But anyways, now I'm back, and considering a main of Ashe/Moira./Dva
Those're always welcome except maybe Ashe. Ashe is seen as yet another sniper lock - but she's also played by hard carries lately. If you're one of those, you'll have a good time.
And man, it took me an hour to get a win in MH tonight. Wtf.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
1. Permanent giant armor pool for the entire team was super stupid given Brigitte's... well, everything else. I'm glad that's done away with, though given the overall nerf to armor on top of it it's probably a harder nerf than immediately apparent and may need a bit more tweaking.
This might be like the worst, WORST patch they've put out. Brig is trash now, Rally worst support ult in a slot competing with the two best ults? And then further nerfing armor? Bye Brig, forums got what they wanted. Tanking in general is increasingly getting more and more difficult. Anyone try playing Rein against a McCree who likes to flash and fan you all the time? It's rough, now add the new Reaper. Fucking Yikes.
Yes goats is dead, and good riddance to that, but the price to pay may be too much. I have no idea why you'd run tanks at all at this point. Just go 5 DPS and a Mercy. And the tragedy is then all kinds of macro-game theory of team comps and what have you go completely out the window and it's just DPS skill match-ups.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
But anyways, now I'm back, and considering a main of Ashe/Moira./Dva
Those're always welcome except maybe Ashe. Ashe is seen as yet another sniper lock - but she's also played by hard carries lately. If you're one of those, you'll have a good time.
And man, it took me an hour to get a win in MH tonight. Wtf.
I'm not carrying shit, but I try not to stay too far back.
This might be like the worst, WORST patch they've put out. Brig is trash now, Rally worst support ult in a slot competing with the two best ults? And then further nerfing armor? Bye Brig, forums got what they wanted. Tanking in general is increasingly getting more and more difficult. Anyone try playing Rein against a McCree who likes to flash and fan you all the time? It's rough, now add the new Reaper. Fucking Yikes.
Yes goats is dead, and good riddance to that, but the price to pay may be too much. I have no idea why you'd run tanks at all at this point. Just go 5 DPS and a Mercy. And the tragedy is then all kinds of macro-game theory of team comps and what have you go completely out the window and it's just DPS skill match-ups.
Do you really think it's going to be so extreme?
I could see, quad DPS becoming common, perhaps. But 5 DPS and 1 healer? I could see 4 DPS firing through a Rein shield being able to put down enough meaningful damage before the 5 dps can eat through the 2k health of the Rein shield, for example. We might see more passive tank play as a result, but I guess I'd be surprised if tanks left the game entirely.
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miscellaneousinsanitygrass grows, birds fly, sun shines,and brother, i hurt peopleRegistered Userregular
This might be like the worst, WORST patch they've put out. Brig is trash now, Rally worst support ult in a slot competing with the two best ults? And then further nerfing armor? Bye Brig, forums got what they wanted. Tanking in general is increasingly getting more and more difficult. Anyone try playing Rein against a McCree who likes to flash and fan you all the time? It's rough, now add the new Reaper. Fucking Yikes.
Yes goats is dead, and good riddance to that, but the price to pay may be too much. I have no idea why you'd run tanks at all at this point. Just go 5 DPS and a Mercy. And the tragedy is then all kinds of macro-game theory of team comps and what have you go completely out the window and it's just DPS skill match-ups.
i've been taking a mini hiatus but golly, this sounds awful
maybe i'll come back to the game later, i have plenty of single player games piling up...
Whenever Blizzard makes a big change, some people (not the same people, just in general) act like the sky is falling. I just checked and the sky is still up there.
This might be like the worst, WORST patch they've put out. Brig is trash now, Rally worst support ult in a slot competing with the two best ults? And then further nerfing armor? Bye Brig, forums got what they wanted. Tanking in general is increasingly getting more and more difficult. Anyone try playing Rein against a McCree who likes to flash and fan you all the time? It's rough, now add the new Reaper. Fucking Yikes.
Yes goats is dead, and good riddance to that, but the price to pay may be too much. I have no idea why you'd run tanks at all at this point. Just go 5 DPS and a Mercy. And the tragedy is then all kinds of macro-game theory of team comps and what have you go completely out the window and it's just DPS skill match-ups.
i've been taking a mini hiatus but golly, this sounds awful
maybe i'll come back to the game later, i have plenty of single player games piling up...
