If by mechanics you are talking about mechanics like, Phoenix, Frank, or Pheonix Wright, then yes I would say that. Having a character that must meet some kind of stipulation to be good will almost always wind up broken or awful, in either case I would prefer the game without.
I can’t come up with an example where it has worked out well.
I’d say Gill fits that description or is at least close.
Well look at source material. How can you not make her overpowered when thats all she was. Marvel consistly has to kill her off. Think about it, would you want someone who can wipe out the comic series running around? Capcom, I think wanted a piece of that in MvC3. I don’t think it was a perfect idea, but look at how much people are talking about one specific character. Not to mention how much Anti technology is being developed just for her.
I geuss that is a reasonable point, people do love to hate.
Like I said, I don’t think she should be banned or totally overpowered ala ST Akuma or Gill, but at the same time I really don’t think she’s okay either. I think the game would be better without her.
This isn’t Brawl. That’s why.
Gill was never playable in the arcade version.
Shun Di in Virtua Fighter. And I believe Chin from KoF counts as well.
Besides, to quote Seth Killian from last year “Broken is good, we like broken.”
Broken IS good but when its derpy as fuck and broken thats when shit starts going downhill
I am not complaining about not winning. I have beat countless phoenix players and I spar with one of the best. The problem here like Ve said is how badly she warps the metagame, and how poorly she is designed. Everything revolves around phoenix.
In a game where 4 bars can be built in one combo using a RPS mechanic or/and extended combos, having a character who is pretty much a win button once she’s at 5 bars isn’t really a good idea when those 5 bars are almost too easily accessible.
Like I said, my problem is how she completely changes the way a match is played. Too much pros, no cons at all.
Also, the idea that competitive players all gravitate to the strongest character is a bit silly. If you wanna be good, you’ll need characters that fit your playstyle. That is why in a lot of games with CLEARLY defined S tiers, not all of the competitive players will gravitate towards the highest tiered character. Sagat was S tier in Vanilla SF4, but there were a lot more Ryus and Rogs around.
Don’t know much about KoF, but the big difference with Shun-Di is that while he has the number of drinks thing, it’s not really core to playing him. A similar Marvel example looks like (I say this because I can’t really be certain) is Nova. He uses Red-Life to power up his damage and a few specials. However, it doesn’t really alter his toolset, Nova with red life is not practically a different character. Instead he appears to be a character first a gimmick second.
To over simplify my point, Shun-Di is a character with a gimmick, Phoenix (and other similar designs) are a gimmick with a character tacked on.
As to the Seth Killian quote… I really can’t do much but groan a bit at that…
Well you can’t really argue with a game (MvC3) that at least one MvC2 vet (fanatiq) calls his favorite.
While it play mechanically different, MvC3 still captures the very spirit of MvC2, the fact that it was a touch of death game with high payouts for low risk, resulting in a game with a lot of “stress” associated with it.
So am I the only one who’s played Phoenix for a few hundred games and several months, and felt the frustration of getting blown up when you spend 75% of the match using no meter, two characters and no X factor? The bitch needs a ton of resources, and then you’re gonna get hit by something random and everything goes to shit.
Phoenix/Dark Phoenix is the character that represents “MAHVELL” at it’s purest - high risk, but if you play her right, higher reward.
But there really is no metagame without Phoenix. Phoenix is really the only character that forces anyone to change their standard “opponent is a moving training dummy” game plan otherwise. Both high/low and left/right mix ups are so ridiculously good overall in this game you really don’t give a fuck what your opponent’s team is, or how they will react the vast majority of the time. Obviously I’m over-exaggerating this just like everyone else, but there are very, very few characters in this game that make you actually play the match up instead of seeing who gets to land their training mode shit first.
I will very much agree with you about the gimmicks though. We’d be a better place if the gimmicks had gone the fuck away, damage was toned down to where you could reasonably expect to need 2 clean hits at the least to kill a character, so actually knowing what any given character can actually do would matter.
This one keeps being mentioned and I keep giving the same response - the only damage multiplier that effects meter gain is X-factor. If the Phoenix player is always mashing on side TAC counter, you get free up tags with that cumulative until the combo ends 20% damage multiplier, making all of your combos on the other two characters considerably more efficient in the damage to meter given to the opponent ratio.
While X-factor is still going to be extremely powerful, the change to minimum damage scaling from 50% to 35% will actually make a large difference. Hell, considering that x-factor’s minimum scaling overwrites the characters normal scaling values, Dark Phoenix may actually do less damage with Phoenix rage at the end of a combo than she would without x-factor, for not much gain to the rest of the combo. Dark Phoenix is normally 30% normal/30%special/50% hyper for minimum scaling, during X-factor everyone is 35%/35%/35% now, unless of course that “hypers will now scale in x-factor” bullshit note means X-factor no longer effects hyper scaling at all. That shit still confuses the fuck out of me, since they already scaled down to the minimum of 50%. (Dark Phoenix essentially can’t not scale a combo to minimum damage with those feathers, so a non-XF Phoenix Rage would deal 240k at minimum scaling, and only during 336k if she retains her 200% x-factor damage bonus which is very unlikey. In vanilla Phoenix Rage’s minimum damage during X-factor is 480k. If her X-factor has been toned down to say, normal Jean’s [150%], she’d deal 252k minimum damage with Phoenix Rage, gaining only 12k from X-factor. X-factor levels 1 and 2 would result in an actual damage loss [15% bonus damage from X-factor 1, minimum of 35% would yield 193.2k.]) We won’t really know for sure until we get our hands on the release copy and can check for these values. Given how much they’ve smacked Phoenix with the nerf bat, they made have even slipped a change to Dark Phoenix’s minimum scaling in, for all we know she could do 20%/20%/40% now so X-factor would always be a damage gain.
