M
Mike Lusareta
Guest
Long Post/Discussion Topic (seriously, it's long. Sorry.)
Opinion on simple balance changes to fix the current major balance problems:
JUNKRAT:
Currently broken as fuck. I was glad to see him buffed, he's always been a favorite hero of mine, but he's complete cancer atm. He's undivable because of the raw damage output of double mine spam, you don't even have to see someone to blow them up. Nerf his mine damage fairly significantly, but give it a damage bonus to armor/structures. This gives flankers/any dps character the ability to actually try and dive him without instantly exploding, and leaves in tact his mobility and ability to be a solid pick against tanks like DVA and Winston, or be somewhat of an objective dive bomber, jumping onto Torb turrets to delete them quickly and secure an objective. (also he still has tons of damage it's not like he didn't before the mine buff)
Personally I think Junk's primary fire needs tweaking. leave the damage the same, but increase the shot velocity while decreasing bounce distance or number. Reduce Junk's ability to randomly spam areas and deny giant zones from crazy range, reward good junk players by giving him the ability to aim and INTENTIONALLY bounce off walls (think grenade would bounce off of a surface once at high velocity, but after that stop moving rapidly after hitting a 2nd surface.)
Skill ceiling = Good. RNG AOE Blind Spam = Bad.
MERCY/PHARAH:
I'm putting these 2 together because I think Pharah is currently busted af solely because of the Mercy changes.
Mercy changes overall are great, but I think the rez cooldown should be somewhat increased, have it be 45 seconds or something. It doesn't feel like there's much window to play against mercy on defense, especially on maps where a single pick is very important to taking the point. (Volskaya, Anubis, etc).
Mercy's ult is awesome, the only problem with it is that it introduces a very weird aspect of trying to counter a mercy. Typical mercy counters are Genji/Tracer/Reaper. But as soon as she uses ult, she essentially becomes a hypermobile pharah. Which is something Genji/Tracer/Reaper really can't deal with much, you would want a soldier or mccree for that. Or a good widow. (I'm leaving widow out of the discussion because while a VERY good widow can completely remove most of these problems, I don't think it's a good state of balance to require people to be a kephri level widow just to counter one specific mechanic that is currently warping the meta. My general mindset is that a mechanics relative difficulty should be matched by the counter to that mechanic's difficulty. It's easier to fly around than it is to snipe someone flying around.)
I think that if the health regen aspect of Mercy's ult was removed, then it would be perfectly fine and still very strong. I'd even suggest instead of health regen, give mercy like a flat 50-100 max hp when she ults. This gives her more survivability, and the potential to ult as an escape, but it gets rid of the annoying situation where you're flanking mercy, she ults, and while you can hit her multiple times, she's just constantly healing, so you literally need to be able to one shot her or she just won't die at all.
Finally, Pharmacy/Pharmercy needs to be addressed. It is WAY too strong currently, because A: It was already strong, and B: Now mercy can just rez her constantly. This leaves the game in a state where you either need 2 hitscans just to handle pharah, or again, you need a REALLY good widow.
I've always had a problem from a design standpoint with the Pharmacy mechanic, because even before rework (and now even more so), Mercy's main skill component was positioning. It's not hard to hold down left click, but it IS hard to know where to be at the right times, and keep your teammates always in vision so you have an escape route from divers. When Mercy positions correctly, she's rewarded with essentially unlimited mobility, and is a bitch and a half to kill, which makes the rest of her team a bitch and a half to kill.
The problem with Pharmacy is that it's the best possible scenario for Mercy (being high above the battle, out of range of all flankers, and the high vantage point gives her excellent vision of her entire team, so she can fly to them at any point in time), but it removes all of the skill aspect of Mercy (you don't have to worry about positioning when you just stay safe in the sky for ages).
The easy fix for this is to give a higher cooldown on consecutive Guardian Angel's to the same target. The cooldown would be on Mercy's teammates, not her ability. So you couldn't fly to a Pharah over and over and over again, but you COULD fly to Pharah, then fly to someone on the ground, then fly to Pharah again. I'd say something like 5 seconds is good (GA's native cooldown is 1.5, and adding in travel time, you would essentially be able to fly back to Pharah by the time you reached the other teammate). This gives a short time window to actually whittle pharah down, while making mercy actually A: still pay attention to her team's position, and B: have to be moving around the battlefield, going to the ground every few seconds, putting her at risk of a flanker taking her out before she flies back into the sky again.
Also can we please fix the thing where GA completely ignores non-stunning crowd control? As a Lucio player, going up to deny a Mercy's GA, booping her perfectly, and having her literally fly right through it is kind of bullshit. Like what. That should definitely interrupt the movement at least, or at least change the flight path in some way.
DVA:
Actually feels fine, I'm super happy with her rework. Left Matrix as a useful ability in the right hands without her ability to stop the enemy team from playing the game. Her extra burst is nice too, gives her some pick potential that she didn't have before. Only including her because she was recently changed.
This was longer than I intended, but I feel like I've explained my points well. If you disagree or have something to add, I'd love to discuss in the comment section.
If you're going to write something like "Just go Widow and headshot them, super easy, git gud scrub", congrats on being a high rated Widow player who can consistently and quickly land headshots. I'm sure you carry all of your games. But you're not being helpful and the game shouldn't be balanced around the highest 1% skill tier, especially when the entire meta starts to revolve around a singular issue or small pool of characters.
"Do we have a good widow? If no, we get shit on by pharah all game. If yes: we win the game."
