Phoenix

The Phoenix is a protoss air unit to be featured in StarCraft II.

Overview
The Phoenix is a deadly spacecraft that is rapidly replacing the older scouts and Corsairs in the role of fighter for the protoss. Phoenix patrols are a common sight on the outer rim of protoss territory, where they sweep deep space for alien threats. The twin ion blaster armament of a Phoenix is highly suited to air-to-air combat.

Sophisticated and lethal as the Phoenix may be, all too often a patrol squadron will find itself heavily outnumbered by zerg or terran enemies. To overcome this weakness, Phoenix pilots have developed a dangerous counter-ploy. A Phoenix pilot can unleash a short-lived storm of destruction by overloading its warp field. The area-effect discharge is devastating and can destroy a large number of enemies at once, but it comes at a price: in the aftermath the phoenix is left temporarily powerless and crippled. Wary foes have learned to flee a Phoenix overload and return moments later to destroy the helpless craft. In turn Phoenix pilots have begun to use staggered discharges to catch their enemies in a web of destruction. These desperate tactics are frowned upon by Protoss commanders, but have become tacitly accepted as a necessity in the desperate times facing the Protoss.

Game Unit
The Phoenix is very good at destroying air units such as mutalisks. This ability gives the Phoenix a very powerful anti-air area-of-effect attack. It is also an effective counter unit for vikings and banshees. However, it is weak against strongly-armored units such as the battlecruiser.

When grouped with void ray capital ships, the two ships complement each other's weaknesses and become a formidable fleet, with void rays firing at long range at heavily-armored targets with Phoenixes firing at lowly-armored targets.

Originally, the Phoenix was capable of attacking both air and ground targets, but is now an air-to-air unit and a slow one at that.

Upgrades
The Phoenix's speed and sensor range are upgraded at the fleet beacon. They are called Gravitic Thrusters and Apial Thrusters.

Previous Abilities

 * Overload
 * This ability could previously damage all nearby enemy air units but was scaled down before BlizzCon so that it could attack only eight nearby air units. This also leaves the Phoenix unpowered for some time and thus vulnerable to attack.
 * More "experienced" Protoss commanders devised a tactic where when using a group of Phoenixes against enemy targets, they would overload one Phoenix at a time, so if the enemy units retreated to avoid the damage, they would be successively caught in the multiple overload fields, and the Phoenixes would be able to rotate powered and unpowered ships, with several Phoenixes fully powered at one time for traditional ion fire.

Overload had a cooldown timer. It could damage cloaked units, making it a "soft counter" against cloaking air units such as Banshees.

Quotes

 * Main article: Phoenix quotations