Not really. You have plenty of option for battery characters. Wesker, She Hulk, Thor, or any char with high health high damage can be a good battery character. You choose your “battery” and give them an assist. Magneto can open you up with combos after his grab, Wesker has a 1 frame command grab to set up combos with, Ammy has her insane airgrab as well.
Then all of them plus Phoenix has zoning tools that are awesome and are quite mobile.
Aerial Exchanges also help characters that build less meter out on Phoenix teams. Suddenly any team is building multiple bars with one confirmed hit.
I feel like Phoenix teams do best when they don’t structure around specific batteries for her but just complete top tier characters that do well regardless. I think this because
[LIST=1]
[]Sometimes Phoenix gets snapped in and dies, and it helps to make a comeback when you’ve got Magneto and Dante lined up with 4 bars and XFactor in the bank.
[]You get less assists to play with then normal, so you better not need them for combo extensions.
[*]Fuck it, you’re already playing Phoenix to win. Play other top tier characters. You’re not doing this for credit on the internet.
[/LIST]
The likes of She Hulk, Magneto and Ammy all are a lot less effective without their hypes. Then I have seen people use Zero or Storm with Phoenix which is even more laughable because they are more or less complete garbage without their hypes. Wolverine and Dante are less effective without their hypes but can still work. Only Wesker seems to be very good without hypes (his hypes aren’t that useful to begin with outside of combos). Then you have the problem of most characters with strong assists either not being that good without using assists themselves and/or not being that good without X Factor (Iron Man, Tron, Haggar, Doom, Dorm, Sentinel all counts). Only Akuma is quite good without assists or X Factor. Having Phoenix completely wreaks your team building options and is a strong limit on how good your 2 non-Phoenix characters can be. This is something those calling Phoenix top tier or even a tier on her own seems to be ignoring. This is also why those Phoenix players seem to have a hard time winning tournaments with her.
Problem is you need to play pheonix for her to even come into existence. Honestly, Pheonix really isn’t top tier because she’s at such a disadvantage when she get’s snapped in. Really the only time I see really good players lose to dark pheonix is when they get hit by a large number of exchanges so they fill their meter VERY quickly. Really pheonix is more a way to easily luck into win than anything consistent. That’s why you don’t see lots of pheonix players winning tournaments her entire gameplan has holes that require large amounts of luck to cover.
Not even counting characters like Dormamu or Zero that can just chip her ass to death soooo easily.
She-Hulk - She Hulk + Tron air tech trap is really good (OTG call flame get thrown or block flame into another mixup) she does this until she’s sure the hyper will kill them. During the course of getting thrown like a rag doll, she’s stacking bars. I don’t think she is “a lot” less effective without meter, especially with her mixups on air techs.
Magneto - he builds like 2.X bars, he can actually blow a meter if he felt like it. This dude can probably get to 5 bars without killing the first character if he doesn’t blow meter on shockwave hitting twice in the corner.
Wolverine - when did he enter the “doesn’t need meter to be a threat” group? I see people blowing meter on B. Charge to hit confirm random B. Slashes and to end combos. His damage without ending in Fatal Claw or executing B. Charge at some point doesn’t seem all that extraordinary.
To start, I don’t really count that as much of a weakness. She’s in trouble if she gets snapped in, but she has tons of tools to avoid being killed right away. If your Phoenix gets snapped in and dies, that’s not a matchup issue; you just fucked up. Really, depending on the character, the bar they just spent to snap in Jean probably would have been spent to kill the character that just got beat on in the first place. So the fact that she “can die if she’s snapped in” is sort of moot.
Also, DPh feels like luck to everybody right now because of the fact that everybody doesn’t want to use her out of pride. Whenever someone sees Phoenix, everybody, including the audience and the commentators, wants to see her die, and a lot of players (Filipino Champ, Clockw0rk, and Viscant excluded) either don’t feel like being the bad guy or hate Phoenix on principle. In my opinion, it’s hard to find counters for a character when everybody refuses to use them. Reminds me a lot of Old Sagat.
