Captain America Assist Character Tier List

Classic Fighting Games Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3
1

So I had this idea that there are tier lists for the overall game, why not rank characters based on how well they assist certain characters? That way we can help people new to the character build better teams from Day 1, and not drop the character. This was something I came up with as I was experimenting with what projectile assist to use for American Teleport mixups, since some are clearly better than others.

Generally speaking, the tier lists will be kept under spoiler tags, and there will also be spoilers within the spoilers for sub-groupings.

So without further ado, here goes:

  1. This does not have every character or assist in the game, just the stuff I’m familiar with. In general, these are the assists that I feel are “viable” for a Captain America-on-point team, though I do make note of which assists in particular are garbage for Captain. Feel free to add characters to my ranks if you more or less agree with how I place everything else.
  2. First, I made a projectile assist list since the Captain pretty much requires one to be on the field.
  3. Second, there is a list that ranks assists you can use for the third member of your team, though that need not be the anchor. These are ranked more just on general usability, so they will resemble a “general” assist tier list more than the projectile one. Again, the stuff I’m familiar with, not everything on the cast. The really great ones will have explorations of why they are better than similar assists. And yes “This also puts [X fantastic point character] on your team” will be given as a reason the assist is good, though that doesn’t give any extra points as an assist.
  4. The tiers are just “Great”, “Good”, “Below Average” and “Garbage”, I don’t want to try and differentiate C and B-tier, or D and C-tier. Currently, the top two and bottom two are ranked together so we can discuss which goes where.

*Shoutouts to Ken123103 for even being able to do those links. You da man. It’s worth noting that he usually uses Nova-B to help him do a corner relaunch anyway though.

NOTES: These lists are being published unfinished! Also, within the tiers there is no particular order. Specifically, Sentinel-A and Hawkeye-A are tied, with Arthur-B a close second. Troll comments are obviously trolling. Color comments are all about blue because if you’re not running blue Captain America, you’re free. Unless you’re Condor_Missile

The tier lists have been moved to my Google Docs, I was starting to run out of characters to describe all the characters . . . wait, what? Anyway, here’s the link:

Projectile: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f0fNybino5xfypY2mYZqOQDyoYb9YVsjqn_PKsbLZ2U/edit

Non-Projectile: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oWRiRBJ03EiV96ibGSkZFCYDM1WCh1UZbrutIJxXmbw/edit

2

You forgot one

Spoiler

http://shoryuken.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/umvc3_week9_003_14907_640screen.jpg

http://shoryuken.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/umvc3_week11_003_23588_640screen.jpg

and this one

Spoiler

http://shoryuken.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/umvc3_week9_004_58186_640screen.jpg

http://shoryuken.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/umvc3_costumes_412_82648_640screen.jpg

actually, you can put rr on either log trap or spitfire twice, but that team goes well with doom hidden missiles, so spitfire twice is better for the team. and lol at thorrible. don’t put him on mighty spark. put him on mighty smash for a powerful crossover counter. hawkeye will cover the teams projectile needs.

3

For real, I’m working on it. Like I said, being posted unfinished. I have a bias against Raccoon, so I’m going to ask a guy from my local FGC who runs Cap with Log Trap what he thinks. That said, he has Log Trap, and an assist similar to Drones, so he’s definitely going into the “Great/Good” category.

Also, fuck Thorrible. His beam has the worst qualities of all beams as an assist, and it puts Thor on your team.

4

I don’t think I’ll be giving special seeding to a crossover counter, but feel free to make your own list and I’ll throw it under a spoiler in my own list.

5

I don’t agree with Thor. Thor isn’t trash. He’s good in the right hands. As REALPLAYER said, you’re not supposed to use mighty spark. He’s best with Mighty Smash because it comes out and activates quickly so it works well with your cartwheels. Plus his color 4 is gdlk.

