Adjust tech lockout during hitpause#906

Currently, you are punished by being hard locked out of tech if you input tech during hitpause of a move. This has real implications for moves with long hitpause and makes spamming such moves and hoping for unreliable defense a real, and in my opinion degenerate, strategy, even at top level. Some examples are La Reina side b spike and Etalus down air, but most strong spikes benefit from it (eg Wrastor, Lox).

I have a much more in depth description of the problem in the following document (more formatting than Nolt allows) as well as a proposed solution, but I would really appreciate hearing any approach to make these repeated, frustrating situations less common.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13zIgG-rIY3AApagAEj6GuosMxFonB4lW1taohAMikeY/edit?usp=sharing

really well written and something ive heard a ton of people complain & question about. i really hope they hear this out

etalus dair is W idk i’m hitting that 2 frame 6 frame and 1 frame window every time

ily

W post, but in defense of this mechanic, i’d like to add:

Preemptive teching (outside of hitpause) is important to make teching a read and a commitment, instead of being reactive to being hit, which would practically invalidate the mind game of tech trapping.

And i personally don’t see teching outside of hitpause a problem EXCEPT for multihits like Etalus’ Dair or Clairen’s Nair, because there it practically feels like a RNG mechanic

There’s a separate mechanic that allows tech trapping (eg like how puff can tech lockout a tech chase with up air on a platform in Melee) which is present in Rivals 2 as well, I actually do think that mechanic is good and should remain (details about it are on the wiki but are a bit more technical)

Tech lockout during hitpause isn’t relevant for that type of tech trap if I’m understanding you correctly. I do actually agree with your sentiment that teching on reaction could be a problem, but I’m not concerned with the fact that this change would make those moves weaker, my concern is that it feels unfair for moves with long animations to have strictly shorter tech windows than those with short animations

@weaselsnore #MinaForRivals2 While I understand the reasoning for this, the actual places where this comes into play dont really meet those standards. Generally the only kind of hit you would want to preemptively tech are the ones where you’re up against the wall, but in all other places it just adds an invisible, arbitrary 2-7 frame window where pressing the button says “no.”

shoutout to when i brought this up to a beta tester back in like month 3 of the game and i was told that teching would be skilless without it : )

Moving teching to being more reactive than predictive sounds like a win to me, tbh.

This game is stacked to the ceiling with predictive mechanics, I think it’d be lovely to adjust the mental stack a little and lower the floor on just getting walloped by Big Buttons and instead allowing you to fall back on an intuitively timed reaction to give you a chance to breath. I’m sure high level advantage will stay brutal even if teching feels more natural.

Also, I’m very, very hopeful that w/e y’all land on (if something does change) won’t be another handful of asterisks just on problematic moves. A lovely, clean, intuitive system level change would be nice.

@DimNetball090 @Youngblood With all due respect, I think the ramifications of this change on prediction vs reaction are greatly exaggerated. Wall teching is not hard in this game. Having an invalid middle-window doesn’t make it a meaningful skill check because no human can realistically plan out the hitpause in real time to gauge whether they should tech predictively or reactively. Players will (and should) use predictive teching in nearly all scenarios anyway, and the moves that would let them react are telegraphed enough that they can easily tech in the early window regardless.

The scenarios where it would make a difference will be few compared to the scenarios now where a player is denied what feels like a successful tech.

As for shortening the window, it may be cool if the length of the window is knockback dependent. The more knockback, the stricter the timing

@Youngblood I’m going to have to argue that it shouldn’t be a predictive vs. reactive situation… Shields are predictive, I’m assuming my opponent is going to hit me so I’m throwing a shield out to take a defensive approach. CC/FH are predictive inputs where I’m intentionally trying to get hit to enable a counter hit….Techs SHOULD be reactive, because essentially you are going I’m put in a procarious situation where I’ve been hit, my last ditch effort is to react to the hit and responding by trying to get a tech in hopes of escaping disadvantage. I feel its actually counter intuative to make it where I need to be teching prior getting hit and makes things feel weird because of it, not to mention adds to much to a mental stack of needing to predict situations.

Maybe the better solution is to remove the early tech window (or Just greatly reduce it from 20 frames to like first 5 frames) while at the same time removing the lockout during hitpause. Current method is problematic because you were trying to time hitting the ground/wall as many of us have spent years doing in other platform fighters.

The argument of heavy hitting moves being too easy to tech in this scencario makes me wonder how other smash titles were able to make this work. I remember in PM that you would still maintain momentum of the launch even after teching so maybe the issue isn’t so much that teching heavy hitting moves is the issue, but rather they are not carrying enough momentum to make them the better option.

It seems like the only reason this was added was to reduce the power of wallhug teching. It just makes you wonder what’s so hard to distinguish between the two in the code. If that’s not correct, someone feel free to correct me, but it seems the development team is using the same term to refer to all forms of teching and maybe causing confusion that way.

Reporting back with observations about Clairen’s tipstun after testing:

1. Yes, it does in fact lock you out of teching for 20 frames if you hit the button in the tipstun window, same as the normal hitpause window. This means that between the point that the Clairen player is able to move and the point that you get launched, any tech inputs will fail and incur a lockout.
2. Tipstun on moves that would require a tech (such as down air) is long enough that any tech input buffered before getting hit will no longer be valid after being launched. This means that the “preemptive” tech window is nonexistent for such moves outside of specifically wallhug teching situations.

These two facts combined mean that Clairen’s down air, used on stage on a slightly airborne opponent, will require a nearly frame perfect tech input in order to actually floor tech it, despite having ample time to process what’s going on thanks to the extra tipstun. While the extra processing time does make it “easier,” it means that anyone who hits the button reactively upon getting hit with what feels like reasonable timing–which many people do since hitpause doesn’t last this long for any other character’s moves, or even Clairen’s own sourspots–will fail the tech and be forced into a knockdown situation. It is, in fact, an even bigger war crime than I previously understood.

@IntelligentNitrogen904 This seems like it might be a bug outright. The wiki explicitly mentions that the tech timer doesn’t count down during Clairen’s tipperstun, and ik the wiki team is pretty thorough with their testing. But I’m testing it and, not only is Clairen’s Dair ignoring this, but every single move Clairen has doesn’t feature this property aside from jab. That’s intersting to me, because jab is the only move (aside from Clairen’s multihit Nair) where the total combined hitpause + tipperstun is lower than 20. But the logic works flawlessly for it, lessing you buffer a tech for much longer than 20 frames before hitstun ends.

So the mechanic that was supposed to prevent that scenario seems to have gotten broken at some point, seeing as it’s never been mentioned in the patch notes. This is also a pretty big hidden buff for Clairen in the current patch, since any tipper she hits you with outside of jab is completely untechable onstage, and can completely bypass pre-emptive tech timings offstage if you are not touching the wall.

@DimNetball090 I have a suspicion that this may be related to a change intended to target Amsah teching her down tilt tippers, but I can’t find the change that mentions it. I could be completely misremembering. If that’s the case, I think the game has ended up with enough tech logic that wires are getting crossed with intent and execution between cases.