Slade's Pirate Hook upgrade is an active detriment out-of-shield#648

The hook is the only item that is a major downside in a lot of scenarios, since slowing down your shieldgrab by five frames makes a lot of unsafe attacks suddenly unpunishable. Slade still has frame-7 shorthop NAir which can lead to a lot, but it loses to floorhug and shield.
It feels strange to me that a character clearly intended to have strong out-of-shield options (NAir, grounded glidetoss, Up-Special, and good throws) can sabotage one of the most important ones with an upgrade.

I’d love to see Pirate Hook get the same treatment as Earth Earring, allowing you to hold shield during it to perform a normal grab instead, adding some more skill expression in choosing whether to go for the longer-ranged and longer-lasting grab or the one that comes out faster with less endlag if you do whiff, and preventing it from actively sabotaging his shieldgrab.

Hold shield is kind of an odd option for it especially given how common holding shield during shield grab would be. I don’t know if there could be some other option hold vs tap grab. Definately feels bad to pickup hook and weaken such an important OoS option in many scenarios.

That was a bit of a concern of mine at first, but I thought about it a bit more and I think it’d be fine? I usually let go of shield when I shieldgrab anyway tbh, I think having to do that to get the longer-ranged hook wouldn’t be too bad, and holding it to get the quicker grab that’s better at catching an opponent right on top of you feels intuitive to me. It also would keep it consistent with every other cancellable move in the game.

you could make it so the shield grab macro is normal grab (shield+special) and the deticated shield button is the hook. or at least make that a setting if people want it that way.

The smash mod hdr’s solution for this was to have tether grabs be on dash attack while standing grab is the normal grab. For Slade that means the hook would remove his dash grab still and then all hook grabs would be dash grabs, but it could be made around that

there is another post that mentioned that shield+strong currently does nothing. so maybe shield +b = normal grab and shield + strong = hook?