I don’t agree with Unibeam too. It’s a great assist for him, compared to disruptor or plasma beam, it keeps them standing and it comes out behind cap. It’s great for keeping the bottom half of the screen clear while you throw air shields. Tony isn’t trash, he’s just really hard to play because he’s got a tougher time dealing with BS. You’re supposed to color code Ironman with his red / grey color. But yeah, his theme is ass. And Condor runs Unibeam.

Ryu Hadoken assist is gdlk too. It doesn’t scale, plus the hitstun is retardly good. It helps with his air shield slash neutral game too. If you play it right, you can even call assist + cartwheel and you still have enough time to confirm into a c.L.

You forgot a - for Arthur and that is : can’t burn XFactor until Arthur comes in. Seriously, non XF3 Arthur is pretty ass.

Strider Vajra is kind of hard to confirm into anything. Especially if they’re right next to you, you only get a l.SS -> HCS. Vajra is best used with characters that can self OTG into combos.

Raccoon is great for cap, he’s a good size, his DHC is pretty safe on a bad HCS call. Spitfire is like sentinel drones that don’t go away when he’s hit. They’re low to the ground, and they’re spaced enough to help your cartwheel mixups especially if you finish on the other side of the 2nd shot. Log is always a great assist, combined with a well timed cartwheel you get a pretty good mixup.

6

I’ve also used unibeam with Cap for a long time, they’re best friends for a reason lol. I don’t worry about the damage scaling so much since I can still kill people even if unibeam starts the combo, and it’s even better at the end of a combo. My BnB combo does 645k damage with no meter when unibeam is at the end of the combo, and still somewhere upwards of 500k if unibeam is at the beginning.

He’s also good for zoning with mixed area and timing of shield slashes. It can really frustrate some opponents into doing something forced to get around it. Stark does take some work to use though alone, and one of these days we’ll figure him out lol. I sitll love him :slight_smile:

Kei

7

I’ll test Thor when I get home from Knock-Out Fights 2 later, but again, make your own lists, I’ll put them up there. I think Tony is below average because his damage scaling renders Caps best quality (damage) a moot point, and I don’t like Ryu’s Hadouken because it’s one projectile. I’ll test how far you can confirm from Hadouken later as well.

8

…Where’s Spencer? Seriously for dirty resets and DHC options he is one of the best for Cap. Oh and you can get almost 1.1mil with Cap/Doom off a Cr.L.

Here are a couple which allow Cap to do OTG assist cs.L cs.H:
Viper Burn kick
Thor Mighty Smash

No matter how far in the combo, you can always end with double charging star. They are alright assists however Thor does use a ground bounce. One thing about Thor is that he has a grab hyper so you can go for hyper charging star on block and DHC into Mighty Punish for an unblockable setup. Viper’s Burn Kick hits high so high/low unblockables if you can get the right setup (air shield slash then unblockable?).

Also Golden Hsien Ko is always a really good assist that is always missed out.

And a - for Nova is that his assist uses ground bounce so may limit DHC options.

9

Fixed that for you lol, I’ve only ever used one color with Steve since I started him early Vanilla. The only time he hasn’t been in the ‘more awesome than everything’ punisher outfit, is a few times recently when I changed to Spencer on point for practice (then Cap goes with color 3)…and that’s extremely rare since I’ll usually just hold the assist button during the vs. screen instead lol.

Great thread though, and I’m going to go through the rest of it pretty soon to see what I can learn from the rest of you gentlemen in here. I’ve given more thought lately to trying out some other assists again just to have a different look for certain matchups, just not put in the time yet.

As always my top 2 are Spencer Upgrapple and IronMan Unibeam.

