So in MVC3 my team is/was Chun/Doom/Phoenix, so the first thing I did when I got UMvC3 the other day was try out my team. Initially after a few ranked matches I thought “sweet this team still works”, but later after quite a few more rounds I began to conclude that Phoenix is just not cutting it anymore. While Chun and Doom are even stronger, Phoenix has just become too much of a liability. This comes as no surprise as we all knew she’d be heavily nerf’d, but the question was/is : is she nerf’d so much that she’s no longer top tier(?), I think so.
Here’s a list of how I think UMvC3 changes are affecting her:
**Only throwing one fireball in the air then returning to the ground: **Not a huge deal because you can still just initiate flight mode, throw one fireball and then teleport (though this does take more time and leaves you more vulnerable than before). If you needed to throw all three fireballs every time in MvC3 then you probably weren’t that good with Phoenix anyways. However if you do accidentally throw a fireball without flight mode, you are wide open as you return to the ground, lame.
**X-Factor damage and duration is turned down: **This doesn’t seem to be a big deal either for Dark Phoenix, still with level 1, 2, or 3 x-factor DP still has more then enough damage capabilities to destroy other characters quickly.
**Meter gain is reduced, and can be stolen with TAC: **This to me is the biggest problem, DP is now a much bigger meter investment. It seems like the meter investment is just no longer worth it because you don’t build meter as quickly as in MvC3. Not to mention a whole bar of meter can be stolen from you with a TAC, sure you can always guard against that, but conversely the other player can always choose to guard against you gaining meter with a TAC too.
Health nerf: I thought this wouldn’t be a big deal since her health was already low, but man Phoenix sure does die easily in UMvC3, get hit once and she’s probably gone.
For other Phoenix players out there what do you think, are you going to replace her? I was planning to replace her for UMvC3 and have now confirmed I will be replacing her.
I think this is for the best. I don’t play Phoenix but now if I lose to a Phoenix player hopefully it’ll be to someone who knows the character and doesn’t throw two balls of saltiness and then teleport into level 3 x-factored mashed crouching light.
Dark Phoenix players will obviously still use crouching light with cross-ups, and there’s nothing wrong with that since its one of DP’s tools. Criticizing that is like complaining about Wolverine players using dive kicks, yeah it may be annoying but its part of there offense so you gotta learn to counter it, or just keep losing and making excuses.
Well it’s one of those things that I know how to counter and could counter offline. Online, the teleport and lag makes defending it too hard for me. I might just have bad reaction times to the teleport, who knows?
I never had major problems with online play with PS3 MvC3, I always thought it was definitely better than SF4 anyways. Just occasionally when I play someone with a bad connection the game would obviously go super slow, but most of the time I didn’t understand why there were so many complaints, maybe its worse on Xbox. Anywho, so far UMvC3 PS3 online play continues to be good.
I think the major nerf you didn’t mention is that her fireballs/traps disappear when she gets hit. Now an anticipated teleport will lead to you dying instead of you just getting poked and your opponent getting hit by fireballs. You can wait until your fireballs hit before you teleport - but then this is pretty obvious and takes away a lot of the mix-up.
Another thing I really noticed is the amount which she slides forwards on cr. B is reduced. Now I can’t hitconfirm into launcher from Dark Phoenix’s cr. A like half screen away which sucks.
The difference is that punishing a dive kick is FAR easier than punishing MASHING cL with DP. There “may” be nothing wrong with it but it’s a scrubby tactic that get completely abused. I’m glad that Jean got all of her nerfs, making her tougher to play. I’m a Phoenix player but it’ll be more refreshing to know that she’ll get dropped by more people just cause of what nerfs she got and what they added to the game mechanics to prevent an easier 5 BARS.
My impressions right now (may change over time) is she just isn’t worth the work anymore. She’s still broken as fuck, but actually pretty team gimping now. I may revise this one though, as I said.
Some thing I doubt I’ll go back on: Strider’s Vajra assist is basically a goddamned hard counter. Dark or not, Phoenix is just fucked by this assist.
I can’t help think the new slower meter building is just a small bump. I’ve been playing the AI and they build meter quicker then me and I’m using TAC meter build. IDK maybe its just me
For me playing phoenix feels alot different. Some of the timing in moves has changed in my combos but thats the only thing that feels different. The other nerfs don’t really bother my gameplay. One thing I took notice is the TK traps, after they fire the bird, can be destroyed by another projectiles. Was that present in vanilla?
Also I can’t seem to land Weskers Lvl3 on Phoenix and catcher during the transformation. I guess she can block earlier then normally now
Yeah but the dive kick doesn’t cost you 5 bars either. There’s plenty of other examples, but the point is whatever you can do to win you should do. Maybe its a “scrubby tactic” if you do that and lose, but if thats part of your offense and you’re winning then you should use it. There’s no such thing as “abusing” a technique in a game when that technique is available to everyone to use. I imagine if we played a game of chess and I killed most of your pieces with my rook then you’d whine about me abusing the rook as a “scrubby tactic”.
so i figured out that when in x factor if ur blocking with phoenix her x factor doesn’t go down. Need someone to confirm but its happened multiple times.
Tried it with shuma and Frank so it actuall seems to be universal. And it doesn’t stop it, it just slows down the speed at which it drains. But when you advance guard, it slows the speed of it more then blocking would. So it would help any character getting pinned by hypers and the opposing team waiting for the XF to end. Very cleaver little mechanic thats not publicly known yet.
Well, it works for both teams, The attacker and the defenders time in X Factor slows. As long as some one Advance gaurds, the time will slow.
No, hitstop and hit stun are two different things. Hit stop is the complete stop the game goes through when a character is hit. It’s really obvious in MvC3/UMvC3 when an assist is being comboed and the entire game becomes extremely jerky. Hitstop is kind of like super freeze, but happens with every hit.
It’s just more risky to play as Phoenix, and running away from her when she got 5 bars just got easier because she can’t put as much stuff on the screen before chasing you, but still, she is as retarded as she should when she turns into Dark Phoenix, I think she’ll be top tier again, even with all those nerfs.
Also, with air xfactor, you can just hard tag her out once he transforms without any fear of a welcome chip setup that would kill her before she touches the ground.