense.
There are characters that rolling just doesn't work against (lookin' at you, Game and Watch mains), but overall rolling is an amazing defensive option. It eats Link and other tether grab users alive (hahaha... Samus), and rolling into people who are tether grabbers can lead to free down smashes. You can roll away to retreat from a bad position (and retreating is NEVER a bad option) and you can often times roll forward to get into a good position (this is significantly more situational). When my friend and I are playing our Lucario and Falco games at our top levels, we do more roll spam than you'd normally see. Why? Because we're always rolling and walking trying to get into position for a grab. Granted, this anecdote doesn't make rolling powerful, but it's an example of it's application. You roll past a grab, and you're behind them, maybe in range for your own grab. If not, take a step forward and grab.
Rolling's greatest issue is that it's pretty easy to punish. Lucario's Dair owns rolling. Game and Watch's... very existence owns rolling. There is a certain type of attack that hoses rolling, and it's those attacks that tend to hit either an area, have a lingering hitbox, have range, start up lag, or hit both in front and behind the attacker. Whew, that leaves a lot of them, doesn't it? It sounds worse than it is though, because rolling's a good way to get out of jabs from characters not named Metaknight. Most tilts can't deal with rolling either (G&W's dtilt being the main exception, with a few others, like Marth's utilt), and smashes (except clearing moves, but even most of those can be avoided) are exceptionally hosed. Rolling is also almost foolproof when it comes to avoiding arials, especially stall and falls. Rolling's second greatest issue is that it's the hardest of your options to counter attack from. You usually end up just out of range (which is kinda the point), and have to move back into range before attacking, and the time it takes to do that usually clears the lag from whatever attack you were dodging.
Spot Dodging:
Rolling's ******* cousin is spot-dodging. While rolling takes you away from your opponent (or into your opponent, I guess) spot dodging is normally done when your opponent is in your face and trying to hit you. Most animations show the character leaning back and wagging their torso in their opponents face, an almost taunt that kind of says, “HAHA! MISSED ME!” Then you pop back up, and usually punch 'em in the face (if you're snake, that is). Spot-dodging is the answer to grabs. The answer. You try to grab me? Well I spot-dodge, and then grab right back! In the last tourney I went to, there was about a ten second moment with nothing but two players foiling each other's grab attempts with spot dodges. In the finals match. Spot-dodging has the same weaknesses as rolling, +1. Jab combos, which don't really match up well with most rolling, utterly own spot-dodging. My friend claims he can perfect spot-dodge Snake's jab combo, and surprise surprise, he hasn't done it yet. I main Falco, and my other friend is a notorious spot-dodge spammer. AAA(hold A) gets him every time because he tries to spot dodge, and then cries as he takes ten, fifteen percent. In exchange for this weakness, spot-dodging has much less lag than rolling does making it easier to punish from. It's good, very good. Use it.
The final of the major defensive maneuvers is air-dodging. Final not because it's the hardest to master (it's not, it's probably the easiest) or because it's the best (I think it might be the weakest defensive option available to you). Final because it has to be done in the air, which means that you're probably screwing up.
There are a lot of good applications for airdodging. Din's Fire should never, ever connect. Pit's arrows while you're off the stage? Hell, shading isn't quite what it was in Melee but is still a great technique, especially since you can autocancel into a tilt or smash. That being said, airdodging can't handle hitboxes that linger, such as the infamous turtle. You'll dodge the first, maybe second and third attacks but you'll get hit in the end. Admittedly if they're coming at you with a turtle and it's your only option, then airdodge to take less damage. But as good as air dodging is, it won't save you from your own spacing mistakes in the same way rolling away and shielding can. If you outrange your opponent with your arials, or out prioritize, screw airdodging (most of the time). Still, chances are Marth's fair out ranges and out prioritizes you, and in fact Marth's fair is one of the greatest examples of how airdodging can and should be used.
General Defensive Theory:
So there we have it, the four main defensive maneuvers. Now, when to use them? Well we've all screwed up our spacing before. Even Ken screwed up his spacing in Melee on occasion, it happens. You may find yourself in the following situation: somehow Game and Watch is right next to you. Who cares how you got there? It happens to the best smashers from time to time. Well, what do you think GW is going to do? One of his smashes is pretty sure to come out. If it's the usmash you can pretty easily roll away, but any other smash stands a good chance to eat your roll alive. As an example, rolling away from this situation as Pit puts you right in the sweetspot of his downsmash. Spot dodging works fine against the upsmash if you're good with timing, but the match will still hit (though it won't be nearly as powerful) and I'm fairly sure the dsmash will hit as well. Shading will leave you hit by the fsmash and the usmash. Shielding will leave you hit by none, and you'll be pushed away. Now you can roll out and be perfectly safe!