Kei

10

Just to note on a good quality of the Doom missiles. If you get an air throw right after you call them, you can do a double jump, l.ss into a full combo. o_o

11

Hmmm… A good way to have this thread would have been to list all the characters and which of their assists would best suit Cap… but that would be long and I’m not about to start doing that! lol

Anyway, I think the best assist for Captain America is Hidden Missiles. I guess the other one would have to be a beam assist, so Unibeam :::shudders::: I’m sorry, not to repeat what’s already been said but I can’t accept it’s damage scaling, nor do I rate Iron Man as a character (but that argument’s for a different thread). Actually… I think Akuma’s Tatsu could even be better than the Unibeam. It isn’t full screen, but it’s got faster start up then the Unibeam, and is projectile invincible and has high priority, and is great for the cartwheel-mix up. Plus you won’t have to use Iron Man. And really? How can anyone really say Thor is a good character. The only person doing anything good with him is Abegen. And he also uses TRON and SHE-HULK (shoutouts to Royal Flush still).

Hawkeye or Taskmasters horizontal assists suit Cap, as do any assists that give a wall bounce (log, Ghost Riders chain etc). In theory, I think Frank West’s shopping cart would be could for the cartwheel mix-ups but I haven’t tried it out. Nova’s B assist provides some good mix-ups too. The drones are good too, but their slow speed is a strength and disadvantage.

I don’t rate Spencer’s Upgrapple as highly as I used to. Mainly because I’ve realized you can escape a majority of it’s resets by just holding up. I should note that’s most of the reset’s I came up with lol. But again, I have my reservations about Spencer. Though Cap/Spencer/Iron Man would be a good team :::shudders:::

Going back to my first point, I’d advice picking which over characters you like and just picking an assist out of those they offer. But if you want to win, forget optimizing Cap. Just pick Zero and Wesker with him and you’ll win.

12

Spencer actually has two solid Captain America assists, it’s a good pairing. The horizontal one helps corner relaunches, and can almost be used as the projectile setup one due to it’s projectile invulnerability, you just time Shield Slash L right and get a sexy looking combo. I forget whether this works with cross-up setups, but I’d imagine it’s a lot harder.

Again, it is without question the best one.

13

Again, people, my biases are reflected in my list. If you want to combat my biases, provide me with technology information that will change my mind. But a better idea is to make your own list, and I’ll post it in a spoiler on the OP later.

14

For whatever reason, the first line of what I want to put under a spoiler tag is in a different spoiler “grouping”, so to speak, than the rest of the post. Can anyone explain that?

15

Exams finish at the end of this week coming week so I’m going to try **every **single assist after it is all done as I was already planning on doing one anyway. Basically, it is going to tick these bullet points:

Spoiler

  • Combo continuality

  • Knockdown

  • Relaunch

  • HSD

  • Damage scaling

  • Double Charging Star ender

  • Setups

  • Cartwheel mixup

  • High/low unblockables

  • Hit Confirm

  • Snap back

  • Resets (this one I might struggle)

  • Blockstun

  • Ground/Wall bounce

  • Damage scaling

  • Safe

  • Special (Meter gain)

  • Power up version (e.g. Devil Trigger, Golden Hsien Ko)

  • THC

  • DHC

  • Safe

  • Continue Combos

  • Unblockable (Thor grab)

Do say if there are other points to keep in mind when I work on it but I do think I have most of the main ones to keep in mind down.

Btw for the spoiler problem, try doing this:
(spoiler)
insert text here with a line gap
(/spoiler)

Where brackets are meant to be square brackets. I think you might’ve done:
(spoiler) text here with no line gap
(/spoiler)

which may have caused the problem.

16

NEW! Building a “reccomended teams” based on the tier list.

17

I’ll try it out.

EDIT: That creates the problem of the first one being completely empty, but that’ll do for right now.

18

I’ve actually maxed out how large a post can be! So here we go.

