Shield drop: Difference between revisions

This is exceptionally useful in melee for a few reasons: First, a general lack of buffering on defense, meaning every option requires immense precision or commitment to get guaranteed punishes. Because shield dropping is bufferable, you can retaliate extremely fast consistently. (Outside of shield dropping, if you do stuff too early it eats your inputs as opposed to ultimate, where it will wait and do them on the first possible frame)Second, its very useful to mix up movement considering the multitude of strong juggling options many melee characters have. And finally, the relative speed of shield dropping compared to other ways of leaving the platform is non-committal generally.(its much more precise and fast, as opposed to wavedashing and fullhopping off a platform.) A common strategy is to go for many full hop reads on opponents who are cornered, and if they retaliate too slowly, you can get a very fast shield drop aerial and convert into big damage. Its almost* similar to being able to crouch cancel after an aerial, but on a platform.

This "window" is made considerably easier to hit using the Axe/Sung method, wherein you fully angle shield left or right(after doing an aerial/waveland onto a platform, or by slowly tilting it manually), then rotate the stick downward to the next notch(From full left to down-left, or full right to down-right.) Because of the alignment of the diagonal notch being generally close to this range of values, this can allow you to quickly buffer shield drops with one control stick input out of shield stun without accidentally spot dodging.(which is what you will often see if people mess up their shield drops.)

Because the margin of error for getting a successful shield drop is limited to ONLY three Y axis values, Shield dropping is frequently very controller dependent. Many modern official gamecube controllers are able to do it to the left out of the box but not the right.

While this would normally cause a huge issue of fairness considering the importance of this tech, many melee players modify their controllers temporarily and permanently to have a control stick gate that aligns with these values on both sides. These are called "shield drop notches" and are generally pretty simple to do with modern tools. If not, there are many controller modders around who are able to do this for you, and it can be relatively cheap. The simpler and easier alternative, the temporary solution- is to use small cut pieces of tape on your control stick gate, to "pad" the corner enough that your stick hits the necessary values.