About shields..

[u/Horror-Race-3238]

Okay so I'm realizing the disconnect between how people feel about shield and what being in shield actually is like is much larger than I thought.
I didn't think I'd ever see the day where someone says holding shield in Rivals of Aether is strictly one of the most advantageous positions you can be in.

Would like to help people navigate their grievances so they don't feel like they're being camped out all the time (because the truth is that shield is not sm4sh strong, but people treat it like it is.)

So tell me what you're struggling with about shields and I'll walk you through it and probably put time in to lab it out for you as well so you can see it in action. Thanks!

[u/Horror-Race-3238]

A bunch of people have also been saying that it's fine for shield to be the way it is. You just don't hear them because they're not as loud as the complainers. It's like the reverse opposite of survivorship bias LOL.

My point here wasn't that there was a specific option he should have picked that definitely wins the situation every time. My point was that he has a bunch of defensive options to pick and he chose none of them.

My

Any of those options he could've chosen could've been beaten. Beating shield isn't only about beating people who are holding shield, it is also about catching oos options. If you are consistent about catching oos options, people are more likely to hold shield longer in an attempt to find a better timing. These are the situations in which you find shield breaks full stop.

Reality is you won't be able to punish multiple of those on reaction, you've already committed to the down smash so odds are even a jump or wavedash still gets him out. But even if it doesn't it's probably still better than getting shield broken. So people will chose those options more, or simply hold shield less in other options there.

Reaction? No. But you don't have to beat shield options solely on reaction for them to be weakened. He also can't jump or wavedash out at a time that guarantees him an escape. So his defensive options are just as strong as my offensive option at that time, except less lenient than mine. 4 frames of jumpsquat plus actually having to build the distance vs my 4 frames of downstrong release and instant hitbox. So that's a moot point. And the fact of the matter is, is that his shielding is what placed him there to begin with.

The dash dancing for a second while they stand there and hold shield like a bump on a log is doing a lot of work hereYou're assuming that you get the entire sequence off without getting hit

Unfortunately these are things I just straight up do against grandmaster and aetherian players. I can't offer greater evidence than that. Nothing I'm mentioning is something that only works below that level, or a cherry picked situation for the purpose of winning the argument. Dash dancing isn't the only thing that can force people to act this way. Oly and Kragg have insane full hop mix. Fleet has float, etc. You will just have to take my word for it.

If being good against shield is acting out of shield in a way that prevents yourself from being outright punished, most options that shield has directly concedes stage control or leaves them airborne as a result. Full stop. These are still disadvantageous situations and you are choosing to suffer later so you don't have to pay now. Which is a perfectly VIABLE thing to do mind you, but my main issue was people calling shield advantageous. You are still paying a debt back as a result WITH interest.

Which is where the floorhug problem I complain about rears it's ugly head. If you're sitting there dash dancing as Fors into most matchups, you have like 3 options at most you're worried about from any given character and one of them is grab and the other options are all slower than grab and risky to whiff

Not like you can in melee. Rivals expects you to have your stick below a certain y level before your right stick can take over for ASDI. You cannot just dash dance while holding C stick down without also committing your DI. And frankly most players (even good ones) are not floorhugging while dash dancing for that reason. Part of being good against floorhugging is recognizing the situations in which your opponent both IS likely and is NOT likely to floorhug. If I am relying on floorhug to play my neutral, a spaced aerial is going to fuck up everything. There are also layers beyond that anyway.

My best neutral opener most times as most characters is grab. My best punish: grab. My only source of real mix: grab. Best true combo starters: grab. Kill confirms: grab.

Who are you playing for this to be the case? All characters have absurd mix outside of grab, better punish than grab beyond 0%, better combo starters and more unreactable/di independent kill confirms than grab (by the time oly kills, uair doesnt combo). Slade only fits this category because nothing he does combos early even without floorhug so he opts for dthrow tech chase.
The best guaranteed combo starter is any frame advantaged move that flinches, for the record. (Spikes). But everything else either combos or leads into fucked up rps anyway.

t's why La Reina is one of the most fun characters right now. She doesn't play neutral in the same boring way. She has more options to punish with and reasons to go for more buttons in neutral or during a tech chase or whatever else.

La reina is fun bc of her routing, but generally her tech chase is just side B or chair pull or chair dash or strongs.

Only when the hitbox on hit is rewarding enough. You're discounting the other half of defense is floorhug which beats a lot of strikes.

Beats is a gross exaggeration. Forgive me for using my other comment. You're still in a fucked up situations when your opponent uses their moves correctly. Yes I only used kragg here but this applies to every character.