We already went through that meta season 1.
Ok I'm done.
Opinion on simple balance changes to fix the current major balance problems:
JUNKRAT:
Currently broken as fuck. I was glad to see him buffed, he's always been a favorite hero of mine, but he's complete cancer atm. He's undivable because of the raw damage output of double mine spam, you don't even have to see someone to blow them up. Nerf his mine damage fairly significantly, but give it a damage bonus to armor/structures. This gives flankers/any dps character the ability to actually try and dive him without instantly exploding, and leaves in tact his mobility and ability to be a solid pick against tanks like DVA and Winston, or be somewhat of an objective dive bomber, jumping onto Torb turrets to delete them quickly and secure an objective. (also he still has tons of damage it's not like he didn't before the mine buff)
Personally I think Junk's primary fire needs tweaking. leave the damage the same, but increase the shot velocity while decreasing bounce distance or number. Reduce Junk's ability to randomly spam areas and deny giant zones from crazy range, reward good junk players by giving him the ability to aim and INTENTIONALLY bounce off walls (think grenade would bounce off of a surface once at high velocity, but after that stop moving rapidly after hitting a 2nd surface.)
Skill ceiling = Good. RNG AOE Blind Spam = Bad.
MERCY/PHARAH:
I'm putting these 2 together because I think Pharah is currently busted af solely because of the Mercy changes.
Mercy changes overall are great, but I think the rez cooldown should be somewhat increased, have it be 45 seconds or something. It doesn't feel like there's much window to play against mercy on defense, especially on maps where a single pick is very important to taking the point. (Volskaya, Anubis, etc).
Mercy's ult is awesome, the only problem with it is that it introduces a very weird aspect of trying to counter a mercy. Typical mercy counters are Genji/Tracer/Reaper. But as soon as she uses ult, she essentially becomes a hypermobile pharah. Which is something Genji/Tracer/Reaper really can't deal with much, you would want a soldier or mccree for that. Or a good widow. (I'm leaving widow out of the discussion because while a VERY good widow can completely remove most of these problems, I don't think it's a good state of balance to require people to be a kephri level widow just to counter one specific mechanic that is currently warping the meta. My general mindset is that a mechanics relative difficulty should be matched by the counter to that mechanic's difficulty. It's easier to fly around than it is to snipe someone flying around.)
I think that if the health regen aspect of Mercy's ult was removed, then it would be perfectly fine and still very strong. I'd even suggest instead of health regen, give mercy like a flat 50-100 max hp when she ults. This gives her more survivability, and the potential to ult as an escape, but it gets rid of the annoying situation where you're flanking mercy, she ults, and while you can hit her multiple times, she's just constantly healing, so you literally need to be able to one shot her or she just won't die at all.
Finally, Pharmacy/Pharmercy needs to be addressed. It is WAY too strong currently, because A: It was already strong, and B: Now mercy can just rez her constantly. This leaves the game in a state where you either need 2 hitscans just to handle pharah, or again, you need a REALLY good widow.
I've always had a problem from a design standpoint with the Pharmacy mechanic, because even before rework (and now even more so), Mercy's main skill component was positioning. It's not hard to hold down left click, but it IS hard to know where to be at the right times, and keep your teammates always in vision so you have an escape route from divers. When Mercy positions correctly, she's rewarded with essentially unlimited mobility, and is a bitch and a half to kill, which makes the rest of her team a bitch and a half to kill.
The problem with Pharmacy is that it's the best possible scenario for Mercy (being high above the battle, out of range of all flankers, and the high vantage point gives her excellent vision of her entire team, so she can fly to them at any point in time), but it removes all of the skill aspect of Mercy (you don't have to worry about positioning when you just stay safe in the sky for ages).
The easy fix for this is to give a higher cooldown on consecutive Guardian Angel's to the same target. The cooldown would be on Mercy's teammates, not her ability. So you couldn't fly to a Pharah over and over and over again, but you COULD fly to Pharah, then fly to someone on the ground, then fly to Pharah again. I'd say something like 5 seconds is good (GA's native cooldown is 1.5, and adding in travel time, you would essentially be able to fly back to Pharah by the time you reached the other teammate). This gives a short time window to actually whittle pharah down, while making mercy actually A: still pay attention to her team's position, and B: have to be moving around the battlefield, going to the ground every few seconds, putting her at risk of a flanker taking her out before she flies back into the sky again.
Also can we please fix the thing where GA completely ignores non-stunning crowd control? As a Lucio player, going up to deny a Mercy's GA, booping her perfectly, and having her literally fly right through it is kind of bullshit. Like what. That should definitely interrupt the movement at least, or at least change the flight path in some way.
DVA:
Actually feels fine, I'm super happy with her rework. Left Matrix as a useful ability in the right hands without her ability to stop the enemy team from playing the game. Her extra burst is nice too, gives her some pick potential that she didn't have before. Only including her because she was recently changed.
This was longer than I intended, but I feel like I've explained my points well. If you disagree or have something to add, I'd love to discuss in the comment section.
If you're going to write something like "Just go Widow and headshot them, super easy, git gud scrub", congrats on being a high rated Widow player who can consistently and quickly land headshots. I'm sure you carry all of your games. But you're not being helpful and the game shouldn't be balanced around the highest 1% skill tier, especially when the entire meta starts to revolve around a singular issue or small pool of characters.
"Do we have a good widow? If no, we get shit on by pharah all game. If yes: we win the game."
We already went through that meta season 1.
Ok I'm done.