Yeah I don't think it's going to be this bad at all. Facing Reaper is gonna suck, especially at lower ranks, but tanks are still gonna have their place. I'll admit if I'm wrong, but I would be shocked if this led to a consistent 5-DPS meta.
Re: Reaper buffs, I think Blizzard wants to make dps heroes who can stay in a brawl and give as good as they get. A third archetype after the two workable ones of "dude that shoots from afar" and "dude wot flanks". See also: the creeping Doomfist buffs. And as much as we'd all like that in theory, in practice it seems very hard to make those kinds of heroes fun and viable at all tiers of play. Because the question is: what are you giving them to let them stay so long int he fight against Widow headshots, Tracer one clips, Brig stuns and team follow-up, etc? And what happens when you give a dps that kind of sustain? Solo Queue Hell, that's what happens.
It's an admirable attempt by them to try avoid buffing another hero's mobility just to keep up with the pace of the game, but I don't see another option. I don't envy Blizzard here.
Let me explain in more detail, first tank's role in the game and the past and current metas:
Overwatch began as an MMO and the concept of tanks sprang from that design. Except in a FPS, you can't have an actual taunt, so tanks needed some other way to convince players to shoot them. This is why tanks actually do significant damage; that is their taunt. A Winston in your backline just can't be ignored. He's going to kill your healers and then you. Their damage is limited by certain means, like limited range, but to limit their damage would cause them to simply be ignored.
This has always caused tanks to generally be pretty strong, see quad tank meta or "slambulance". I say meta but really it never became a meta. It was used sometimes, a viable strat, but it always had the weakness of the healers. Given tanks do have some limitations and if the healers died, they'd be helpless against more balanced teams, the quad tank never became strong enough to dominate.
Enter Goats. Brigette changed the ballgame, not with stuns, or aoe healing, but with repair pack. Suddenly you have a beefy healer that's hard to kill, with a quick burst heal that prevents you from killing the other healers or really anyone else. Combine this with existing damage mitigating abilities like DM or Zarya bubbles, and it's impossible for DPS to consistently beat a triple tank, triple support comp before it beats them. And so just go goats 4head was born.
There has been a slow and steady increase to DPS in the game overall. Hanzo's E, Torb's E, Mei no damage falloff/freeze pierce, Sym in general, Solider had a DPS buff, most recently Bastion's narrowing spread, and McCree's Fan the Hammer. Probably some others I missed.
This PTR; it changes the math entirely. Tank survival across the board is slashed. All of them except Zarya have armor, hell, Orisa's HP is half armor. I don't consider the D.Va nerf to be bad, she's arguably the best overall character in the game, but DM was the answer to a lot of DPS problems. Throw in Reaper just shitting out damage all of the place and being impossible to kill without just one-shotting him, and it's a recipe to just remove tanks from the game.
I played one match on the PTR, may play more to confirm, but that game was not a good sign for things to come. We did win with two tanks vs a mostly DPS comp, but for a large chunk of that match it was 6v5 in favor of us (PTR lol). We got rolled the first two points, and some of the things i was seeing was just not a good sign. Reaper out healed the damage of both Winston (me) and D.Va. Every single time I would do the classic Winston overextend leap just to Ult got me instantly killed every time, and I mean after the ult. I didn't even get a second leap, just instantly flash banged and deleted by Reaper, McCree, Ashe and whoever the hell else they had; Over 1k HP gone in seconds. Like at that point I'm just an ult battery for them.
I have a hard time not seeing how the scales tip against heavy tank comps into heavy DPS comps. Solo tanking was already a bad idea, so I'm not sure if any of them could pull it off. I really envision comps where there are actually DPS acting as main tank. A Reaper or Mei acting as the first man in to gain point presence. The only thing I'll take back is Brig being useless just because I could see her as a solo heal/main tank. At least when she gets savaged by DPS, she doesn't give shit loads of ult charge.
Finally got back to Overwatch after being sick all through Christmas and New Year’s and not having energy to get on the stationary bike. Six matches as Mercy / D.Va and went 5-1, including a 1:24 Hanamura on attack where I think the opposing team just died of shock.
I also got my first melee kill as Mercy and it felt real good.
