I actually messed with that team for a bit, the biggest issue I ran into is lack of dhc potential, even being able to do about 950k off a spencer 1 meter, dhc’ing off anything other than a full bnb does almost no damage, and like you can Weskers assist doesnt do much for hawkeye, you cant set up effective unblockables or crossups with it. not a particularly good team overall, i think the wesker/spencer/hawkeye version is substantially stronger
I don’t see how you can run a Spencer team and not prioritize THC effectiveness. Lancer is so freaking good as a THC starter if you have the right stuff backing it up that I feel it’s impossible to ignore. None of Hawkeye’s hypers are at all useful for those purposes, so I could never play him with Spencer.
Yeah, I found that Wesker/Spencer was decent with DHCs but Maximum Wesker into Spencer’s hypers wasn’t super reliable for me, especially in the corner. He’s a great character in all, but I find that Wesker is powerful without a team and doesn’t really help Spencer all that much.
I would need an anchor that has a decent projectile assist and a second character that can also benefit from a projectile assist and does well with meter.
I found that Spencer with Doom’s Plasma beam on anchor to be a great combination, but do you guys have any ideas for a 2nd slot character? Someone that can do well on point but can get lots of damage from a DHC after a Bionic Maneuvers/Bionic lancer would be great.
I’ve experimented with Super Skrull, Nova, Taskmaster Firebrand so far and they all seem to have some decent DHC potential with Spencer.
Dante
Im running IF/frank/spencer. I find the synergy for this to be very fluid. iron fist does a ton of damage and builds good meter. He can set up a crumple state for frank to come in combo, snap a few picks after the knockdown and IF crumple assist into a DHC and get a him to level 3 in one combo. from that point on its shopping cart, pure mixup, and keeping the momentum going in my favor. if it comes to it, i have spencer there for clean up, or some serious come back work.
on a side note, i read that a lot of ppl are running spencer on point, which in my opinion is a little “out there”. spencer has been made a staple as one of the best anchors out there. he is even pretty good as a middle man, but why would you run him on POINT?? I dont know about him building meter to support a team. its like some ppl have a team full of ANCHORS lol. thats why your team doesnt work well. obviously having a good assist is key in this game, but if the actual character doesnt fit your team its not 3v3 anymore, its 3vs2. and you will loose.
Spencer’s metergain is not good and he could in no way be considered a battery. I dislike the thought of running him on point for this reason. However, I still would prefer to run him in the second slot rather than the third as I feel having an assist and THC capability enables too many good things to ignore.
So I’ve been messing around with Zero/Spencer/Sentinel. I’m not too familiar with Spencer but he and Zero (surprisingly) have good DHC chemistry. I want to use H.Shot assist to combat advance guarding when Zero puts on pressure. Sent helps both get in.
Anyway, anything I should know about Spencer? Any ideas or concerns? Like I said, I’m pretty new with him.
That I can agree with, his meter gain isnt the greatest, but even alone he is superb. He has TWO OTGS, his 2 meter bnb does 850K no assist, and his simple full screen grapple to Hyper combo does around 650K (depending on whether or not you cancel the extra grapple and armor pierce into the hyper). Spencer can hold his own and clean up the mess.
You guys shouldn’t sleep on Wesker/Spencer/Hawkeye. Spencer’s Beta assists allows Wesker to pull off some legit resets that people can’t tech roll out of, and he can OTG gunshot from anywhere on the screen to continue a combo.
Wesker also makes an amazing battery for the team since he can kill with resets alone and allow Spencer/Hawkeye to come in with 4/5 meters to play with.
Spencer is a overall solid character. Not too many bad match-ups and he has quite a few good/even match-ups. There are many threads up that have spot on stats and tech. for Spencer, so I advice you view the threads for more insight. But my advice to you as far as team building would be to see how he fits in with your team as a whole and figure what his role is. Zero,Spencer,Sentinel is a very interesting team in my opinion. I will say that Spencer can eat quite a bit of meter, as does Sentinel. The problem with this is that Spencer doesn’t build meter very well. And if I’m not mistaken Zero has low health, eats a lot of meter, but builds a good amount. Basically what I’m saying is be aware of your teams needs, know how they work with one another, and be sure that they do not cloud one another. The DHC chemistry is good, cause that is needed, but be sure you can get the kill and get Spencer in and out.
I agree that his meter gain isn’t the best, but he doesn’t necessarily need meter to kill, only to inspire the fear of god with Bionic Lancer. The 1 bar he gets at the start of a match is enough for that and he should be building over a bar in most of his combos. On average I get about 850k meterless, which kills most of the top tier anyway if you’ve chipped away at them (and if not, you can always cancel the last vertical grapple into a super for over a million damage with 1 bar). Meter is only a problem with him once the tank is completely dry.
Of course team composition is very important in this sense. I’ll concede that some teams will work better with him in second, but if you’re set up to maximize the number of vertical grapples (i.e. Doom missiles and either an OTG assist or something that enable another vert grapple) he’s not a bad battery at all.
I strongly disagree with ever putting him last though, if I ever use two meters in a combo, it’s to DHC to someone else after maneuvers. Using a super mid-combo is extremely sub-optimal imo. He’s not a strong enough anchor to put him in that spot either.
I always found him hard to play because I couldn’t convert stray hits into combos and my execution for the double motions was tough in Vanilla, but I’ll give him another shot. He seems like he has a lot of tools, would he be better on point compared to Spencer?