Recommended** Captain America Teams per Metagame as of May 2012**

My honest opinion of the Captain is that you ought to be building a team around him instead of having him be a team member. His Shield Slash assist is pretty decent for some of the teleport mixup stuff for characters like Vergil, but I always get the feeling that’s not how it should be done when I’m using it. Therefore, here are recommended teams that put the Captain on point. Generally speaking I list Captain America-Y as the assist for the very rare situation of a crossover counter, but it really doesn’t matter what assist of his that you run. This is true except for teams with Vergil, because, again, Shield Slash M is honestly a good projectile for that stuff: Adds damage as opposed to scales, and if you’re doing anything that effectively covers Cap on recovery, the projectile remains a threat coming back as well.

Team strategies coming later.

Spoiler

Captain America-Y/Hawkeye-A/Doom-B: Captain Latveria (Scrub)
So called because neither Captain America nor Hawkeye is hard to use, and they’re made even easier with Doom missiles. You’re easiest way to get in is going to be: Call Hawkeye, American Teleport, 2L, and then combo per this video:

[media=youtube]-RKyxoPYozA[/media]

Note that without the second meter, you can still get over 850K with Heavy Charging Star, so against characters with about that amount or less (namely Zero and the dog,) don’t burn extra meter.

When Cap dies, play fullscreen keepaway with Hawekeye, and make sure to back it up with Doom missiles. This is very hard to deal with. Call shit out with Anti-Air Standing M, and Slide. If you have three meters, don’t be afraid to use Hawkeye’s Level 3 to finish the plate. Hawkeye does very little damage in combos, and when finishing any decent combo with Gimlet you’re basically paying 1 meter to get the damage of a single standing heavy because of damage scaling. Don’t worry, Doom does a ton of damage (610K in the corner without burning any meter at all) and build a lot of his own meter.

When Hawkeye dies, how you play Doom should more or less be dictated by how well the opponent was dealing with Hawkeye to begin with. If the keepaway was working well, throw out Beams, Finger Lasers, Super-Jump flight, all that good shit, but if your Hawk got bopped, don’t be afraid to square jump, and make people respect the footdive (when footdive is blocked on the ground, air dash to the ground and do a mixup). A really great thing you can learn how to do here is Level 3 on reaction as a punish, for example when reading a Vergil teleport. Also, learning when to Alpha counter a block-string with X-factor is crucial. Note that the infamous Doom corner loop is a 100% combo in the corner without using meter when using Level 3 X-factor.

Captain America-Y/Doom-B/Sentinel-A: Captain Latveria (Skill)
Captain America-Y/Hawkeye-A/Vergil-Y:
Captain America-A/Vergil-Y/Hawkeye-A:
Captain America-Y/Hawkeye-A/Nova-B: Team [Secret] Avengers, or, Team Ken[123103]
Captain America-Y/Hawkeye-A/[Ryu-Y or Akuma-Y]: Baby’s First Team
Captain America-Y/[C.Viper-B or C.Viper-Y]/Sentinel-A: Team Only-Play-This-If-You’re-Good-Enough-To-Play-C. Viper

19

Wow, C. Viper actually has two good assists that can achieve corner relaunch. Not to mention both of them give OTG capable Hypers when using THCs. That sounds fucking sick, I’ll need to try it later.

EDIT: Never mind on the actual OTG Seismo (C-Viper B). Launches too high for practicality, although I guess it gives you an opportunity for the most obvious throw reset of all time.

20

Right, so, if people like Flush / Abegen can win with Thor, that doesn’t mean Thor is a bad character. How can you say that if they place high with the very characters you’re saying are bad? They have put in the time, which other people haven’t. They’re not easily picked up, so it’s not surprising that a majority of the players are bad with them, and that doesn’t necessarily make the characters themselves, bad.

Akuma Tatsu is a good assist for Cap’s cartwheel shenanigans. If you can confirm it on hit, it’s rather good. You won’t be able to get too much of an extended combo, but damage is damage.

For Spencer, Cap / Spencer / Hawkeye or Task would be a better choice for that team, simply because I forget which arrows come out at the same speed of Spencer’s horizontal grapple so it would help him too.