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Oftentimes, games will try to prevent the notion of Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards from seeping into their games. Every character or character class is as valuable as another, or must rely upon one another for game balance purposes.
Crutch characters, however, are player characters (typically available early on) who start out powerful enough to carry your party to victory on their own, but who Can’t Catch Up with the increased powers of newer enemies or their fellow characters, or because they simply leave the party at some point (possibly because they are The Mole), or they arekilled, forcing the player to somehow come up with a replacement. Worse, without Leaked Experience, the crutch may actually cripple your party if you lean on them too heavily - if they leave, or if their diminishing returns make their levels empty, then you’ve functionally wasted experience points that could have made other characters powerful.
Thus, they are like a crutch - you can lean on them to overcome a weakness early on, but eventually, the game will kick the crutch out from under you, and your other characters must have learned to stand on your own two feet by that time, or you are doomed to fail.
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Clockw0rk thinks that she is one and is trying to learn how to win without her (problem is, he’s trying to do that with Jill who looks bottom tier ATM). That those Phoneix players are in danger of not being able to catch up with those who are learning how to win with the dynamics of a full 3 player team, rather than with 1 broken but not invincible character and 2 gimped characters.
I think if phoenix players want to “grow” they might just start treating her as a 800k health character. For instance she has a very good DHC glitch super and does lots of damage for a point character, especially if you give her something like an otg assist. Now consider trying to catch a run away phoenix with missles or haggar etc. As the game has evolved most people are doing 800-900k damage combos off their main point character anyways so whats the difference between ammy and phoenix. You still have the threat of d.Phoenix on your team but could use her in a point character role. She has good assists and mixups, I’d love to see some people break out second slot phoenix’s. Her biggest downside is she can die to random super + dhc but I don’t think that should be a big enough deterent.
Definitely. I see top players simply fully relying on only Phoenix. She requires barely any skill. You might as well hit the slot machines because that’s what Phoenix stands for.
Dark Phoenix, Xfc 3:
[SIZE=3]Teleport behind or in front, hope opponent makes mistake and you kill him, If the opponent does guess the correct position he blocks (and possibly punish with x-factor).[/SIZE]
[SIZE=3]It’s a boring character to play against or with and if she were to be nerfed a lot of players would drop.[/SIZE]
Why is it a ‘problem’ if he’s trying to fill the gap with Jill? I’d certainly want to see how much technology he can advance with her rather than him switching to one of the upper tiers and make his team look like everyone else’s.
And if he does make it work, it’s less likely that folks will call him out for ‘riding (Phoenix/Upper Tier)’ to victory.
You know, because if he picked one of the top tiers some idiot would then change the statement to “Clockw0rk is a tier whore”.
It’s in the game… use it. As broken as you may think it is. Any competitive activity doesn’t get you wins through being the ‘honourable’.
As for not being able to play normal teams, I wholly concur with this, because both sides play differently when there is a Phoenix on a team. Phoenix players should definitely try to have a non-Phoenix team on the side.
I still see a lot of potential in Jill. Anyone that can overhead that constantly that fast when they get in is going to be a problem. Some characters dont even have an overhead. In this game you can get by not having an overhead as long as you have a strong left right mix up but some characters like Captain America need an assist to even do a left right mix up.
Playing Phoenix is strong because it completely changes the way your opponent has to play the game. It changes the way the Phoenix player has to play also but the onus is on the opponent to completely drop their normal gameplan because it will prove rather ineffective against a Phoenix team. You can’t just go turning on XF if you catch the point and assist character in a combo on a Phoenix team because then you lose your XF and give her crazy meter to make it easier for her to turn into D.Phoenix. Which means if you killed her first 2 characters by doing the level 1 XF 2 for the price of one strategy normally that’s a great strategy because you only have to fight one character left that has a level 3 XF that you can lame out. Unfortunately if you do this to a Phoenix team you now have to fight 2 characters. Although they both have little health…the first character pretty much beats half the cast on paper and the 2nd character you have to run away from for 20 seconds just to have a shot of killing her unless you’re like 4 or 5 characters. The only other thing you can hope for against the 2nd character is that she whiffs a fireball where you can hit her safely without her cancelling into super.
At the same time I feel it will be very difficult for a Phoenix player to win a major event even though she is the best the game has to offer as far as raw power. The issue with her is that she can instantly die to random shit like a mix up after a snap back or some guy mashing super even when she’s XF’d up in D.Phoenix. You are the best in the game but if someone swings something at you one time when you were trying to set something up and it kills you? Playing Phoenix effectively pretty much requires you to do like a no health loss run in a Metal Slug game but if you get hit one time…that’s usually it and as time goes on people will learn to just turtle up in the corner against XF3 D.Phoenix and use every little resource they can to burn out her ability to stomp out 3 characters.