Those PTR changes sound pretty dumb, but I did enough battleground time in WoW to know that Blizzard wants things to be fast and exciting for stream viewers and stuff that slows down deaths is slow and boring. I don’t have enough experience to comment in any substantive form though.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
There's two ways to look at Reaper's problems. The first is to directly address the mobility issue. I'm sure some of you remember I made a lot of posts almost a year ago about how his teleport is an awful skill. Since then he's been switched from souls to health steal, and had his footsteps made slightly quieter (and I think the teleport noise was made quieter too). None of those have really improved him in 6v6, although if you play him on Chateau Guillard DM, you'll see he still shines in close quarters maps with lots of flanks and good ambush spots. So yes, an obvious route is to make teleport actually useful somehow, so he can get to those sorts of spots in the more open 6v6 maps.
The alternative is to look at the Pyro from TF2. Pyro originally suffered very similar problems; they were an ambush character in a game with a lot of wide, long open spaces, characters like the Sniper who could headshot ding them very quickly, and even if a pyro did start a fight on full HP, there was still a good chance they lost or traded to a decent Soldier/Scout/Demo player. The addition of the air blast changed a lot of this, except for the Sniper obviously. Giving Pyro a way to deal with incoming fire, and indeed use it offensively, was the most important change to making them an actually good character to play.
With Reaper at the moment, to really make him shine, you kinda need a Reinhart and Lucio to provide shielding and speed boost to get him to where he needs to be. Having to use two other character slots, and forcing them to play closely together is too high a cost to really make him work well in anything except the most co-ordinated teams (where other similar close-group strats have worked better). One possibility here is to change the way wraithform works in the same manner D.Va's defence matrix was changed. Rather than a single use ability with a long cooldown, give it a charge level that can be used either all at once, or bit by bit with a short cooldown between uses, to allow him to weave its use in to e.g. avoid helix rockets, pharah/junkrat attacks, or just general damage. The ability to split it up gives him options like burning half the charge to get in, getting a couple of shots in, and then wraithing out when his health gets too low, which would be especially useful against shield comps who Reaper currently has horrible trouble with if he has to make a frontal assault.
(as an aside, the fundamental problem with playing Reaper as a flanker is that his mobility is so bad that where someone like Tracer or Genji can very quickly use the longer flanks to engage at the same time as the rest of the team, Reaper's slow movement means his team has to be actually waiting for him to get in position before engaging, something that will very rarely happen below GM. It's actually amusing that Soldier, who is very much a frontliner, is the one who gets the ability to sprint which would be more useful for a flanker)
Maybe I'm just being a crazy scrub, but in my books Reaper's guns are the real problem. They're such murder machines at the right range and such peashooters outside of that range. It makes Reaper an inherently binary hero. And unlike Widow you can't even argue that the problem is handled by the mechanical skill requirement. I don't think changing or 'fixing' teleporter or Wraith Form or anything else will fix that problem, only highlight it.
BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
That's another way to look at it, yes, but it's part of his current design to be a close range hero. It could certainly be argued that other characters with a focus on particular ranges (Mei, Widowmaker, Roadhog, D.Va, Reinhardt) all get an alt-fire or secondary ability to reduce their weaknesses outside of effective range (with Mei in fact being absurdly good at long ranges as your aim improves), and another solution would be to give Reaper either just such an alt-fire (slug-shots with slow, on a 6 second cd maybe? Overwatch always needs more CC ho-ho-ho) or secondary ability to let him do better at range. But I'm very wary of changing his actual primary fire to be better at midrange as it just moves the character into a more generic role where he's competing with Soldier, McCree, Ashe and Sombra. Sombra's changes to her spread have made her a more versatile S:76 in many ways right now, and it's a bit silly. Same with Ashe muscling in on McCree's role.
I don't understand how the armor changes will really screw up tanks. It seems to me more of a specific buff for heroes whose weapons fall into a very specific damage range.
For snipers like Ashe, Widow, McCree and Hanzo, these changes are practically immaterial - adding literally 2 damage to their primaries Vs. armor, so like plus 2 DPS each and 4 DPS for McCree. Basically nothing.
For low-damage rapid-fire weapons like Tracer, or tickle damage like Winston and D.Va, these changes will have literally zero effect on how much damage they do to armor - they'll still do 50%, period.
For very specific heroes - Soldier and Recon Bastion come to mind - this is a straight buff. Soldier will now do 16 damage per shot to a tank instead of 14, and with his rapid-fire that's a good deal. Sombra's SMG does 7 per bullet at close range - a +1 damage per bullet buff - and one of Reaper's shotgun pellets will now do 5 damage instead of 4 - a small but noticeable buff.
