Phoenix are the best anti hero unit in the game with their ability to drain energy with lifts and take heroes out of the play for extended periods of time. The hero has become a necessity in any sort of high level game (usually played by the support player). I think the main issue with phoenix is how tanky it is, lifting a hero most of the time comes with no risk what so ever to the phoenix itself. I find this issue especially true with an ultimate phoenix which makes sense it should be more tanky than the regular version but I think a reasonable nerf to phoenix would be to make lift either reduce the move speed even further of the phoenix lifting or make it so when pheonix hits a lift it cannot move therefore rewarding good lift cancel micro/switching lifts between the phoenix depending on the one targetted. This would be phoenix more fun to play with and against in my opinion and would potentially shift the meta away from just them allowing more heroes to be used in higher levels of gameplay.

I agree with nix nerf, but idk if i agree with the tankyness nerf. I think a better way to go would be to increase energy cost to lift or to increase duration between lifts, because right now its like if you outplay the lift and doge it doesn't really matter they will have another one in like 5 seconds. And its the same if you emp them with spec, they will immediately have lift again in a few seconds because it cost no energy.

Well if you do hit the emp with spec on nix they cannot regen energy for a few seconds so if you hit the emp on both its not a big issue. The issue is the likeliness of you hitting both phoenix with the spectre emp is highly unlikely especially if they are aware that it is the only condition against spectre where a nix can die.

I don't super disagree on any of this but probably it would be better to go in the other direction. I'd rather have something like nix only drains 60% of the lifted unit's energy rather than draining it all, so 1 lift doesn't completely reset the fight, but have the heroes be a bit tankier so only a caught out hero/hard won fight will kill it. A big problem with heroes right now is their hp scaling is horrible, but their damage scaling is really good. This means heroes like spec get worse since the damage scaling doesn't mean much, but an archon hitting 1 storm can delete half an army. Maybe nix should be a little more vulnerable, but if you have say hta vs nix, if the nix hits every lift the fight is now even, but if one nix dies or you miss a lift, the hta will delete half your army and control mid, where if the nix player hits every lift they're just making the battle even again.

Proposed changes would be:
ultimate heroes get ~2x the hp scaling they have now (or maybe it scales up to 2x, I think they get 50 hp per up as it is which is nothing)
nix lift only drains 60% energy (or even 50%)
nix slowed a bit more after lifting
ultimate hero damage scaling (tass and queen) reduced by 25% (maybe more)

This makes fights against ultimates less of "lift the queen/archon or get deleted" and makes it so 1 lift can't insta-kill most heroes. Higher hp heroes with less damage also means they have to be running up to the front more to actually be powerful.