context: im on a 5inch freestyle build, been flying for maybe a year, comfortable with basic power loops and split S on wide open stuff but i want to start doing tighter proximity work around trees and structures. watched a ton of mr steele and UAV futures videos and everyone seems to have a different opinion on what fundamentals matter most for close quarters flying.

my buddy keeps telling me to nail the slow roll first because it teaches throttle management or something but another guy in our local group says slow rolls are kind of a party trick and split S variations and the ability to reverse direction fast is what actually saves you when youre deep in a gap and misjudge. curious what people who actually fly proximity think about this, not just what sounds good theoretically

your buddy isnt wrong but also isnt fully right. slow rolls do teach you a ton about throttle because you have to keep altitude through the inverted phase which forces you to actually understand whats happening instead of just memorizing stick positions. but i wouldnt say one comes before the other ? theyre teaching you different things. split S variations are honestly more immediately useful for getting out of trouble but if you do them wrong in proximity youre just going faster in the wrong direction which is worse than the original problem lol

what i'd actually say is spend time flying with a lot less throttle than feels comfortable. like hovering in place and doing slow deliberate movements around a single tree before you try threading anything. sounds boring but proximity flying is mostly about trusting your sense of where the quad is in 3d space and that only comes from slow deliberate reps not from going fast and getting lucky

tbh i think the framing of which maneuver to learn first is kind of the wrong question? the thing that made the biggest difference for me in proximity was just getting way more comfortable with how much authority i actually had at low speed. like i used to think i needed to be moving to have control and thats just not true. also simulator hours specifically on tight courses, not just freestyling in empty space ? liftoff has some decent proximity maps that arent perfect but they do force you to think about lines