I feel like all this talk about whether or not to nerf her and how good Dark Phoenix is kinda doesn’t matter. IMO, the Dark Phoenix mechanic is JUST NOT GOOD. It’s a dumb mechanic. When she’s on a team she completely hogs the entire metagame, and though it’s exciting whenever Dark Phoenix is on the screen the game is full of even better excitement whenever she’s not and other shit’s going on than “OH SHIT GOTTA GET PHOENIX GOTTA GET PHOENIX.” While experimentation is good, it’s also important to realize that an experiment shows flaws in a concept, and I think this is one of those cases where the idea being tossed around ended up sucking. It’s like one of those things where other game devs like Valve or Blizzard drop a feature or an entire game because it just isn’t good. I don’t like the idea of keeping something that’s dumb in just for excitement, so I kinda feel like it’d be best if the Dark Phoenix feature just got thrown out entirely.
Maybe because of the nerfs more people will pick her because they actually like the character instead of becuz she is OP. Who cares if a player will drop her because of various nerfs…if you care about tiers so badly just pick the soon to be annnounced best team in Ultimate and call it a day.
EDIT: I’m still gonna play her occasionally with my friends because she is a fun character, but I’m not going to whine because she is getting nerfed. If you’re a good enough player your skill will suffice and you won’t need to complain about it.
Wow. Just wow. I don’t play Phoenix, have never played Phoenix and probably never will play Phoenix but I will certainly shed a tear for her as the way things are going UMvC3 is going to be down a playable character. I’m glad that you’re so tired of losing to Phoenix that you’d rather have Capcom solve the problem for you but I’m not. I want to be able to solve problems myself not have the ill-informed hand of the Nerf God come down and smite my problem matchups for me.
I actually like hearing “Dark Pheonix Rises” when I play against my peoples. Now if I hear it I’m gonna laugh. lol
Phoenix can be answered and many characters are on her level in terms of power. But not everyone is, and the main problem is that she forces teams to play aggressively that normally don’t want to be aggressive at all.
Are you running a zoning/keepaway team, or characters with poor rushdown (Chris, Deadpdool, Arthur, Ryu etc)? Well then you lose to Phoenix teams for free. Zoning/keepaway guarantees her team will get 5 bars before she dies, and then you’re boned.
She also makes portions of the cast unplayable because they have 0 answers to jump-back-fireball spam.
If you aren’t playing a Phoenix team, you have to be designed to answer Phoenix teams. No other character demands you answer them like that. You don’t have to plan your team around answering “Wesker” or “Magneto”. You just make a good team to answer the other best characters in the game. Phoenix is the only character that can beat your team at character select.
“I can’t play this point against Phoenix teams, he has poor mix-up and can’t deal with jump-back-fireball spam if I fail to get the mix-up.”
“I can’t play this anchor against Phoenix teams because he has no options against Phoenix or Dark Phoenix.”
etc etc. Nerfing jump-back-fireball spam is good (though I hope she can still teleport after throwing one), but the biggest thing is that more characters need to be relevant in the fight against her. And rather than changing everyone else’s toolsets to get to that point, it’s easier just to nerf her.
I can’t believe the amount of people that say phoenix is fine and that they can deal with it because there are so many tactics. Didn’t the best 7 players in the world get destroyed by phoenix?
Actually, the Wesker/Haggar/Phoenix team is more like 95/99/180.
It’s all about team synergy. Using Phoenix with characters that don’t build meter effectively and/or need meter to do their damage is just a poorly comprised team, and that has nothing to do with Phoenix. Not much different than picking the Haggar assist and then using Magneto as your point character. Neither are bad choices, but you’re not gonna get nearly the same effectiveness as someone that can OTG easily like Wesker or Dante.
Bold=This. Back to what I was saying, to beat a scrub, you must think like a scrub. If you’re not playing Phoenix, you have to be built to play AGAINST Phoenix the way I see it. Nerfing her to that extreme destroys the purpose of making her that way in the first place. Its real sad that Capcom answers to their fans by rebalancing the game in the most extreme way possible. But hopefully Phoenix’s will stay Phoenix’s. By that I mean the people who were playing Phoenix for Dark Phoenix will continue playing her for that reason, because if it aint for that, theres definitely no reason to play Phoenix now. And Phoenix isn’t the only one either. Let’s not forget Wolverine, Dante, Wesker getting unnecessary nerfs too.
I just wish they’d forget about nerfing and get to buffing. Jill, Shuma, Hsien-Ko, Felicia, Spiderman, Chris, Cap, Morrigan, etc. They all are in great need of the Buff Staff.
It doesn’t help that Phoenix’s design means she is either a god tier character or a trash tier character. There is absolutely no middle ground whatsoever when it comes to balancing Phoenix due to her “gimmick”.
Most people don’t even understand what makes DPh so powerful. Yes, XF3 is herp derp, but lots of characters have unblockable(ish) XF3. Combofiend’s Spencer is no joke in XF3 either. The main advantage that DPh gets over every other XF3 character (in fact, every other character in the game) is that she is immune to XF3 shenanigans on entry.
Consider this: if, when Phoenix was killed with 5 bars, instead of exploding, Phoenix simply disappeared and then Dark Phoenix fell on the screen like every other character does after a kill. DPh kill rate would immediately skyrocket because she would be subject to the same 50/50 mixups as everyone else. The fact that DPh is the only character in the game that gets a free, almost-perfectly-safe reset on entry gives her a huge advantage over the rest of the crowd.
Imagine if other characters just appeared on the screen (invincibly) in place of their dead comrade. How many characters do you see die immediately on the left/right mixup (with TK trap) on entry?
