Ness DJC Rush Drills

For anyone who is unfamiliar with Ness, a DJC rush is when Ness DJC fairs so fast that the hitbox doesn't come out and the fair autocancels. This allows Ness to immediately go into his initial dash rather than continuing at his normal run speed. This is pretty useful, as Ness is tied for the 3rd fastest initial dash but also tied for the slowest max run speed. DJC rushing can be used to deceive your opponent in neutral with tricky ground movement, to avoid your opponent's invincibility, to get in position for an edgeguard more quickly, or to extend combos. Part 1: Improving DJC Speed If Ness's socks show when you DJC dair, you aren't DJCing fast enough to DJC rush. You can use a metronome to help increase your speed. Choose a manageable BPM and try to see how many consecutive DJC dairs you can do. Once you get 10 in a row, gradually increase your speed. You want to eventually get somewhere in the 170-180 BPM range. As you can see in the video, you can get away with some slow dairs at 152 BPM, but that's no longer the case at 176. Part 2: Getting the DJC Rush Start off by focusing on the autocanceled fair. This may be deceptively difficult if you've played a good amount of Ness, as your muscles will want to do the normal DJC fair timing. Once you can get the autocanceled fair with some consistency, try adding the dash. It'll take some practice to get the timing down, but in my opinion, the dash is the easy part. Once you can do one DJC rush at a time, try stringing them together while running across Dreamland. I think 5 over the length of the stage is the most I've gotten. Part 3: Working Rushes In Most of these drills are fairly self-explanatory and there's nothing too special about most of them. The basic idea is just to practice DJC rushes in the context of other movement so you get more comfortable rushing. I recommend aiming for a certain number of reps and increasing that number as you get better. My favorite of these drills is probably "Rush - Fair - Rush," because it forces you to switch back and forth between normal DJC fair timing and the quick DJC rush timing. My general philosophy is that I should be practicing with drills that are much harder than what I'd be doing in a match. If I can do rush - fair - rush 4 times in a row or 12 consecutive rushes while dash dancing, I'm a lot less likely to miss a single DJC rush in a match. Part 4: Combos Practicing combos is another option for working rushes into your movement if you get bored just moving around the stage. It also provides an opportunity to practice DJC rushes while under a bit of pressure. Most of the combos are pretty similar and none are particularly flashy. I think there's some value to trying all of them though, as comboing different characters requires slightly different DJC timings. I think the Fox combo is the easiest one, so that might be a good place to start. The first Puff combo is really short, so that's a good one as well.