Another argument to look at, some people are more naturally suited to play fighting games due to faster reflexes or more precise muscle control. So, if you want to ban a character for having a supposed advantage, you need to ban the players that have a real advantage too, such as those with better than average reflexes(essentially every top level player). You can’t just go out and ban anyone, you need to see how it affects the game. Think about all the strategies and combos people come up with… How many of those would have been found if people didn’t have issues(like Phoenix) that they needed to overcome? Marvel should be taken differently than Street Fighter, it is a more unpredictable and fast paced game meant to have quick turnarounds. Most people here come from a street fighter background which is a much slower paced game, and because of that you treat Phoenix as an outcast because of how well a good player that uses her can upset a match.
There’s a reason why there are more top tier players in most games than those of the other tiers. You even play Pokemon, and people will all use the top tier selections, even though there are other just as viable options. You play CoD, and almost everyone uses the Barret or the Intervention, you play Smash(which I have a background in), people all used top tier charaters aside from the few exceptions.
This has been stated many times in this thread. Back when I played smash, I had a specific plan for EVERY character. They weren’t grouped in together, it was “I play against [insert character here] with [specific strategy here]” and it worked very well for me. I mained Falco(who was top tier) but was also average with CF and Jiggs(melee only, Brawl jiggs is terrible). I had a specific plan for every character, but I also adapted different strategies to different play styles. It wasn’t a “If I consistently do this for every character I will win.” That isn’t how a game should be. If you’ve ever played an FPS online, you have a strategy to counter every weapon in the game, because the other guy may be across the map with a sniper and all you have is a shotgun. You need to have a way of handling everything a game can throw at you. You’ll learn this even more so when you speedrun games(Which I do), if you miss an important glitch or skip, you need to have a backup strategy, because some things you can’t just try again. If a game throws you Phoenix, you should be ready to take on Phoenix, if the player uses another character, you need to be ready to beat that other character. If every character had some weird gimmick to playing them, then nobody would complain, but because one does that it suddenly makes it different. Phoenix players have their own setbacks and it can hurt them just as she can hurt you.
You’re sort of missing the point. It’s not that phoenix is unbeatable. She clearly isn’t. It’s that the threat of phoenix influences team composition. It makes for a less diverse metagame, which is the reason that characters get banned. Phoenix isn’t banned because it isn’t that bad.
There’s not really a good analogy for Phoenix because other fighting games put a lot of effort into not having hard counters.
My two cents: Banning a character is something no fighting community should ever do until **at least **2 years have past since the games release, and the metagame has managed to advance enough such that it has become extremely unlikely that any sort of anti-character tactics or counter characters will emerge through metagame evolution.
There are certain exceptions of course, such as in the case of a character that is completely broken. And by broken, I mean the real original meaning of the word, not the deluded version that is tossed around so casually nowadays.
Correction: The game would be better without DARK Phoenix. I love Jean Grey as a character. I would happily give up the ‘gimmick’ that is Dark Phoenix to have a regular, playable, Phoenix.
A better question is why X Factor is not banned. EVERY SINGLE serious player of the game KNOWS in his or her heart that one of the things that killed Vanilla was X Factor, not just Lvl 3, but just the mechanic in general. Everybody bitches about it, and rightfully so, and we all know that the game would be infinitely better w/o it. This isn’t even something that we CAN’T get rid of, because we can, its not like Rage mode in Tekken which is automatic. We as players have a choice to press the button for X Factor, so if it were completely up to me, I would ban X Factor at all tourneys…
I’m gonna be honest here. I’d rather fight all 4 god tiers in a 1 v 4 match in mvc2 then Pheonix.
Also all 4 characters were better designed, harder to play, and funner to fight. This isn’t nostalgia talking, I’m playing the game right now as I type this by the way.
Ok, not let me get back on topic… Phoenix in Vanilla was just a joke, clearly. At least in this version, she definitely can’t run away as good as she had before. But, as I expected as soon as they announced that change to Phoenix, Dark Phoenix is going to be played completely horizontal from now on. I remember seeing FChamp just doing the projectiles and teleports on the ground the whole time he had Dark Phoenix and he was pretty much the same broken garbage that we have all become to hate. But even with that, whenever FChamp didn’t have Phoenix out there, he was showing that he was legit with some pretty good Dorm and Magneto tech. Its a very high risk or reward thing IMO, but I think it’s more reward than risk, considering the fact that its not as easy to kill the character that comes in after a snapback. Also the fact that building meter isn’t that tough in a game like this. Then you consider the fact that if you’re going to use Phoenix, you’re most likely going to have at least one character that is strong @ zoning (Dorm for FChamp), so while they’re playing keep away, they’re building meter at the same time. Even with all of that said, Phoenix got some much deserved nerfs, so she definitely is not on ST Akuma’s level. It was just a mistake for the producers to include the type of character that she is into the game…