When every little anti Phoenix strategy is used regular against Phoenix teams then the issues will start shifting to Phoenix. Anytime their Phoenix gets snapped in before the 5 meters they’re going to have to worry about the threat of Akuma assist plus Wolvie high low mix up that could potentially one shot their character. Even when they turn into D.Phoenix they’ll have to worry about someone running into the corner and burning out their XF, one shot XF guard cancel kills and Akuma/Dormamu one shot full screen supering pretty much anything they try to do due to the heavy start up and recovery on her specials. Eventually playing Phoenix wont be so much about “i have this broke character” it will be more so about “i have to keep this character alive” and a character like that will never see regular success in majors IMO. A character with such powers does great against people who don’t think about what to do when she is on a team but those that meticulously pick apart what they can do and how they should strategize around her it will be really tough to not have something stupid happen to your Phoenix at a major.
I’ve watched enough streams to notice that a lot of top players will change their team to anchor Phoenix for a better chance to win, rather than relying on their current team and changing tactics.
That speaks volumes to me, even as a casual player.
Yeah there’s definitely a level of play where people are going to put Phoenix on their team to give them an immediate chance of winning but in the end I see it as a 2 way thing. People picking up Phoenix to try to give themselves a crutch towards winning tournaments will eventually see a downfall in players being better than characters. Phoenix is just too random to see consistent success when it comes down to having to play multiple matches in tournament. The only way she could get close is if people start using abstract strategies like burning meter and XF early to kill off important characters and then relying on the power of regular Phoenix to win the match after getting enough of a lead on the other team. Which could work but would still do better with a non Phoenix team. Eventually when people learn to burn out her XF as D.Phoenix and constantly force her into snap back situations it’s going to be an issue of a character that always has to deal with the possibility of death.
I have always said that regular Phoenix is good enough on her own if she just had a bit more health. As it is the only reason people use her now is for Dark Phoenix, which I agree is a crutch. A generally effective crutch in XF lvl 3 but still a crutch.
I tend to think that she stops being a crutch at a certain level of play. Sure at a casual or mid level of play you see a ton of people that win purely on DPh comebacks, but at that higher level, you see people actually using there other two characters. If you’ve seen Green Ace or Viscant play you know what I’m talking about. Hell even Clock has been stepping up his game recently and is actually putting in work with Ammy/Doom.
An interesting thing about Clock’s situation, in my opinion, is that it wasn’t until he started using his Jill team that he seemed more capable with Ammy/Doom on his Phoenix team. So in that regard, you could make a case for her being a crutch character.
If what ComboFiend did tonight doesn’t prove Phoenix will never be consistent, I dont know what will. She’s good but when people think and limit Dark Phoenix’s ability to perform mix ups and burn out her XF she just wont last in a consistent matter. A good player of Phoenix will run through all the pot monsters and then run into a good player and get snapped in early and lamed out later.
Ya, all the best players can beat her. People just need to get better before they scream nerf. I hate phoenix like everyone else as well. But she is beatable.
As a Phoenix player, people always talk about snap-backs as a counter, but tonight at WNF I was snapped in 4 or 5 times, I got hit by it once and still won by catching an assist with Wolverine. I just dash up-back, throw 3 balls, land while you block and hard tag back (1 free combo for you, 2 free bars for me). What you really need is any good answer to her, and some practice against her to use it, then you win easily. These include:
-Dormammu Stalking Flare, XFC Stalking Flare, Chaotic Flame as Dark Phoenix comes in before she hits the ground.
-Magneto lvl 3 (or similar) when regular Phoenix is at 4.9 bars or D.Phoenix is not super jumping.
-Doom rays all over the screen blowing up her balls and confirming into super.
-Any good random hyper mixup.
-Any good mixup into a combo that isn’t blown up by feather spam.
-Laming her out.
-Unblockable snap-back setup.
Finally, when you have 3 low health characters, no x-factor left, and none of the options above; and I have Dark Phoenix with x-factor ready, you already lost. First guy gets chipped out with feather spam and balls, second guy gets a trap/teleport mixup, third guy gets chipped out to 2 traps and a super. It makes it look like Phoenix is doing an insane amount of work for the team taking everyone out, but you lost the meta-game long before she got on the stage. At least have one of the options above ready as a counter-pick. Yes, she’s a crutch, but so is your level 3 Akuma/Sentinel/Task/etc.
I mainly use Arthur to deal with her using his Lv3, unless I’m mistaken it will kill a DP instantly. I’v seen many players use her as a crutch and iv often thought the same thing my self. But on the flip side iv seen some people pull some very nice combos off with her, more often than not though this isn’t the case, I do believe she is a crutch character for a lot of people, if they tweaked her a bit i don’t think we would see that many Phoenix players anymore.
Yup…that pretty much sums up what 90 percent of people play her for. The random factor level 3 Dark version that 2 percent of people know how to deal with in an effective manner.
She’s not a crutch per se, but most people basically use her as one, forsaking everything just so they can get that Level 3 XF Dark Phoenix and mash whatever for two hit kills.