Each of your defensive options has its time and its place. The thing about brawl: the game creators don't give us moves with zero application. Some, like Ganondorf's utilt and b (wow, no wonder he's low tier!) have almost no application, but they do usually have some application. The defensive options are no different. If you're playing a character with mediocre grabs (Sheik, for instance) you'll want to roll out of grabs, if you're against someone who's attacks can be easily punished (DK or Ganondorf) you'll want to spot dodge, and if you're against Game and Watch you'll want to shield. Learning the time and place to defend is what separates those who can actually win matches at the competitive level from those who get three stocked. My friend went into a GW ditto and shielded very rarely, mostly using rolls and spot dodges. He got horrifically owned the first match. I told him to shield more, he listened, and in the second match lost by a handful of percent on the final stock (different than the easy two stock that had occurred on the first match). All I did was outline the defensive options every character bar none has. Sure, Pit's got his shield, the Spacies have their reflectors, Mario's got a cape, and a handful of characters have counters, but these four are the moves every character has.
Make sure to learn the range of your character's roll. Make sure you learn the time on their spot dodge (I'm pretty sure they're not the same). Make sure you memorize how long you can take shield damage, and have a good general idea of how much shield you have left as well as how much you can afford to lose, how much each attack will do to the shield, and how long before your shield recharges.
Spacing:
“Wait,” you say, “You're a scrub! How can you say there's only four defensive maneuvers?” No, there's a fifth. It's called 'spacing' and is by far the most reliable of the defensive options available to you. But spacing is an entire thesis unto its own, and is so very different for every matchup. Your shield is constant. It'll take the same amount of damage for each character.
The theory behind spacing is that you're at the place that a) maximizes your damage and b) minimizes your opponent's damage. In Brawl, b is far more important than a. It is always always ALWAYS better to give your opponent 1% and to take 0% than to give your opponent 5% and take 3%. That being said, perfect spacing (by this definition) is the place where you take no damage and your opponent takes damage. Hence, Pit has the easiest spacing game of any character in Brawl: he can essentially always damage you with proper arrow control.
Clearly Pit isn't the best character in the game though, and that's because long distance spacing (camping) is owned by another type of spacing known as approaching. In fact, all movements you make should be a type of spacing. If you aren't specifically choosing how close you are to someone then you're screwing up.
Example: Pit is camping you, and you're playing Marth. Pit has a super advantage at this range because Marth lacks projectiles, and Pit has one of the game's best projectiles. You are losing this spacing game, because Pit has spaced you into a situation where you cannot do damage. So you move forward (shading, shielding, rolling, whatever) to get in tipper range. Now you're perfectly spaced, and pit is not (because you've maximized damage, and Pit can't reach you). Pit will now space in response, probably moving closer (since he's up against a wall in this example) to get inside your tip range. As he moves closer to you, your damage potential lowers and his rises, meaning that your spacing has become worse. Now he's next to you and his quicker speed means he's going to hit you before you hit him. Pit now has great spacing on you because your damage is minimized while his is maximized, but not perfect spacing because you can still deal damage to him. In response to this, you space by increasing the distance between you two, and in all this moving you and pit are desperately trying to get damage and hit stun to space and set up for a kill while at the same time doing all the shielding, rolling, spot dodging, and air dodging necessary to avoid getting hit.
Many people take 'spacing' to mean 'moving.' This is, quite simply, a very flawed mentality, and one that loses games. Every attack you have spaces to some degree or another, with a couple exceptions. Some space so much that you knock your opponent off the ledge and into the side wall, koing them. Others have no spacing at all, of which the best example is Fox's laser. When playing Marth, I use his jab as a spacing tool as it tends to push them into tip range for the next jab, and then out of range so I can approach. With only a few exceptions, moving is the only way to decrease the space between two players. Notable exceptions are some tether grabs and the returning of Link's boomerang, as well as some tricky explosion applications.
Another aspect of spacing that gets lost in the translation is two dimensional spacing. Lots of people work their spacing in terms of left and right, and that's fair because it's impossible to maintain good y-axis spacing (thanks to gravity). But even if just for a moment, you can get out of range of attacks by using all that expanse of the stage that's above the floor. In fact, if there's platforms, y-axis spacing is an amazing tool, and why characters like Marth, Snake, and Metaknight do so well on the stages like Battlefield: they destroy y-axis spacing.
Conclusion
To summarize: Brawl is mostly about dealing significantly more damage than you take. To win a game of brawl your opponent will have to deal damage to you at some point, which means if you can avoid damage for the whole game you will win the game. Avoiding damage is done through application of spot dodging, rolling, air dodging, and shielding, as well as being careful in your spacing. The player with the better spacing will probably win the match.
This is how I interpret the Brawl competitive scene, discuss! Please point out things I may have missed/mistakes I may have made, as I'll be a better player for it.
Also: go read cwjalex's thread, cause that thing is all kinds of awesome.
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