Post Your Personal Ness Fundamentals

[101011]

Hey everyone, new Ness main here. Since there really isn't too much learning material on Ness as opposed to a character like Fox, Falco, or Marth, I think it would be beneficial for us to talk about our personal things we do as Ness that seem to work well that may or may not be the usual Ness advice. I have a theory that if every Ness player worked together and shared our experiences and tips with each other, than Ness's meta could improve exponentially. I strongly believe that maybe Ness could even be viable one day, but we definitely have to put in more work as a group for that to be possible.

I don't have too much experience playing other people, but I have been spending a large amount of time watching the few Ness videos out there and experimenting with low-level computers and can start the thread with some things that I don't really see in Ness guides.

There is a couple things that I think are under used in Ness play. The first couple being some things I've observed while watching hours of Simna's steams on Twitch.

- Regarding the Marth matchup, I've noticed that Simna uses dash attack as a common approach on a dash dancing Marth and it seems to pay off most of the time. However, when Simna misses the dash attack he immediately spams dtilt which does very well in covering Marth's grab attempt that usually follows after a missed dash attack.

- Another thing I've learned from watching Simna is how useful and underused the weak hit of PTK can be when edgeguarding, especially on space animals. If PKT hits how it was intended to, then it doesn't really do anything effective in terms of edgeguarding in most cases and actually can help an opponent if PKT hits and sends them towards the stage. The weak hits however don't send an opponent up and like I said, this could be very useful for space animals by forcing them to recover lower than they originally intended.

- One thing I noticed on my own is that from my viewing experience, most Ness players don't really utilize Ness's ground movement potential. I was previously a Falco main (I actually plan on dual-maining.) and an important part for me was making sure I had movement that resembled PPMD. If a Ness player could fully utilize Ness's ground movement potential then I think there could be a huge improvement in Ness players.

Feel free to add anything that you think is beneficial to Ness players and any advice or tips are welcome.

 

[dan smith]

i never edgeguard space animals with pkthunder. that's super weird to me. most often i just dangle the yoyo over the edge repeatedly and then bat. falcos especially tend to die from this. OR you can just nair/fair/bair. all very safe and effective.

ness dash attack is good but not without it's flaws. a player who knows how to deal with it will either avoid it or punish it.

the dtilt and a combo are indeed good disruption moves. dtilt can get you out of a number of sticky situtations where ness simply doesn't have anything else fast enough to prevent a punish.

 

[PSI-Apocalypse]

Hi!
To edgegard spacies I usually try to hit their recovery with the weak hits of the fair, so they're forced to recover low, so i keep hitting with the fair until i'm ready to weak reverse bair the low recovery, this weak bair works with falco, 'cause his recovery has not a long range, with fox instead of weak bair I try hitting with the bat, the problem is that if you hit in a predictable timing they could tech it, maybe you could edge hog forcing the recovery to go high and then ledge jump to bare or maybe ledgedash to back throw (if the percentage is enough high).

 

[CheAkiwara]

One thing I dont often see from other Ness players when edgeguarding spacies is just going offstage and kill them with 2 fairs.
On a stage like FoD its a guranteed kill everytime. Also try to include U-tilts often. They often set up for djc u-airs wich eventually lead to hard b-airs. Oh d-tilts on the ledge are also a great idea on spacies and C.F when their recovering from below , however you have to time it well or else it could be that you get burned.

 

[Ganreizu]

One thing I dont often see from other Ness players when edgeguarding spacies is just going offstage and kill them with 2 fairs.
On a stage like FoD its a guranteed kill everytime. Also try to include U-tilts often. They often set up for djc u-airs wich eventually lead to hard b-airs. Oh d-tilts on the ledge are also a great idea on spacies and C.F when their recovering from below , however you have to time it well or else it could be that you get burned.

The problem with fair edgeguard like that is that it's duration is too long. You need to place it exactly right or else you're immediately going to be edgeguarded yourself or if you're successful you need to always sweetspot or else you're going to land on stage just as the opponent revives and he super hard punishes, usually killing you. You would need to aim for hitting with the final, more powerful fair hitbox so that it not only ends quick enough but gimps them with enough effectiveness. If you get good at that then you can just double jump airdodge to recover since his distance is pretty damn good with just that and infinitely safer.

Dtilts on falcon aren't amazing because if they react appropriately you're basically always going to get hugged. It's only good as a surprise, which it does pretty well because it's quick, but you're way better off ftilting if you can it's just a tad harder to do sometimes.

 

[Double Helix]

Ness fundamentals? Uhhh....aside from the transferable stuff from other characters, make sure you can edgeguard. Edgeguarding with fair isn't a great option unless you are against Jigglypuff. I think I posted about this awhile back, and if you are interested I can link it since I don't know what page it's on nowadays. But one of the most important things I've found with Ness is knowing when to play like a fast-faller and when to play like a floaty.

As far as everything else goes, chaingrabbing space animals on FD is often overlooked because it isn't guarenteed (it's dependant upon their DI).

Nair.

Have more fun than the other guy. I'm playing Ness and he/she probably isn't. I can't lose.

 

[PSI-Apocalypse]

Edgeguard with Fair is more secure than with other aerial, Dair is so easy to tech, Nair usually ends in a trade, and for Bair you have to time it very well, I'm speaking of edgeguarding on stage, not out of the stage, I think the thing you should avoid the most is going out of stage, unless you guarantee the hit, of course.

 

[Double Helix]

The reason I prefer the Nair edgeguard is simply because it usually trades. Knowing that the Nair trades with so many things allows us to go for more dangerous edgeguards further off the stage. For instance, at mid-percents, going low to edgeguard a Fox is perfectly fine because you can easily just take the 12%(?) from the up-b and not worry about hitting an angle. Fair is also situational because edgeguarding with Fair can be bad if you don't hit the last hitbox (or if you do, character dependent).

 

[PSI-Apocalypse]

Yeah, the thing is to actually edgeguard the oponent, what works for me maybe doesn't for others, but it also depends on your own playstyle, as I said, as long as it works it's fine. Also you have a point, the edgeguard well depends on the character you try to edgeguard