Now I agree that this buff in combination with 50% lifesteal, Reaper is about to become far more interesting, but...
Every single time I would do the classic Winston overextend leap just to Ult got me instantly killed every time, and I mean after the ult. I didn't even get a second leap, just instantly flash banged and deleted by Reaper, McCree, Ashe and whoever the hell else they had; Over 1k HP gone in seconds. Like at that point I'm just an ult battery for them.
C'mon, Brutal, if you've got 3 DPS all shooting at the same stunned target it's gonna' melt instantly. It's not like Ulting Winston's hitbox is a challenging shot to begin with.
This has always been the way of things.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
Even if the changes don’t inherently fuck tanks, it’s going to be even harder to convince people to play tank based on perception of the changes. It makes DPS an even more attractive role at lower SRs.
I get Blizzard’s desire to kill the GOATs meta for pros, but this is gonna make competitive even shittier.
We will see where the balance ultimately falls, could the armor change be a tipping point that sees a drastic meta shift? Maybe. I don’t pretend to be able to tell.
I do know that mathematically heroes like soldier are more damage over a fixed period than heroes like widow that do large burst but have overall low damage output. If armor was the reason that soldier wasn’t used, we at the very least may see a swap to what DPS are used. If that happens there is simply going to be more damage per minute being thrown around the game, will it be enough to just overwhelm tanks and their new weakened armor?
Again. I have no real idea, but I am curious for the results of this change.
The increase effects more heroes than you think by quite a lot. It gets crazier with damage boost or discord too.
Edit: You have to consider that once you're going all in on damage comps, you are REALLY going all in on damage comps. Any idea how much a damage boosted McCree's fan does to does to a discorded target? It's enough to kill Rein. This is already in the game, and people just haven't realized it yet or felt it's justified to fully commit.
We should also consider that the maker of that graphic seems to think that Tracer fires 20 bullets at 12 damage apiece instead of 40 bullets at 6 - which she does - and thus receives absolutely no benefit from the change.
I don't have the time to crunch the other numbers, but that line graph fails the sniff test. No idea how much of it is accurate, if any
Edit: oh wait the red highlight means it only applies to headshots. Okay might be legit.
Chance on
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
Honestly I think they should just remove the armor damage reduction. It's an invisible mechanic that just complicates DPS calculations for no real reason. Convert all the armor heroes to HP, and just use armor as a visual indicator for Torb/Brigitte's packs.
Shielding doesn't provide any kind of passive damage reduction benefit, right? It's more just like "This section is part of your HP pool, and it can regenerate if you don't take damage for 3 seconds."
Shielding doesn't provide any kind of passive damage reduction benefit, right? It's more just like "This section is part of your HP pool, and it can regenerate if you don't take damage for 3 seconds."
Correct.
'Chance, you are the best kind of whore.' -Henroid
We should also consider that the maker of that graphic seems to think that Tracer fires 20 bullets at 12 damage apiece instead of 40 bullets at 6 - which she does - and thus receives absolutely no benefit from the change.
I don't have the time to crunch the other numbers, but that line graph fails the sniff test. No idea how much of it is accurate, if any
Edit: oh wait the red highlight means it only applies to headshots. Okay might be legit.
yeah it's headshot only for her, but with discord or damage boost, her bullets will benefit from the change.
The increase effects more heroes than you think by quite a lot. It gets crazier with damage boost or discord too.
Edit: You have to consider that once you're going all in on damage comps, you are REALLY going all in on damage comps. Any idea how much a damage boosted McCree's fan does to does to a discorded target? It's enough to kill Rein. This is already in the game, and people just haven't realized it yet or felt it's justified to fully commit.
Spoiler'd the graph because its so damn big but also,
Honestly I think they should just remove the armor damage reduction. It's an invisible mechanic that just complicates DPS calculations for no real reason. Convert all the armor heroes to HP, and just use armor as a visual indicator for Torb/Brigitte's packs.
