Floor/late wall teching is inconsistent#880

This is something that has been a problem for the game’s entire lifespan and for the life of me I can’t figure out why it has never been addressed.

Why are we not able to buffer techs while in hitstop?

“Oh it’s just a skill issue, just get better, stop whining.”
First of all, this is something that’s already bad locally, but is exacerbated online, where most of this game’s matches actually take place. The window is tight and can’t be buffered around or option selected, unlike wallhug techs, which are their own can of worms. Any sort of variance in how long it takes for the input to be recognized (presuming it gets recognized at all, which it often doesn’t) makes it a gamble, and I don’t like gambling in a game that’s supposed to be about skill (or something (probably)).

Why is this a problem? It’s because it breaks the rules of teching. The way the mechanic is generally laid out is that you press the button, and if you reach an instance when you can tech within the next 20 frames, you get the tech. If that doesn’t happen, you’re locked out for 20 more frames (which is better than Melee’s 30, thank you for that). But here comes the arbitrary “no teching while in hitstop” rule to screw up how the input is done. If you’re in hitstop, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s normal hitstop or tipstun or whatever stupid bullsh!t gets added next to further convolute things, hitting the tech button even one frame early lands you in that 20 frame lockout window.

That’s the problem. This completely arbirary restriction turns a 20 frame buffer window into, depending on the space between your character and the ground/wall, a frame perfect input window. Being even one frame early means that you get locked out, whereas in most situations, you’re allowed to be up to 20 frames early. That’s means your lockout leniency goes from a full 3rd of a second to a 60th, and, furthermore, there’s no good indication of why this is the case or whether you’ve even triggered it. You just hit the shield button kinda roughly near the end of hitstop, and you pray it worked.

Fixing this is stupidly simple, provided the game is programmed well. If you press the shield button in hitstop, then it gets buffered for 20 frames. Tick down while still in hitstop, and follow the normal rules. There. Now you can actually buffer the bufferable option, and it works consistently with all other instances of the mechanic. Easy! It’ll never be done of course, because of “skill expression” or some other of the usual excuses people make for bad design in these games, but it would be so easy.

Why are we not able to buffer techs while in hitstop

Allowing to buffer techs in hitpause will make them reactive instead of preemtive and will remove many timing mixups for tech baits.

Teching isn’t gamble, it’s a decision you have control over. If you know there’s no attack that will kill you rn except a strong, you can delay your tech to tech a later strong attack, but will be prone to being comboed with a tilt. If even a tilt can kill you, then it’s a guess for when to input tech to survive.

I can agree about “gambling” on multihits tho. If you wanna tech a multihit, you have to fit your shield input in a microscopic window between hits (Clairen Nair with 1f gaps for example) and this isn’t a guess but just a chance and i don’t like it and want it to be addressed

@weaselsnore #MinaForRivals2 You’re adding context that doesn’t need to be there. Reread if you don’t understand.

Did i understand you correctly:
Imagine a situation when you’re grounded and in lag (UpB recovery) and is about to be hit with Olympia Dtilt.
To tech it, you need to press shield before the hit connects. Do you expect to also be able to input tech AFTER hitpause (in the current game)? If so, it doesn’t work like that. Tech input has to be preemptive to hitpause.

Or maybe you’re talking about situations when you’re in the air and already in hitpause with no tech buffered and there’s only a few frames before you collide with the floor to tech the hit? If so, i understand why this can be frustrating (it’s similar to multihits) and maybe it’s worth taking a look at

You got it right with the second one. I’m not talking about amsah techs or wallhug techs–the window to tech during hitstop is too narrow to be reactive anyway, and you’ll already have moved away from the floor or wall after hitstop expires, so teching afterward doesn’t make sense at all.

I’m talking about cases where you get hit and there’s a narrow window between when you exit hitstop and when you collide with the floor or a wall. Think about getting hit by a spike in the air. You press shield a single frame before hitstop ends, and you get locked out, which defeats the purpose of teching being bufferable in the first place. In practice this means a non-negligible number of casss where you react to an offstage spike with DI and a tech press, and you don’t get the tech because you hit the button just slightly too early. This especially applies to tipstun since it increases the hitstop window.

You can actually feel check this in the tutorials and see how different and weird it feels compared to normal floor teching out of tumble, which gives you the full buffer window.

I have felt this way for a long time. The “hole” in the tech window is so weird to me. Getting rid of it should be a no-brainer.

The devs removing the ability to tech while in hitpause was always a bit of a bandaid fix honestly. I dont blame the devs for it, but I feel that there must have been other avenues to explore for nerfing wall techs

walltech can be done in hitpause. You just have to preemptively hold towards the wall if it’s a medium hitstun

Yeah, wall techs were regardless their main point of focus when they made the change, tho

There’s a difference between wall techs (techs against a wall after being launched) and wallhug techs (techs against a wall during hitstop, bufferable before hitstop). The latter is currently fine, the former is not.

I completely agree with this for the exact reasons you specified, though I think my implementation of how I’d adjust it varies slightly. I’ll put them in since it might be a good idea to bounce ideas around.

So, just like you suggested, I’d make it so ‘regular’ teching, i.e. getting slammed into a wall/floor, could be performed before, during, or after hitstop, as long as you pressed Shield 20 frames before hitting the wall. The execution for that should be very lenient.

However, for wallhug techs (and floorhug techs? idk), I’d make it so those could only be performed ONLY before hitstop. In the past, wallhug techs being possible during hitstop did make everyone’s recovery power way too strong, so I’d say the execution of that, at the least, should be as difficult as it is right now. And that implementation wouldn’t leave an arbitrary ‘hole’ where your tech inputs are useless (you just have to be early on the draw), so the implementation should be reasonable given the historical context of teching in this game.

With this idea, here’s how the following situations would play out:

• Far from the wall, launched towards the wall: Pressing Shield before, during, or after hitstop will allow you to regular tech.
• Touching the wall, launched towards the wall: Pressing Shield before hitstop gives you a wallhug tech. Pressing Shield during hitstop gives you a regular tech. Pressing Shield after hitstop is too late, of course.
• Touching the wall, launched away from the wall: Pressing Shield before hitstop gives you a wallhug tech. Any other timing you just get launched.

Of course, in all situations, the Shield button still must be pressed within 20 frames of getting hit into the wall, as usual. And all of these ideas could translate to teching on floors and floorhug techs, of course.

At the end of the day, yes, it’s very frustrating when you get hit by a move two inches away from the wall, or a spike two inches above the ground, or if you’re being smushed up against a wall by certain multi-hits, and there’s just. Not much you can do about it outside of pressing Shield incredibly early and with a visceral amount of foresight. And all of that aside, even if ‘not being able to tech during hitstop’ isn’t the worst game mechanic in the world, it just has bad gamefeel, and so I do hope it gets addressed at some point down the line.