Basics:

Shield

Why?

ADT shield advantages for reflecting

I n many scenarios, full shield sized reflect sphere isn't big enough to cover a character. Reflecting with just a "normal" shield can be impossible in such cases, as the character becomes poked by the projectile before it'd reach the reflect sphere. There are multiple factors that affect this: character and shield health are big ones. Shield start-up animation also "blends" with whatever animation you interrupted with the shield, so the previous animation state is very relevant as well. The increased reflect sphere size of ADT shield can often make powershielding projecties possible in these cases.



Marth leans heavily forward in his dash and run, which makes his head stick out of shield and normal ps attempt fails

















Large ADT shield can make Marth's reflect sphere big enough to allow powershielding a projectile even from run







Playing around ADT shield when shielding non-projectile attacks



Because ADT shield shuts down shield sphere, you want to avoid it when defending against attacks. I recommend having one trigger without light shield (either "trigger tricked" or removed spring) to use whenever you want to powershield attacks. If you can't analog shield with a trigger, you can safely push the button down without ever initiating ADT. However, powershielding isn't strictly beneficial vs attacks, as it increases pushback while shieldstun remains the same, which can make you whiff counter-attacks after blockking. To avoid both normal powershield and ADT, you can press a shield trigger almost fully down, so that you get max analog input but no digital shield. This way you achieve max shield size for minimum shield stun, but still avoid unwanted powershield.

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start-up behaves differently depending on how you input shield.shield refers to Analog-to-digital transition shield: ADT shield is initiated with frame 1 analog shield input ("light shield" input) into frame 2 digital shield input (R or L pressed fully down so the digital button part of the trigger is pressed).When you ADT shield, projectile reflect sphere ("powershield sphere", which only reflects projectiles) is created on the 2nd frame where digital shield is input, just like the reflect sphere appears immediately with "normal" powershield if digital shield is pressed on frame 1 instead. The key difference is that on the 2nd frame of ADT shield, normal shield sphere shuts down for 2 frames and won't block attacks or projectiles while it's down. This has been thought of as a huge nuisance, as it means you can easily get hit by attacks out of the beginning of ADT shield.Other difference is related to shield size: Shield size is "locked" for 3 frames on the shield start-up, so when you ADT shield, the shield size is determined by the analog input level on the first frame of shield. The projectile reflect sphere scales with shied size (reflect diameter = 0.75 * shield diameter for non-Yoshi characters), so the lighter the initial light shield input is, the larger reflect bubble you get on the following 2 frames.I've seen ADT shield been called a bug in many places. It's certainly seems weird to make characters get "randomly" hit out of the beginning of shielding depending on how they inputted shield. However, I think I've found the reason now: if the shield sphere would be up during projectile reflect window, it would in many cases interfere with reflecting projectiles, as the projectile could become blocked by the (light shield sized) shield before reaching the reflect sphere:In the above gif, the upper part shows a pikachu successfully ADT reflecting a laser. The lower part shows the exact same scenario, except shield sphere doesn't disappear on the 2nd shield frame. My conclusion is that ADT shield shuts down normal shield sphere in order to make reflecting projectiles work more consistently.ADT can be especially useful for characters that have small shield compared to body, such as Bowser and DK for instance. The increased reflect sphere size can also make projectile reflecting window larger.