I’m not going to beat around the bush or sugar coat this at all - there was a lot about MvC3 that made me salty. A lot of shit that some characters were capable of that would just make me toss up my controller in frustration and roll my eyes. A lot of things that I personally felt needed to be changed or retweaked in order for the game to even begin to be considered ‘balanced.’
I know that this is not a popular opinion around here, but I am a firm believer that the answer to balance doesn’t solely reside in ‘improve the other characters, but don’t nerf the good ones!’ mainly due to the fact that no matter how powerful you make low tier character X that won’t make top tier character Y any less powerful. It may affect character Y’s popularity depending on how powerful character X was made, but then you just end up with two broken characters kicking sand in everyone’s faces, and that’s not fun. No, I don’t believe every character should play exactly the same or have the same stats, that’s just stupid. Although ridiculous shit is fun for awhile - after all, it is Mahvel, baby! - but eventually reality sets in and you (hopefully) realize that it makes the game less fun overall.
Sometimes nerfs are needed. Sometimes nerfs actually improve the game as a whole by giving everyone more of a fighting chance. Having said that, these are the top 3 nerfs I am looking forward to in UMvC3. Feel free to post your own; you know you want to!
1: Magneto disruptor and dash speed nerfs. I always hated the fact that Magneto could go from full screen zoning with the fastest beam in the game that also managed to produce ridiculous chip damage to in-your-face high-low mixups in the blink of an eye. Combined with basically any other zoning assist (Sentinel Drones, Hidden Missiles) most members of the cast would find themselves locked down in the corner facing a slow death with few to no options. His health was low, sure, but actually getting a hold on Magneto is usually a feat unto itself. If a good Magneto wants to keep you out and is content to play the match that way, good luck!
2: Wolverine Berserker Slash and health nerf. Once again it was decided that one of the fastest, most damaging characters in the game needed a little more oomph, with the answer apparently being to give him a teleport-attack which crossed up and was completely invulnerable during the dash portion. Brilliant! Berserker slash alone, when combined with another fast, screen covering assist (Akuma’s tatsu or you’re doing it wrong) pretty much guaranteed that one wrong left/right or high/low guess versus Wolverine’s constant onslaught would result in quick and painful death - especially once everyone caught on to the fact that Wolverine could cause so much damage in X-Factor 1 that he could easily kill off two characters before it expired. Not even going to bring up the Derp Kick since it wasn’t changed, but Berserker Slash was brutal enough, especially since you can cancel it into Berserker Charge on hit to continue your combo. To top it off, it was decided that a character who had all this going for him also needed 950k health, meaning in order to actually kill Wolverine you would have to either blow X-Factor, have a healthy stock of meter, or have flawless execution while performing an advanced combo. Brilliant guys!
3: Phoenix air special nerf and health nerf. When this was originally announced I actually thought it was a bit much, but eventually realized that most of the cast didn’t have an answer to the horror that was super-jump h-shot spam. Heavily damaging, multi-hit fireballs that tracked that were placed on a character 3 different extremely fast teleport options was bad enough, let never mind the fact that this is Phoenix we’re talking about here, who always has the threat of Dark Phoenix waiting in the wings. The general consensus to dealing with her was “snap her in early and kill her before 5 bars” though unless you had a solid 50/50 guess set up (which doesn’t always work) snapping in against a decent Phoenix player would only result in you wasting a bar and likely taking some salty balls to the face before she tagged back out. Happy to see it go, but I have the feeling the 1 air special nerf won’t make it to live before being changed to something else.
Bonus salt: DHC and TAC Glitches gone. I think we can all stop kidding ourselves when we refer to them as “tricks” - the fact that Capcom actually went out of their way to remove it in UMvC3 kinda proves that they were never intended in the first place. This is in contrast to combos, which many defenders of the glitches typically compare them to, which were never intended in the first place but actually contributed to the game overall and would eventually become a staple of the series. Happy to see them go.