I dunno, it only complicates interactions that were already abstracted in my head. Like, how many players really plan a fight by going "oh I need exactly 7 headshots from Soldier to kill this hero? No, unless it's already a nice juicy number like 200, you keep shooting until the bar hits zero, and you start to get a good feel for when that will be. And as for shotguns, well, I'd look real funny at a player who said "I need 19 of my 25 pellets to hit, or 9.5 headshot pellets". It's a consideration you just account for naturally through experience or the natural heuristic of "big damage instances good, small damage instances bad".
I'd like to see some heroes get an additional ability just to flesh them out a bit more. I realize that makes balancing characters in a game that struggles with it already much more difficult, but it'd be nice if some heroes had a little more to do than shoot, a different shoot, and a utility skill.
Pulling abilities from heroes and then re-adding them on new heros is weird to me.
Get rid of Symmetras primary tracking beam. Make hero Moira, give it to Moira. Take away super huge turret buff from Torb. Make Ashe, who is boring DPS. Give Ash super huge turret that also counts as player for captures.
I appreciate it's difficult to make every character fully unique but there's already a lot of overlap in hitscan dps and barriers, I'm thinking maybe stop adding more and modify what already exists.
Ashe is just super boring mechanically. Even if I like the character.
Edit: I like armor and shields but I think armor should not be a part of basic health. Adjust base hp, give more options for armor as a buff.
dispatch.o on
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Monkey Ball WarriorA collection of mediocre hatsSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Pulling abilities from heroes and then re-adding them on new heros is weird to me.
Get rid of Symmetras primary tracking beam. Make hero Moira, give it to Moira. Take away super huge turret buff from Torb. Make Ashe, who is boring DPS. Give Ash super huge turret that also counts as player for captures.
I appreciate it's difficult to make every character fully unique but there's already a lot of overlap in hitscan dps and barriers, I'm thinking maybe stop adding more and modify what already exists.
Ashe is just super boring mechanically. Even if I like the character.
I don't know, her dynamite ability is kind of novel. I'm unaware of any other ability that involves placing something and then shooting at it in an attempt to influence activation time.
But yes, past that she is basically just a Macree/Widow hybrid with a Force of Nature and a summoned ult. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but compared to ex. hamster she isn't breaking any new ground.
"I resent the entire notion of a body as an ante and then raise you a generalized dissatisfaction with physicality itself" -- Tycho
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The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Moira existed well before Symm's latest rework and her primary doesn't track at all. It's just a wide beam.
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Those're always welcome except maybe Ashe. Ashe is seen as yet another sniper lock - but she's also played by hard carries lately. If you're one of those, you'll have a good time.
And man, it took me an hour to get a win in MH tonight. Wtf.
2.
GOOD BYE TANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This might be like the worst, WORST patch they've put out. Brig is trash now, Rally worst support ult in a slot competing with the two best ults? And then further nerfing armor? Bye Brig, forums got what they wanted. Tanking in general is increasingly getting more and more difficult. Anyone try playing Rein against a McCree who likes to flash and fan you all the time? It's rough, now add the new Reaper. Fucking Yikes.
Yes goats is dead, and good riddance to that, but the price to pay may be too much. I have no idea why you'd run tanks at all at this point. Just go 5 DPS and a Mercy. And the tragedy is then all kinds of macro-game theory of team comps and what have you go completely out the window and it's just DPS skill match-ups.
I'm not carrying shit, but I try not to stay too far back.
Do you really think it's going to be so extreme?
I could see, quad DPS becoming common, perhaps. But 5 DPS and 1 healer? I could see 4 DPS firing through a Rein shield being able to put down enough meaningful damage before the 5 dps can eat through the 2k health of the Rein shield, for example. We might see more passive tank play as a result, but I guess I'd be surprised if tanks left the game entirely.
i've been taking a mini hiatus but golly, this sounds awful
maybe i'll come back to the game later, i have plenty of single player games piling up...
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Yeah I don't think it's going to be this bad at all. Facing Reaper is gonna suck, especially at lower ranks, but tanks are still gonna have their place. I'll admit if I'm wrong, but I would be shocked if this led to a consistent 5-DPS meta.
It's an admirable attempt by them to try avoid buffing another hero's mobility just to keep up with the pace of the game, but I don't see another option. I don't envy Blizzard here.
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Overwatch began as an MMO and the concept of tanks sprang from that design. Except in a FPS, you can't have an actual taunt, so tanks needed some other way to convince players to shoot them. This is why tanks actually do significant damage; that is their taunt. A Winston in your backline just can't be ignored. He's going to kill your healers and then you. Their damage is limited by certain means, like limited range, but to limit their damage would cause them to simply be ignored.