I play Spencer on point, mostly because I like playing him the most. I think his best position is in second place with a good battery character in front who can do a combo, otg with Spencer assist into a mixup/reset situation. I used to play Wesker in Vanilla exactly for this reason, there’s great synergy between those two, but I got absolutely sick of playing him. I don’t think Spencer in first is actually that bad of a meter builder, he obviously doesn’t build as much as other characters, but he’s not bad at all. I wouldn’t use him if you just want to build meter for a different character since Spencer wants that meter for himself.
All that aside, Dante is a pretty good battery character. He’s got very long combo’s and lots of otg oppurtunities to get a Spencer slant shot mixup going. You’ll need a very solid beam/projectile assist to cover his approach, you mentioned Doom who has a very solid beam assist. If you’re not afraid to use Sentinel as your last character then you could always go with Drones, but that assist is a lot harder to protect than Doom’s beam.
I’d say if you’re willing to put the time in learning Dante he’s a great character and has good DHC potential with Spencer. Combo’ing into his Million Dollars will net you free arms and/or maneuvers, and if you hit a B. Arm with Spencer you can DHC into Devil Trigger for a nice otg combo. THC potential with Spencer/Dante is great since Dante has the longest hyper in the game, it covers Arm well and gives you a mixup oppurtunity or you can continue a combo with grapples, bomber, wallbounce and what not.
Not entirely sure about Dante/Spencer stuff, Dante has a lot of otg oppurtunities though. I think you should definitely look at Sentinel, Doom or Taskmaster for your last character. Good DHC’s with Spencer making stuff relatively safe on block and dealing lots of damage. Drones assist is the best one but it’s harder to protect and you get a bad anchor. Task and Doom are both good assists too and better anchors.
Spencer??850k meterless ?? where they do that at?? must be playin with damage at the highest. you cant even get past 650K without tossing one Hyper in there ~_~
Im all for putting spencer wherever you put him cause he can do it all. im just sayin, for my team, he fits in as a anchor better than anything else.
I can get 1,050,000 meterless if we’re talking absolute optimal situations.
You can get that much if you use assists to get in more unscaled vertical grapples. Solo, no, Spencer can’t hit that high meterless, but DS plays him on point with assists to maximize damage output, so
ya, i guess if thats where hes coming from, but i was referring to solo damage. but yea, hes good for that too
been playing spencer since day one vanilla…always used spencer/task/doom(missles) and i loved it…looking to sub out tasky for someone else, but having a hard time deciding who to put time into…i like characters with a good amount of health that hit hard…tasky’s assist was obviously used to get me in, and the missles were used for combo extenders…wouldnt mind having another character fill that void, but another character to extend combo’s can be fine too. ive messed around with hulk, nova, vergil, firebrand, ghost rider, cap, nemesis… all fun, and all work…just looking for suggestions, ultimately, i may just end up staying with tasky though.
refuse to play wesker, so please dont suggest him.
I’m actually in a very similar situation as you, as I replaced my Amaterasu (Cold Star) anchor with Dr. Doom (Hidden Missiles) when I switched over from Vanilla to Ultimate, so I’m currently running the same team as you (although I’ve experimented with switching Taskmaster and Doom’s positions on the lineup for a different anchor experience).
As I’ve also been considering switching out Taskmaster, I’ve been doing quite a bit of theory-fighting as to what would make a great assist for Spencer and mesh well with the rest of the team (I was considering making a write-up about the topic). Since I’m pretty sure that a lot of people will be pairing Spencer with Dr. Doom’s assist, it’s definitely a topic that bears exploring. Spencer has weaknesses as a character, and getting in safely against solid zoning is definitely one of them (to be honest, so is effectively defending a slow assist like Hidden Missiles), so a point Spencer using Hidden Missiles as a combo-extending assist would really need a powerful horizontal assist of some kind to help him out. I’ll have a run-down of about a dozen characters written up in a couple of days (I’ll post it here) and what they do for a Spencer/Dr. Doom team, but in the meantime, I’m curious as to others’ suggestions. Aside from obviously useful assists for the team (Dagger Toss, Unibeam M, Quick Shot (Greyhound), Sentinel Force L, etc.) I’m curious if people have any experiences with more esoteric horizontal assists, like Whirlwind M, Low Voltage H, or even Rolling Buckler L.
I’m running Spencer/Taskmaster/Doom myself for a couple of solid reasons. I’ve considered the following other assists: Greyhound Hawkeye and Charge Sentinel. I personally think Taskmaster and Hawkeye are just plain better than Sentinel, plus his assist is easily shot down by Wesker (who has always been the most played character in my country even before Ultimate).
So that left Hawkeye and Task, the assists are really similiar. So this is mostly about DHC and THC potential. DHC-wise, Taskmaster is a bit safer as opposed to Gimlet/Scatter Shot, since after a Bionic Arm to DHC you will most likely be close to the opponent. Greyhound gives you the Gimlet for THC which ruins the mixup
potential after a blocked/hit THC, whereas Taskmaster gives you a bit better options when the THC is blocked.
Also I personally like Taskmaster more than Hawkeye, he fits my playstyle a lot better.
Trish is pretty interesting as well since there’s a lot of THC potential when you use her Low Voltage assist, and a lot of cool combo potential with Trish’s… spinny scythe super, raw tag, UVG.