As for the Phoenix “nerfs”; in the videos I’ve seen so far, XF2 still lasts 20 seconds, so I’m not sure how much of a nerf XF actually took. 1 action per jump is a legit nerf… for normal Phoenix, which almost doesn’t matter. (It’s also a really lazy nerf.) Side air exchange is not a Phoenix nerf at all; since every Phoenix player will counter side 100%, in practice it means that Phoenix opponents get down exchange for free. I don’t know about you, but if someone said “We’re going to fix Phoenix by giving her opponents more meter!”, I wouldn’t have been impressed.
Yeah as long as your team doesn’t get laser lined to death by traps when they fall in, run to the corner and burn it out. The problem is if she’s by herself even if you have all 3 characters…if one dies they all have like a 70 percent chance of getting laser line trapped to death.
Even in Ultimate beating Phoenix will still be about killing her before the 5 bars. The H shot nerf does nothing because she doesn’t even need the H shot. Traps and Contra jabs are way better than shots for Dark Phoenix. Balancing Phoenix will mostly revolve around whether or not they toned down her power and time in XF3. The best the H shot nerf is going to do is make it so she can’t lame out snap backs as hard and buy herself time to get away from characters that can’t cross her up in mid air into combos like Wolvie. If Phoenix gets 5 meters she’ll be the same broke BS unless they tone down her XF3.
I don’t mind her being broken in XF3 DP since that’s the point but it’d be nice if there was just a bit more of a leeway. It’s like you’re fighting two broken things at once and that’s too much. Something has to change with her in XF3 or she’ll most likely anchor win Evo next year too.
I’d say that the easiest fix would be just to make Dark Phoenix a level 5 super. The problem with Phoenix IMO is that you’re getting 4 characters, this way when Phoenix dies she is just dead and to activate Dark you have to do it yourself.
If they did that, I wouldn’t mind everything else except maybe those ridiculous teleports.
I’ve played Jean since day 1 and have been hyped since she was announced as she is one of my favorite Marvel/X-men characters. As I feel at times she is op, I really think it was X-Factor that caused a lot of the saltiness. The amount of damage and meter built is crazy and definitely needs to be toned down but in reality this is why Capcom put her in the game to begin with, she was supposed to be this powerful shes freaking Jean Grey/Phoenix.
I just don’t understand the hate for some of the top players using her. The whole point is to win and you play characters that give you the best chance to. I plan on still using Jean in UMVC3 even with the nerfs, just means I need to practice more to make her effective. There will always be people who will complain about the top tier characters, some with legit arguments and some who are lazy and don’t want to work to figure out ways to beat them. Wouldnt be surprised if we get another version after Ultimate if Phoenix Wright, Vergil or somebody else is considered god tier
I don’t get that mindset of “the character is OP in X so it’s ok for them to be broken in MvC3.” If you applied that logic, most of the Marvel cast would be nigh-invulnerable or have outrageous healing factors. I mean, just take Wolverine - if you took him at comic-book status, only Magneto and Dark Phoenix would be able to realisticly take him down - he’d just heal through everything and keep coming!
Phoenix is broken - yes, most of it may be due to X-Factor - but it’s still there. Saying that it’s justified due to her status in the comics doesn’t mean anything when it comes to the game. At the end of the day, we’re all playing this game to win and have fun, but nobody likes it when there are grossly overpowered/broken characters dominating the rest of the cast. Look at how pissed off Street Fighter fans are at the state of AE with Fei Long and Yun having outrageous advantages over the majority of the cast. The balance is so out of whack they are already working on a patch to even things out more.
If I could suggest a change, I’d say make Dark Phoenix a 5 bar power-up mode that lasts the rest of the match, but it has to be manually activated and any damage she’s taken so far doesn’t get restored, and you can’t just sit on it and get ressurected. In exchange, her health doesn’t diminish.
I would actually really like Phoenix the way she is even with all the crazy bullshit, if they just toned her damage (especially in X-Factor) waaaaaaaay down. Like…down to 20-30% of current. By design she’s a character who can do some really interesting things, keeps the intensity of the match high, and always has to watch for just 1 hit that will kill her. If she were like this i.e. better than every character and one hit kills her but she has to get more openings than everyone else to kill someone then I think we could all enjoy watching and playing her.
Buff her HP, nerf the rest. Make her closer to a real character.
SDCC build already had the largest Phoenix nerf possible, Strider’s Vajira assist. Whee.
Fuck nerfs. Phoenix is fine, the only thing that made her OP was the ridiculousness of XF3; once that’s sensibly dealt with in UMvC3 there will be no reason to nerf her, other than people’s tears. She was a really originally designed character and instead of encouraging the new design and features of our fighting games half of the community whines and cries because… I don’t even know why.
And is DP OP? of course she is. She’s supposed to be. But her health goes down by itself, she dies in one combo and she needs 5 bars to even show up on the field. You should be able to deal with that now, imagine how able you will be with all the meter draining mechanics that we were already shown?
Now, Wolverine and Wesker? those are the kind of characters i could understand people to want a nerf for. One is stupid as hell and the other has no significant drawbacks and can run any spot on any team. And none die in one successful mixup or loses their health by just standing there, yet nobody is making as much of a fuss over either (ok maybe over Wolvie, kinda, but certainly not over Wesker). I swear, sometimes I don’t understand this community at all.
That’s actually true given that the air zoners are all female. Anyway, Phoenix’s flight mode is slow enough that in the SDCC build you could wait for flight, and then on reaction Dante/Dorm teleport, or Strider assist into death. Air X-factor doesn’t help as much as you may think either, as a good prediction on that will get you Gravity Squeezed out of the X-factor recovery frames(Why do people still act like X-factor is 100% safe at all times and has no recovery? That’s only out of Block Stun folks).