Ok back to Smash after a brief mental break. This week I tried maining Wolf.
Night One
My normal trying out a character drill. Training mode, CPU, Online Quickplay, and then Classic Mode.
Wolf’s recovery is not good. You can’t chain his Side-B and Up-B together. Even Luigi and Dr. Mario can do that. And when you look up Wolf’s kill confirms a lot of YouTubers are like “confirms into Wolf Flash at the edge”. But that kills Wolf! What stupid way to get a kill confirm. If you miss it you’re just dead for no reason.
Online Quickplay did not go well. I think I won one, maybe two out of 10 matches. The first night I just didn’t know how to play Wolf. I’ve always heard him described as a fast character but he’s too slow and/or his moves don’t have a long enough range to whiff punish.
In Classic Mode I upped it to from the standard 2.0 to 4.0 difficulty. 2.0 is always too tame to really get a challenge. I did end up dying and having to use a ticket but that’s fine. I think I’m going to start upping it to the highest difficulty of 5.0 from now on. It’ll just make Classic Mode more enjoyable.
Night 2
Nah.
Night 3
Continue training Wolf and working on his combos. I also spent quite a bit of time trying to land his Dair spike, but since I was practicing against Zelda it didn’t work. Also, practiced using his Up-B on the ground to get a quick burst attack. I also went back to something I need to work on – double jump getups. Also continue to practice RARs. There are many advanced techs I still need to work on getting down 100%.
Online Quickplay went a bit better this night. I was starting to get more of the hang of how to play Wolf, instead of whiff-punishing you need to use his aerials to punish where your opponent wants to go. And lots of dash dances into tilts and dash attacks. Still not sure about the best way to recover and edge-guard with him. It was also mostly losses, but I beat two separate Pokemon Trainers. I would have thought that match-up favored PT, but Wolf seemed to be able to handle all three Pokemon.
Then, I was still in the mood to play Smash after playing three sets online so I went and played the Spirits Mode with Wolf. I have barely touched this mode since the game came out, but I had fun. Unlike the World of Light you can choose which stupid conditions you fight under. It was a good way to keep learning Wolf.
Night 4
Night 4 was one of those nights that makes you really hate Ultimate. Practice in Training Mode and against CPUs went fine. Then I went online.
The first online match was kind of close, but their username bummed me out so I didn’t re-match them. The second match started out okay, but I became more and more annoyed by the lag as the match went on. So I didn’t rematch them either. I ended up only re-matching one person, and that person had the Final Smashes on! I kept running into either 1) lag 2) opponents who were so much better than my Wolf it was frustrating or 3) opponents who seemed like good opponents but then spammed teabagging after each KO. The majority of the matches I just self-destructed the last two stocks. I know that’s not the way to learn and that’s also not sportsmanlike. But some nights online just puts you in such terrible tilt. I think it wouldn’t have been so frustrating if it wasn’t an issue with every match. I got a laggy match, then a match against someone I didn’t have the skill to even hit for the entire first stock, and then a decent match against a degenerate that teabagged. Even though the game was still even. And then I had the exact same issues with the next three matches!
I played a little more after that just to see if could get a win in. And that’s when I started playing against people with Final Smashes on. Eventually I did get one win at the end of the night. I won against someone who was clearly practicing playing as a lone Ice Climber. They kept killing the second Icie on purpose at the start of each stock. I did try my best and did win, so probably good practice for that guy. Because I didn’t 3 stock him. So not a great victory, but I helped him out?
Fix Ultimate online.
Night 5
Night 5 I didn’t have time to practice so I jumped right into warm-up matches against the CPU. Then I went online again. It went…better. I won two matches out of around eight. I have the same problem with Wolf that I had with Zero Suit Samus. These aren’t rush-down characters, these are counter characters. I think the optimal way to play them isn’t even to whiff-punish – it’s too counter what your opponent wants to do. I’m just not that good at that. I’m much better either being that all out aggressor or turtling and only attacking when there’s a huge window. Which is why the aggressive characters of Joker or Ness and the defensive characters of Kirby and Ganondorf appeal to me. This in-between I can’t really play well, even when I try to force myself.
Night 6
So this night I actually had plenty of time to practice. Started just working on Wolf’s recovery and his offstage spikes. I tried working on his combos and kill confirms, but I gave up. His moves just don’t combo well. And I couldn’t get any combos to work because his moves have too much knockback. You’re supposed to short hop weak nair to setup into smash confirm? Or full hop weak nair? Or just a normal short hop nair spaced away? I don’t know, because not one of those worked well enough to follow up with a confirm. I decided I just concentrate on getting the hits instead.
Went online again and did about as well as before. Only two overall wins over three sets. But I did get decent connections each time so that was nice.
What seemed a little weird this week is I kept running into Zero Suit Samuses and other Spacies. I don’t think the match-up is good in either case. I think Zero Suit Samus does everything Wolf does, slightly better. Maybe she’s a lighter and doesn’t hit as hard, but her recovery is much better. And personally I can’t keep up with the speed of Fox and Falco. But maybe I’m just getting old, I was having trouble reacting this week with Wolf. Maybe it’s not Wolf’s fault so much as I’m starting to lose it.
So, I had some extra time on Night 6 so I thought I’d finally check out Project Slippi. If you’re not aware this is a new project that adds rollback netcode to Melee running on the Dolphin Emulator. I got it up and running in not too long and started looking for matches. It looks really nice. It plays very well, I only noticed lag in one match. But I was not fun, there’s no skill matchmaking in it yet so it just matches you up with who’s online and close to you. I got destroyed a bunch.
Then I thought I finally try out Anther’s Ladder since that is supposed to be a place to get better Smash matches and get an actual ranking in pretty much any Smash game you want to play. Honestly, I was a bit disappointed in this. There wasn’t many people in the queue for either Ultimate or Melee. I couldn’t join a ranked Melee match. So I joined an Unranked one with someone on the West Coast. I guess in Anther’s Ladder you can use the Dolphin that they have on their site or project Slippi. I sort of wanted to test theirs against Slippi since I had both installed. But the person hosting was using Slippi. Because of the distance there was noticeable lag in these matches. I also got bodied a number of times. But I didn’t get bodied as bad with Ness.
Maybe I’ll try Anther’s Ladder in Ultimate in the future. But I think I need to find another Discord or something to get a some decent matches in Melee. But I think I’ll keep using Slippi.
Night 7
So I did practice some more of Wolf’s recovery and more of his spikes. I did try a little to work on his combos but gave up again. I lost to all three Level 9 CPUs.
Then I went online, and I actually did okay. I think I won two to four out of eight matches. And two matches 2-stocked the opponents (they were playing Omega Stages with 2 stocks). But I probably would have two-stocked them with anyone, they were super predicitable. Though Wolf’s Blaster did really help space.
Then I played a tournament. It was Ace Pilots Only so it was a only the pilot characters with Items On set to Medium and Final Smashes on. The first match was a four-player Free-for-All which I won by grabbing the Assist trophies. The final was one-on-one on Venom. It started out fine, but the lag became unmanageable by the end. I missed kill because of the lag. I was able to get a kill in at the last second to tie the game. Even though the opponent was running away. But I lost in Sudden Death.
Wrap-Up
So, will I use Wolf in the future? No, he’s definitely not a main for me. As I’ve said he just doesn’t fit my style. I got better at his recovery and at his counter-punching playstyle over the week. But it just doesn’t come natural to me.
By random selection the next characters I need to try out is Dark Samus/Samus. But after playing through Fire Emblem Awakening, I want to give Robin, Chrom, and Lucina another look. And I also just got Paper Mario: the Origami King so I might not be playing much next week.