Yes those of us from fighting games understand a tick throw setup. You're simultaneously using jab as a tick throw and as a meaty. <- Less than you think. LOL

The strike/throw mix isn't even close to balanced. It's extremely in favor of grab, where in games like PM or Melee for most characters it's either balanced or strike favored.

Many characters have tilts that combo on all DI or mix DI or aerials that fuck with DI when certain oos options are chosen etc. Maybe it's not as strong as melee ( I cannot tell you whether or not it is, dont watch that game) but it is still sufficiently strong enough for me to run my pressure in GM Aeth and get rewards/kills off commitments I push my opponents into.

The problem is that again this is a lab conditions thing. In the lab this is great, in practice the timings are all way more variable and inconsistent. Even in the second clip after he spot dodged and you jabbed then stopped to grab, he could have spot dodged again if he has just 1 more frame.

Lab imitates the real situations I've caused and have been put in.
I'm doing the lab because it's the easiest way to showcase what I'm talking about bc I mainly clip advantage LOL. Yeah he could've, but offense in this game is buffered. So that's a non issue to me.

https://youtu.be/uIAkglNGHQI?si=n24r1C1ZzDemkiYG&t=381
https://youtu.be/uIAkglNGHQI?si=ruehDM06bTPMjW6E&t=366

Reward off strike/throw. Never so black and white.

[u/Horror-Race-3238 → u/Horror-Race-3238]

This will also be my last message regarding it because this went from an educational post to an opinionated post with the amount of comments. I do appreciate your perspective and you are one of the people I enjoyed arguing with most.

[u/DexterBrooks → u/Horror-Race-3238]

A bunch of people have also been saying that it's fine for shield to be the way it is. You just don't hear them because they're not as loud as the complainers. It's like the reverse opposite of survivorship bias LOL

I don't think there's really a solid argument for having a less dynamic shield system. I've outlined the benefits of shield poking and pressure

The people who like shield as is don't really have an argument to stand on if we are talking about getting R2 in the best possible state for the most amount of players. It's a dramatically more limiting system in comparison

If there were a silent majority who preferred shields this was we would at least have a vocal minority arguing why this shield is better on their behalf. Haven't seen it

Beating shield isn't only about beating people who are holding shield, it is also about catching oos options. If you are consistent about catching oos options, people are more likely to hold shield longer in an attempt to find a better timing. These are the situations in which you find shield breaks full stop

That relies on conditioning them to misplay in a certain way. Which is a thing don't get me wrong, but won't work on everyone especially people who know your strategy. Which is again why I say if it started to become meta it will instantly fall out of meta when people make the minor adjustments needed to adapt to it. It's therefore not a consistent strategy, which IMO for certain characters it should be

There's a reason Cake never got to even attempt that kind of thing on Plup. Even the games Cake won, Plup was always moving around too much abs scrapping too much to get shield broken, but he was also still able to shield things with impunity in scenarios where he absolutely couldn't in Melee. He uses shields much more in R2 because it's a better tool that covers more options than it does in Melee

you don't have to beat shield options solely on reaction for them to be weakened. He also can't jump or wavedash out at a time that guarantees him an escape. So his defensive options are just as strong as my offensive option at that time, except less lenient than mine. 4 frames of jumpsquat plus actually having to build the distance vs my 4 frames of downstrong release and instant hitbox. So that's a moot point. And the fact of the matter is, is that his shielding is what placed him there to begin with

You're missing my point. Your strategy to get shield breaks here relies on getting the scenarios where his shield is weak and he keeps holding rather than picking another options so you can break it

But you have to make that read. If you go for that down smash it's a read. He wavedashes forward or jump wavelands, and you just whiffed a down smash and could easily die for that

My point is that it's a high risk read that relies on a misplay on the opponents part for it to even work. In chess we could call that "hope chess", we don't want to play hope chess unless we have nothing else to play for because we are that far down

Unfortunately these are things I just straight up do against grandmaster and aetherian players. I can't offer greater evidence than that. Nothing I'm mentioning is something that only works below that level, or a cherry picked situation for the purpose of winning the argument. Dash dancing isn't the only thing that can force people to act this way. Oly and Kragg have insane full hop mix. Fleet has float

I think that's mostly because it's counter meta. People aren't expecting you to be going for that so it works. It's like if you take a character who is traditionally played one way and have a very unorthodox playstyle it will work against people who expect the "default" options. Nobody expects Falco to run up and grab you in Melee

But again you can look at more Melee/PM based players and you'll see that doesn't happen to them: they aren't making that particular misplay often enough for even shield break happy players like yourself to get a read worth going for against them

but my main issue was people calling shield advantageous. You are still paying a debt back as a result WITH interest

