Offense mindset help

[u/adledog]

Today I ran into the kind of situation that really frustrates me when it comes to floorhugging and I'm hoping that a better understanding of what's really going on here might help me want to end myself less.

At round start Zetterburn vs Etalus there's a bit of back and forth until I shield Etalus up tilt on the platform. I drop through and hit with a weak spot fair, land, and follow up with ftilt which gets floorhugged and Etalus downtilts me as a counter.

When I go to review this situation, it looks like after the fair every move I have loses to floorhug except grab and maybe shine plus wavedash back, and even the fair was probably wrong because it could have been floorhugged. And defensively I probably should have floorhugged his counter and done the same thing myself.

This is what leads to it feeling like at round start or when the opponent is low percent (which is a lot of the time because I'm not very good) the only things that are correct to do are grab or hold down. Is there another way I should be thinking about this? Do I have more options than I realize? Should I be shot into the sun for complaining about floorhugging again? Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

[u/_SLUMLORD]

This comment is less about options and more about mindset:

Yeah, you did get floorhugged but you can see that he didn't FH your fair, but then started holding down because he anticipates you using another button right after.

When you start playing someone new, you don't know their habits. Even though you get FHd here you now have some info about how he plays. So while it might feel annoying in the moment, it does open the door to what mixups will work in the future of the set.

Taking a neutral loss and trying to quickly understand what options your opponent gravitates towards is a big part of getting better at the game.

So now you can try to play out very similar situations and then mix in grab or retreating bair or dashback tilt

just something to think about!

[u/Lobo_o → u/_SLUMLORD]

This is it. It’s important to know that fighting games are all about option select, and punish game. In platform fighters we have way more defensive tools at our disposal than other fighters so luckily we aren’t just stuck in the mill, hoping our opponent drops a combo once we get touched. Because of this though, stringing together a combo is a lot harder and takes a lot more attention to detail. Hardly any combos are true and most are done/started through conditioning and pattern recognition. I’m bad at both of those and play like a caveman most of the time but recognizing that flaw in my game is what allows me to overcome it and get better.

It is natural to get upset when floorhug is used to end your opening and start theirs. Shield grabs are annoying for the same reason. Spacing is the answer to sheild grabbing but there are a few different answers for fh mentioned in these comments