This has always caused tanks to generally be pretty strong, see quad tank meta or "slambulance". I say meta but really it never became a meta. It was used sometimes, a viable strat, but it always had the weakness of the healers. Given tanks do have some limitations and if the healers died, they'd be helpless against more balanced teams, the quad tank never became strong enough to dominate.
Enter Goats. Brigette changed the ballgame, not with stuns, or aoe healing, but with repair pack. Suddenly you have a beefy healer that's hard to kill, with a quick burst heal that prevents you from killing the other healers or really anyone else. Combine this with existing damage mitigating abilities like DM or Zarya bubbles, and it's impossible for DPS to consistently beat a triple tank, triple support comp before it beats them. And so just go goats 4head was born.
There has been a slow and steady increase to DPS in the game overall. Hanzo's E, Torb's E, Mei no damage falloff/freeze pierce, Sym in general, Solider had a DPS buff, most recently Bastion's narrowing spread, and McCree's Fan the Hammer. Probably some others I missed.
This PTR; it changes the math entirely. Tank survival across the board is slashed. All of them except Zarya have armor, hell, Orisa's HP is half armor. I don't consider the D.Va nerf to be bad, she's arguably the best overall character in the game, but DM was the answer to a lot of DPS problems. Throw in Reaper just shitting out damage all of the place and being impossible to kill without just one-shotting him, and it's a recipe to just remove tanks from the game.
I played one match on the PTR, may play more to confirm, but that game was not a good sign for things to come. We did win with two tanks vs a mostly DPS comp, but for a large chunk of that match it was 6v5 in favor of us (PTR lol). We got rolled the first two points, and some of the things i was seeing was just not a good sign. Reaper out healed the damage of both Winston (me) and D.Va. Every single time I would do the classic Winston overextend leap just to Ult got me instantly killed every time, and I mean after the ult. I didn't even get a second leap, just instantly flash banged and deleted by Reaper, McCree, Ashe and whoever the hell else they had; Over 1k HP gone in seconds. Like at that point I'm just an ult battery for them.
I have a hard time not seeing how the scales tip against heavy tank comps into heavy DPS comps. Solo tanking was already a bad idea, so I'm not sure if any of them could pull it off. I really envision comps where there are actually DPS acting as main tank. A Reaper or Mei acting as the first man in to gain point presence. The only thing I'll take back is Brig being useless just because I could see her as a solo heal/main tank. At least when she gets savaged by DPS, she doesn't give shit loads of ult charge.
I also got my first melee kill as Mercy and it felt real good.
Those PTR changes sound pretty dumb, but I did enough battleground time in WoW to know that Blizzard wants things to be fast and exciting for stream viewers and stuff that slows down deaths is slow and boring. I don’t have enough experience to comment in any substantive form though.
The alternative is to look at the Pyro from TF2. Pyro originally suffered very similar problems; they were an ambush character in a game with a lot of wide, long open spaces, characters like the Sniper who could headshot ding them very quickly, and even if a pyro did start a fight on full HP, there was still a good chance they lost or traded to a decent Soldier/Scout/Demo player. The addition of the air blast changed a lot of this, except for the Sniper obviously. Giving Pyro a way to deal with incoming fire, and indeed use it offensively, was the most important change to making them an actually good character to play.
With Reaper at the moment, to really make him shine, you kinda need a Reinhart and Lucio to provide shielding and speed boost to get him to where he needs to be. Having to use two other character slots, and forcing them to play closely together is too high a cost to really make him work well in anything except the most co-ordinated teams (where other similar close-group strats have worked better). One possibility here is to change the way wraithform works in the same manner D.Va's defence matrix was changed. Rather than a single use ability with a long cooldown, give it a charge level that can be used either all at once, or bit by bit with a short cooldown between uses, to allow him to weave its use in to e.g. avoid helix rockets, pharah/junkrat attacks, or just general damage. The ability to split it up gives him options like burning half the charge to get in, getting a couple of shots in, and then wraithing out when his health gets too low, which would be especially useful against shield comps who Reaper currently has horrible trouble with if he has to make a frontal assault.