This. Zero fills any spot easily. I honestly die a little bit inside when people say XF3 morrigan with astral vision is a great anchor, and then I hear people talking shit about Zero as an anchor when he has his Mugen super that allows him do his self unblockables and more stupid shit.
And Zero is probably better than anyone but Mags at opening people up even without assists. He has some seriously dirty stuff, even from full screen.
Also I lol when people try to XF guard cancel through his block strings. This ain’t no wolverine divekick.
His assists are terrible though, only use i’ve found for them is as combo extenders.
If you can’t play a character without X-Factor, then you can’t play the character. My .02.
I also think you might be a little closed minded in your thinking about what is ‘laughable’ or ‘complete garbage.’ While it is true that team composition is stricter for a Phoenix team than a non-Phoenix team, and that some characters are much better at being the battery than others, Marvel 3 is a pretty flexible and creative game, you don’t want to get fouled up by mental rigidity. My .02, again.
Zero’s assists are completely more useful than other characters. Especially since he has the ability to power them all up with sogenmu. Ryuenjin is a decent anti air, hadangeki when powered up gives a decent zone tool and the best one is probably shippuga. Shippuga gets new properties when used as a crossover counter where it gains invincibility and if it hits an opponent allows Zero to go into 800k damage combos with an assist. Which means he can safely get you out of a sticky situation and possibly counter hit a low health character out of the match. It’s also not bad for pressure when used as a regular assist and when powered up gains more active frames.
Oh wow didn’t know that about shippuga. Been using it as a pressure assist and combo extender but holy shit if it’s invuln on CC’s then that is some next level shit.
Yeah the nice thing about shippuga crossover counter is he retains the on point properties of the move so he stays plus 4 on block.
X23’s DP (crescent scythe) assist when used as crossover counter gains invincible frames also but unfortunately it’s totally unsafe on block so you have to know you’re going to hit something.
Zero is better than Logan IMO though. Better assist,safer pressure and able to deal with keepaway due to his ranged moves.
On the Zero discussion,
I agree that Zero is significantly better than Wolverine. With assists he can have just as ambiguous cross ups and his general tools are more universally applicable. I personally think he has a lot of important matches that he just barely wins but the fact that he beats a lot of really good characters is important.
LOL this isn’t related to the discussion at hand but paper liked like 100 posts in a row a few pages back and it’s pretty funny.
Lol I was wondering when someone was gonna mention this
Honestly, I thought everything gained iframes as a crossover counter. People had made a big deal about Shadow Blade doing so, but I’ve noticed Dark Harmonizer gains enough iframes as a crossover counter to last until after it’s fully recovered.
On the topic of Phoenix teams, I really wish people would realize you merely have to **conserve **meter, not horde it. You can and should use meter for a kill unless you’re Wesker, or absolutely sure you can immediately get another touch and finish them. Against problem characters, like Magneto, it’s worth it to go ahead and use a level 3 to end the threat right there, even with Phoenix in the back. You’re better off making sure to eliminate the threats, instead of trying to force a 1v3 comeback. Especially considering that most people currently run their assist only characters in the anchor slot, and all Jean needs to deal with them is Healing Field at most.
Also, I may be alone on this one, but if Phoenix can hit the ground vs Dormammu, I feel that match up is entirely in her favor once you start using TK Overdrive. L starts up faster than her teleports, is a whopping -1 on block at point blank range, projectile immune through out it’s entire active frames. This allows you to hit Dorm out of virtually everything he can do on reaction from quarter to half screen, and if he tries to “bunker up” in the corner vs Dark Phoenix with a flame carpet, makes it pretty easy to negate the carpet and tick throw him back out of the corner. Akuma and Magneto are her worst match ups after she’s hit the ground.
The best pheonix teams are the ones that realize that even regular pheonix is still a ridiculously good character. People like to horde their bar as insurance (or as a crutch).
what do some people thoughts on hulk?
I used to think he was decent , but I don’t think there really is.an excuse for being hit by him.
He’s got decent pressure just no mix up kind of like a weaker form of Taskmaster IMO. 
He’s another one of those characters that is just outclassed by other characters. He does have the capacity to get a lucky H hit and kill a character, which I don’t think can be totally ignored.