Nerf Perfect Shields#879

Everyone complains about shielding in this game and honestly, I see shields as a mechanic to be even more prohibitive than floorhugging– especially in a game that has floorhugging in it. Shields themselves are actually pretty interesting right now: They don’t have much health, and they don’t recover very fast, nor do they recover while you’re airborne, but they do recover for every successful hit you land on your opponent. These changes were made way towards the beginning of the game to address the strength of shields back then, but over a year later, I still struggle to see the impacts of that change reflected in the game. The reason?

Perfect shields. To be clear, I love perfect shields, and their implementation in this game reminds me of my beloved Smash 4, but I think, as a consequence of the game’s generous buffer and the consistent lack of landing lag on aerials across the cast, perfect shields are just too easy to perform, which renders all of those elegant shield changes mostly useless. I’m sure others can come up with a solution that’s better than mine, but I’ve thought out a few potential ideas:

• Make perfect shields only available when shield health is below 30%.
  I like this one the most, because it creates more friction in the shield game that can impose more decision making around shield in general. If you’re one hit away from getting shield broken, you might not want to faff about throwing your shield around haphazardly– or you can risk responding to your opponents pressure with a perfect shield. I’ve been in situations like this before in this game and they’re exhilarating.
• Make shield unbufferable on landing, or reduce the size of the buffer window.
  A similar change to this was made in the past regarding shield grabs. I think it did a decent enough job at reducing the amount of shield grabs, but it was too prohibitive from an accessibility standpoint because it incentivized players to mash while in shield stun, which was unfun for everyone compared to what it did for the game. I don’t think making shield unbufferable out of landing lag will be much different, so I don’t like this concept, but I think it’d be more effective at mitigating repetitive gameplay than the shield grab change was.
• Make shields a limited resource (e.g. 2 shields per stock that don’t recharge at all)
  This would fundamentally change how the game is played and I fear the balance implications it would add to the game, but it would at least be an interesting shake up that also contributes to decision making and encourages interaction.
• Reduce the active window of perfect shields
  This is the most sensible option. Right now, perfect shields are active for the first FOUR frames of shield. That’s enormous! Even in Brawl/Smash 4 the window was 3 frames, and in Melee it was 4, but you couldn’t buffer shield in that game the way you can in this one. Reasonably speaking, we could make the window 2 frames without much issue, but if you want to get more interesting, we could also make it so that the perfect shield window starts on frame 2 of shield, instead of frame 1, which would significantly reduce the strength of buffer.

There’s 4 options, I’m sure there are tons more but I think 4 is enough to get a conversation going at the very least.

I’ve only seen Cake and Plup use PS intentionally and it’s only for preserving shield’s health and never for reversals.
Most people don’t even know PS is a thing. I can see that hitting a shield multiple times with no consequences may feel unrewarding, but this is just means you’re too predictable and don’t mix your hit timings

@weaselsnore #MinaForRivals2 My post isn’t saying “perfect shields have too much utility.” To your point, stuff like “preserving shield health” is cool, like I said in the main post I’ve done similar things in game and in my own case I can even say that I’ve developed a habit of using perfect shields to deal with projectiles instead of parrying despite it being a worse option because I like the mechanic that much (and because I’m really bad at parrying online).
The problem is that overall, perfect or not, shield provides way too much reward in comparison to the risk of going for it. It’s a frame 1 bubble with only one hard counter (since this game doesn’t have shield poking), and because of low landing lag on aerials (low lag in general tbh) and a generous buffer system, everyone gets their shields out on frame one of actionability all the time, which in turn provides them with 4 full frames of completely risk free shield invuln.
You’re probably right that most players don’t know perfect shields are a thing, and that’s a part of the problem, considering how frequently perfect shields proc in standard gameplay, and how infrequently shields are broken in spite of all the implementations to make shields weaker and shield pressure stronger. If shields can become a more scarce resource in game, players won’t rely on them so much. I just think targeting the mechanic that gives players a 4 frame long, frame 1 invulnerable shield with zero stun and zero pushback that’s bufferable and doesn’t reduce shield health might be a good way to help with that.

What about nerfing shield health and normal regen speed in general?

frame 1 invulnerable shield with zero stun and zero pushback

PS doesn’t do anything neither to shieldstun nor pushback. All it does is you take no shield damage and can cancel shield release into a grounded attack