Some of the earliest combos ever put up with her did 100%. It's called a fact. Although the degree of difficulty will naturally vary based upon personal skill levels... and DP is more likely to kill people with xfactor chip / bnb damage before she needs to actually do anything skillful. Do you play Phoenix, by any chance?
For the most part, I think a lot of Phoenix players (and mvc3 players
In general) would prefer her as a "normal" character without the DP gimmick.
It's about how easy those are to set up. With X-Factor, her speed boost lets her teleports recover even faster, and everything she does becomes safer. Dark Phoenix is much easier to counter without X-Factor on. I'm not disagreeing that her combos do huge damage, I'm differing on how easy they are to actually make happen without X-Factor.
No, I don't play Phoenix. I got my 30 matches in with her for the title, winning most of them with Dark Phoenix, and then moved on. If she were a viable character outside of Dark Phoenix, then I would put her on my team, because she would be a great partner for Dormammu. As she is, I have to play a meterless game with Dormammu, and that's just too strong of a conflict between the characters.
No one debates that some characters will be better/more popular. It's just that that when the big difference in power level is due to a missed bug in the game that will be patched eventually, having to wait out the time until the patch hits and restores the intended game mechanics is sort of frustrating.
If they patch it. Capcom has said that certain bugs add to the game; they might feel this is one of them.
Phoenix would be overpowered if she had double life and no Dark Phoenix. Her homing projectiles and teleport are there primarily to let her try and hunt down players who are playing runaway vs her. Her "all the answers" moveset would be ridiculous on a normal character.
She might need some other adjustments, but that doesn't mean the option shouldn't be explored at all.
Phoenix is already the best offensive character in the game. Best flight, best teleport, probably top 3 traps, crazy mixups, one of the fastest character in the game and good projectiles that can be used to cross up. With Dark Phoenix, everything is augmented. With level 3 XF, it's not even fair.
I agree with all of this, except for best flight mode - I haven't seen her do anything crazy with flight compared to what Magneto, etc. can do.
I think it's important to remember that Dark Phoenix requires 5 bars though. For 3 bars, you can take most characters down by half of their life. So, a 5 bar hyper should roughly guarantee a dead character.
Obviously, they balanced her out by making her the lowest HP character in the game (without dark phoenix), so the opponents' gameplay changes to take her out before she reaches 5 meters. Even your best choice (snapback) is a huge risk, especially if you watch someone like Clockwork run her since he actually learned how to use her instead of mashing buttons.
I think balancing her around Phoenix, and then considering Dark Phoenix a nice little cookie if you achieve it, would help mitigate this issue.