Often, when playing Phoenix, you may be killed and try to use his self revive ability. This to me is his most powerful ability, undoing the work that went into killing you, and maybe even allowing you to revive and kill your other teammates. However since this ability takes time to work, the enemy team has a chance to kill your prone body before you can use it. This is undoubtedly a good and balanced system, which ties into how when a medic is around, you need to kill the downed enemies before the medic can revive them.
When you are conventionally revived, you are given an invulnerability bonus for a second or two, or until you use a weapon. This is also clearly a good thing since it gives you the choice to escape a failing firefight, or attempt to fight again. I believe that this invulnerability kicks in when you re-enter first-person, meaning that you can still be permanently killed while your body jumps back up, just after having been revived.
This is also how Phoenix’s ability functions, and this is how it can be annoying. Often you can revive yourself, only to be killed just before you re-enter first-person. Now this both kills you, and uses up your ability, which has rather a long cooldown. This is extremely annoying, especially in those, admittedly rare, but less rare than you’d think, occasions when you could have respawned instead, as the timer had counted down, but you decided to try it anyway, to be closer to the fighting, only to be killed and forced to wait the entire 20 seconds, which is frustrating enough when you’re killed normally.
I would therefore propose that the ability is either given back if you fail to actually be revived, or that the invulnerability kick in the moment you’re revived, though obviously only in the case of Phoenix’s self revive.
I do understand that this would allow Phoenix players to not consider as thoroughly whether or not to revive, but in the current state, I find that it is equally easy for enemies to ignore Phoenix when he is prone and only shoot him quickly when he self revives, rather than allowing him to be an interesting priority when he’s downed, since the choice may be between killing a downed Phoenix who could self revive and heal up his entire team, or other members of Phoenix’s team who may present a more immediate danger. In his current state this choice is instead given to the Phoenix player who can normally only guess if they will be killed the moment they are revived.
What do you think? Am I a self-important, shortsighted dick? Or a misunderstanding nerd who hides on game forums? Or maybe, just maybe… you might agree with me?
Haha of course I’m a self important dick.