(as an aside, the fundamental problem with playing Reaper as a flanker is that his mobility is so bad that where someone like Tracer or Genji can very quickly use the longer flanks to engage at the same time as the rest of the team, Reaper's slow movement means his team has to be actually waiting for him to get in position before engaging, something that will very rarely happen below GM. It's actually amusing that Soldier, who is very much a frontliner, is the one who gets the ability to sprint which would be more useful for a flanker)
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
For snipers like Ashe, Widow, McCree and Hanzo, these changes are practically immaterial - adding literally 2 damage to their primaries Vs. armor, so like plus 2 DPS each and 4 DPS for McCree. Basically nothing.
For low-damage rapid-fire weapons like Tracer, or tickle damage like Winston and D.Va, these changes will have literally zero effect on how much damage they do to armor - they'll still do 50%, period.
For very specific heroes - Soldier and Recon Bastion come to mind - this is a straight buff. Soldier will now do 16 damage per shot to a tank instead of 14, and with his rapid-fire that's a good deal. Sombra's SMG does 7 per bullet at close range - a +1 damage per bullet buff - and one of Reaper's shotgun pellets will now do 5 damage instead of 4 - a small but noticeable buff.
Now I agree that this buff in combination with 50% lifesteal, Reaper is about to become far more interesting, but...
C'mon, Brutal, if you've got 3 DPS all shooting at the same stunned target it's gonna' melt instantly. It's not like Ulting Winston's hitbox is a challenging shot to begin with.
This has always been the way of things.
Omg those are so sweet ^.^
I get Blizzard’s desire to kill the GOATs meta for pros, but this is gonna make competitive even shittier.
There are changes coming to the killfeed:
I do know that mathematically heroes like soldier are more damage over a fixed period than heroes like widow that do large burst but have overall low damage output. If armor was the reason that soldier wasn’t used, we at the very least may see a swap to what DPS are used. If that happens there is simply going to be more damage per minute being thrown around the game, will it be enough to just overwhelm tanks and their new weakened armor?
Again. I have no real idea, but I am curious for the results of this change.
The increase effects more heroes than you think by quite a lot. It gets crazier with damage boost or discord too.
Edit: You have to consider that once you're going all in on damage comps, you are REALLY going all in on damage comps. Any idea how much a damage boosted McCree's fan does to does to a discorded target? It's enough to kill Rein. This is already in the game, and people just haven't realized it yet or felt it's justified to fully commit.
I don't have the time to crunch the other numbers, but that line graph fails the sniff test. No idea how much of it is accurate, if any
Edit: oh wait the red highlight means it only applies to headshots. Okay might be legit.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Correct.
Edit: late
yeah it's headshot only for her, but with discord or damage boost, her bullets will benefit from the change.
Spoiler'd the graph because its so damn big but also,
Twitch: KoopahTroopah - Steam: Koopah
Nope, it was the exact same conditions.
(Original Bliz announcement about that one here)
Thanks for the warning. Now I know not to spend $20+ there this month.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
I dunno, it only complicates interactions that were already abstracted in my head. Like, how many players really plan a fight by going "oh I need exactly 7 headshots from Soldier to kill this hero? No, unless it's already a nice juicy number like 200, you keep shooting until the bar hits zero, and you start to get a good feel for when that will be. And as for shotguns, well, I'd look real funny at a player who said "I need 19 of my 25 pellets to hit, or 9.5 headshot pellets". It's a consideration you just account for naturally through experience or the natural heuristic of "big damage instances good, small damage instances bad".
hAmmONd IsnT A mAin TAnk
Steam: TheArcadeBear
Get rid of Symmetras primary tracking beam. Make hero Moira, give it to Moira. Take away super huge turret buff from Torb. Make Ashe, who is boring DPS. Give Ash super huge turret that also counts as player for captures.
I appreciate it's difficult to make every character fully unique but there's already a lot of overlap in hitscan dps and barriers, I'm thinking maybe stop adding more and modify what already exists.
Ashe is just super boring mechanically. Even if I like the character.
Edit: I like armor and shields but I think armor should not be a part of basic health. Adjust base hp, give more options for armor as a buff.
I don't know, her dynamite ability is kind of novel. I'm unaware of any other ability that involves placing something and then shooting at it in an attempt to influence activation time.
But yes, past that she is basically just a Macree/Widow hybrid with a Force of Nature and a summoned ult. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but compared to ex. hamster she isn't breaking any new ground.