On Chris:
[details=Spoiler]Chris is an interesting character. He is often passed off as nothing more than a subpar zoner in a game where there are zoners better than him and overall zoning just not being very good. This could not be farther from the truth.
While initially it seems like Chris’s moves work towards keepaway, there is an underlying agression underneath all of his game. By that I mean, all of his moves are little ticks in the armor of your opponent, daring them to come and take a swing at you up close. His machine gun and shotgun are not duckable, and force considerable chip even at long distance. His grenades explode upon contact with him and have noticeable AoE, which can throw any opponent off his game. His magnum is extremely high durability, which allows it to plow through most other forms of projectiles in a sort of counter effort. Counter is the word I would use to describe Chris.
He counters your offense in wierd ways, and forces the opponent to come in close, where he has pretty solid options of countering offense still. For example, Chris is blessed with having pretty decent frame data, his s.h being about -2 on block with a large push. Using this, he can cancel that hit on block or hit into an H grenade, which has a bit of startup that is usually covered by the block or hitstun. The mind game then comes in that tagging Chris with any move at this point will make the grenade explode, and pop the opponent high up in the air, which allows Chris to land his extremely damaging ground BnB with the additional 130,000 from the grenade tacked on…that’s a dead character for more than half of the viable cast.
Another way he can force the opponent to move is his hyper combo, Grenade Launcher. There are many characters that have a move that is pretty much safe to throw out from almost full screen that is supposed to force you to just block. Dormammu’s Stalking Flare and Storm’s Hail Storm come to mind here. However, both are plagued with either a lack of speed (Dormammu) or long startup (Storm). This is where Chris takes advantage. While having a bit of startup, it’s nowhere near the 20+ frames of startup that the other two supers have. The first hit also comes out fast, and that’s the key to it. Every grenade has high priority projectile durability, which means hitting another projectile of lower or similar durability cancels that one out. Storm and Dormammu’s are on the same level and have high priority, so Chris’s initial ice shot cancels the other one out. However, whereas this means that Dormammu and Storm are locked in an animation that forces them to stand still, Chris continues on with his or in Storm’s case, is hit out but does not actually take damage, therefore FORCING the opponent to either DHC that either wastes a meter or at worst sends a character off to his death if the DHC is poor, and lastly, leave the character to be killed by Chris’s monstrous damage.
The last type of offense he counters are the long range keepaway/zoning types, which are becoming plentiful in UMvC3. Here, one of Chris’s buffs to his game significantly helps here. The answer to countering here lies in his Prone Shot. Prone shot was not a good move in MvC3; it had 27 frames of startup and the lag between each shot in the prone position was very long, not to mention the almost . Now it was reduced greatly to 10 frames of startup, which means that going into it from even midscreen is not really a hassle anymore. The best part is just how low his profile gets. There are very very few moves that can hit Chris if your opponent is firing projectiles on the horizontal plane, and now, the prone shot has extremely reduced recovery, so he can fire off shots pretty fast, and there is a bit of stutter to them, so they will stuff every move your opponent does if they get desperate and try to mash on specials and non-invincible hypers. While the Prone Position does leave you in a bit of a vulnerable state, there are two ways to get around this. One is the very quick recovery, which is 5 frames, and even faster if you hold up to jump. This allows Chris to visually recognize a threat coming and and jump to either chicken block or use an air throw. The other tactic a lot of people worry about is teleporting, specifically cross up ones. Chris has a unique answer to this that takes advantage of a sort of glitch in the way the game engine works. When Chris is crossed up, he is forced to stand because the game can’t recognize him in the prone position not facing an opponent. When he gets up, for whatever reason, he’s completely invincible until he gets up. So if a Phoenix or Dr. Strange teleports behind you, any move they throw is vulnerable to a throw because their move will go right through Chris.
So what does it all mean? Chris can force you to come near him or do a move that is not advantageous to to you which he can counter and kill you off of. Frustrating with Prone Shot to the point where you are forced to approach, which starts up the grenade mindgames, as well as Chris’s very long range Standing H and Crouching M, which are relatively quick (10 and 8 frames respectively) and have quite a bit of range, particularly s.H. Maybe in the fight to combat his Prone Shot, you take to the skies and maybe airdash your way in. With no way to block as you airdash now, Chris can jump up and land a simple MHS air hit into a full combo on the ground, or air throw, or stand up quickly and throw out a flamethrower, which covers the unique area around his head and is now cancellable, so if there is a misread, a simple cancel to shotgun or landmine can save you. And he can force a character to burn an x-factor or waste a meter DHC’ing if he uses his Grenade Launcher hyper to stop projectile type hypers.
Now all of this would be for naught if Chris didn’t bring the pain…which he does, in spades. Assuming you are playing with his best possible assist (Strider Hiryu), then his typical BnB does 860k, and because the combo builds 1.25 meters (Chris builds incredible meter, due to natural huge meter build and flamethrower, which builds about half a meter if inserted into a combo at all), Chris can use a second meter to make it do 1,024k, which means a dead character for the most part. For a landed magnum, from 3/4 of the screen away, he can do 863k for one bar (That is built int he course of the combo), and 1,017k if an extra bar is burned. Chris’s damage went up due to being able to hyper combo cancel his d+H OTG gunshot into his Sweep Combo hyper, which was also changed so the last 7 hits of it OTG, which tacks on quite a bit more damage. I have yet to test, but the recent flamethrower buff may actually add to these combos meter build and damage capabilities, but this needs more testing.
Overall, I think Chris is a fantastic character mostly due to the way that there are some characters that are very relevant in this metagame (Hawkeye, Nova, Wolverine, Dormammu) that Chris either does very well or beats. However, due to how I feel Strider is very necessary to keep Chris’s defense and damage to their highest capabilities, I feel I can only put him in the B tier, which means that he is good but is reliant on an assist or two to realize his max potential…which is very high ;D[/details]