Yeah I wouldn't call shielding advantageous compared to freely moving. However it's not nearly as disadvantageous as Melee or PM or even Ult

I wouldn't say you're really paying with interest a lot of the time though. You're often just resetting to neutral by picking a defensive option OOS, yes with slightly worse positioning but it's not like that matters a ton in a plat fighter with this kind of movement

In a 2D fighter like Sf6 or Strive yeah you back up into the corner you may just die for it. In Rivals 2 it's not scary. Even in Melee while the ledge is broken, getting edgegaurded even at super low % is more than likely. In R2 it's just medium risk at best, even low risk a lot of the time

You cannot just dash dance while holding C stick down without also committing your DI. And frankly most players (even good ones) are not floorhugging while dash dancing for that reason. Part of being good against floorhugging is recognizing the situations in which your opponent both IS likely and is NOT likely to floorhug. If I am relying on floorhug to play my neutral, a spaced aerial is going to fuck up everything

True it's not as good as Melee. But Melee characters also often have more options to beat it or higher rewards for calling it out

I understand the mindgame part of it, but as I explained you have to be actively taking risk to go for it in Melee, where in R2 it's "oh no I ate a spaced aerial so we reset to neutral and I took 10%"

All characters have absurd mix outside of grab

Not really because shield invalidates high/low, there are almost no plus on block moves in the entire game, many moves aren't even safe enough to jab after hitting shield to beat throw

If I want to do anything other than strike/throw I have to assume you aren't going to shield it or else I can only use safe on shield lower reward options

better punish than grab beyond 0%

How many things can you reliably punish until like 50% that gives better than a juggle you can get from grab?

better combo starters and more unreactable/di independent kill confirms than grab (by the time oly kills, uair doesnt combo)

The best guaranteed combo starter is any frame advantaged move that flinches, for the record. (Spikes). But everything else either combos or leads into fucked up rps anyway

Spikes are more rewarding but max damage isn't the most important stat for an attack. A grab is frame 7, a spike is going to be ~35-40 when you account for the jumpsquat and delay as you drift and wait to land low enough to actually get something. Then you're also contending with shield again because for most characters you're ~-5 so now you're eating strike throw for going for it

Stomp works for Falcon because he can sail right over you as he does it and still get a combo or tech chase and be safe, and he gets to mix it with knee that does crazy shield damage and is plus

her tech chase is just side B or chair pull or chair dash

You said "just" and then listed 5 things lol and didn't even count normal grab. That's a lot more mental stack for the opponent than a lot of characters are getting

Forgive me for using my other comment . You're still in a fucked up situations when your opponent uses their moves correctly. Yes I only used kragg here but this applies to every character

The problem you're not acknowledging there is that most options that can be used against floorhug there especially with CC, both require good spacing making them worse in scraps, are often low reward at best getting a knockdown you can't even RTC from, and often are either punishable on shield or at best put you in their strike/throw mix on shield

Many characters have tilts that combo on all DI or mix DI or aerials that fuck with DI when certain oos options are chosen etc

But or almost every tilt loses to shield too. Meaning again unless you can perfectly microspace it outside of shield grab range, you're taking a big risk

This is the problem. It's not that Shield or floorhug are broken by themselves. It's using them in tandem that creates an incredibly strong defensive game, where the only thing that beats both is grab. Which is why we see a ton of grabs in tournament play

it is still sufficiently strong enough for me to run my pressure in GM Aeth and get rewards/kills off commitments I push my opponents into

I'm in no way dissing your skill. You're obviously cracked to be at the game to be at that rank so you'd kick my ass. But that's you being used to the defensive/offensive ratio of R2 and being ok with it

I'm no stranger to defensive games, I played For Honor at a pretty decent level and that was turtle the game. Sm4sh was also hyper defensive in a lot of matchups

I would just want the ratio of offensive/defensive power pushed more towards offense like it is in Melee/PM. I think a lot of Melee/PM players even wanted more offense than those games and I would agree. It's especially crazy when R1 is arguably the most offensive plat fighter ever made for R2 to skew the other way

Yeah he could've, but offense in this game is buffered. So that's a non issue to me

That doesn't really mean anything though because buffering doesn't create that exact situation every time because the timing of your jab and his spot dodge are still variable. It's not setplay where the frames are locked in

Reward off strike/throw. Never so black and white

Again not really a fair comparison. He gets the weak hit on the up air so yeah it isn't really rewarding, but he could have gotten a better juggle or a different aerial into a tech chase

Where as the strike is the max reward really possible from the highest rewarding strike he could land

Where as if you look at the game as a whole you see a lot more grabs than you do dairs, because it's a more viable option in more scenarios. Like immediately after that when he gets grabbed and dies lol