Options

[Humpy Thrashabout]

In the MK ban discussion I heard lots of talk about options and comparisons of who has the best in any given situation. I tried taking this type of paradigm to my game and I feel like it's helped tremendously in being a thinking player as opposed to a reactionary player. I feel like we could all benefit from thinking about options in situations you encounter. If no one else minds I think a weekly discussion on a situation would be helpful.

So to start things off with an easy situation: A free hit.

Imagine a situation which gives you a free hit on your opponent. A shield breaks or your opponent performs a very laggy move. What do you do? What if they aren't in kill percent? What if you aren't completely sure they are in kill percent.

Do you charge a forwardsmash? Maybe a downsmash?
Risk wasting a half-waft?

EDIT:
Discussion #1: Shield Breaks
A fully charged forward smash on all accounts is a good option. Deals 27 damage and has incredible knockback.
A fully charged down smash is useful on characters with weak horizontal recovery. Olimar or ICs.
If you are feeling fancy you could autowipe the bike on the edge for massive damage. Throw the bike and forward smash in the hitstun. Omega Black Mage offered this gem:

autowipe bike, pick-up and walk to within grab range of opponent
throw bike straight up
grab -> dthrow
bike hits them back out infront of you
grab -> dthrow
bike hits them again
after your throw start charging an fsmash and hit them out of the bike hit...

shouldn't this do like 60 damage? its probably possible to smash di out of this. oh and if you have a full fart it might actually do close to 100 damage.

 

[PhantomX]

If they aren't at kill percent or I'm unsure I'd charge a Fsmash for the 27%+ If I'm certain they'll die and I have it available, I'd go for the half waft, after triple taunting, of course.

 

[Browny]

those arent the same sort of options they were referring to... just coz DK has 10 ways to kill you <100 doesnt mean he has a lot of options

its more like, say you are near the ledge of the stage and snake is walking towards you, ready to ftilt. if you shield the ftilt, its going to knock you on the ledge where snake can cause serious damage. what options to you have to prevent this from happening? good characters like MK have multiple options from upb, tornado, d/ftilt, fall off the stage and go to the other ledge or even cape behind snake. All have the potential to escape the bad situation and damage him. character with limited options who cant jump high quickly, or can not contend with the range of ftilt might be limited to only roll dodging away. when your only option is to roll dodge into snake, you can see why having a lot of options is a good thing :/

 

[Humpy Thrashabout]

I understand the idea of options, but some of the more complicated stuff is character specific. I figured we could just start with an easy situation. One where the opponent doesn't have any sort of counter-measure. Eventually I was hoping this could work with the match-up discussions to give more specific advice against a certain character.
Stuff like OoS options and recovery options would be easy to discuss. If we were to talk about snake specifically then we could fill pages and pages, something the match-up thread is supposed to do. I'm just hoping to bring more attention to this line of thought.

Or maybe I'm being silly and over thinking.

 

[PhantomX]

You're welcome to give it a shot, Humpy. If it fails, it fails, but we never know how a thread will go until we've tried it.

 

[Padô]

Depending on character I'd charg DSmash in characters like Olimar or IC's
On DDD probably Full Hop Dair than Clap...

As PX said, you wont know If you don't give it a shot

 

[Humpy Thrashabout]

What kind of numbers can you hope for if you get into this situation? A full waft would give you 42, PX said a fully charged Fsmash gives 27+.

Are there any good setups you could force an opponent into? Maybe an autowipe and throw the bike on them? Anyone familiar with how much damage that does or if you can get them in the hitstun with a forward smash? Is any of this worth the risk?

Sorry if I'm asking a lot of questions, I just want to be thorough. Feel free to give reason why you think a certain option is dumb or provide some numbers if you can.

 

[Masky]

..........

 

[omegablackmage]

how about this fearsome combo:

autowipe bike, pick-up and walk to within grab range of opponent
throw bike straight up
grab -> dthrow
bike hits them back out infront of you
grab -> dthrow
bike hits them again
after your throw start charging an fsmash and hit them out of the bike hit...

shouldn't this do like 60 damage? its probably possible to smash di out of this. oh and if you have a full fart it might actually do close to 100 damage.

 

[PhantomX]

They can SDI out of it, but you could still get in a solid hit or two with it. It's probably viable if you upthrow next to them and then dthrow them into the bike though.

I very rarely ever get shieldbreaks with Wario though, unfortunately.

 

[omegablackmage]

agreed px, i don't think i've gotten one either. Multihitting chars tend to only get tons of shield pokes, no breaks, same fate for gw. My dk however, tons of breaks ha ha.

As far as sdi'ing that combo, if you grabbed them and dthrew them into the bike so that they would only be getting hit by the very front of the bike, then they wouldn't be able to sdi out to the other side... i'd have to play around with it more. Also i think they are on the ground after the dthrow (standing) so they would only slide across to you, meaning no up sdi either. Its entirely possible this is a legit combo, but like i said more testing needed... and its incredibly rare to break shields.

 

[Humpy Thrashabout]

I've noticed something when throwing the bike. It seems that if you are standing next to a taller character and you face away from them as you throw it hits on the way up. I'm not sure if that's helpful for anything, but I thought it would be worth mentioning.
OBM that combo sounds excellent. That might be possible to pull off in teams.
Ok, so shield break is kind of tough to do. It probably wouldn't happen in a higher level match. So that was a pretty straight forward issue. If no one objects maybe we can move on?

A thing I have trouble with is Wario's recovery. It's absolutely phenomenal. Unfortunately I seem to be pretty predictable and often take damage before I can recover my jumps.
What kind of recovery options do we have? We seem to have quite a few, but what are the best ways to mix it up and what are the safest ways? Obviously there are certain characters you don't want to recovery in a certain way, but generalizations will do.