Oh yeah, that can happen. That could’ve even happened in hgc. The problem is, was it competitive enough to be picked instead of the standard Q? Q was too dominant for a reason 
Yes, a lot less annoying. He will be much more annoying in close range though 
I don’t think he’s any less annoying Darak, just in a different manner. The trap build is really good, and it can essentially zone out heroes with that threat of level 4 trap that chases heroes, silence at level 7, and additional trap with CDR talent on 13. His damage goes up quite well with the level 1 talent, as I get more value out of that than the other damage boost talent I notice. The new Junkrat is pretty scary and annoying actually, he has better agency for making kills with the trap build. The AA build is okay, it is closes to the old version, but trap build is currently showing up stronger.
Yeah, but all that is much more close range than it was before with Q spam, that is what I was saying. RCW was asking if he would still be that guy who spams Q from miles away. With the rework, Junk has to play much more close to the fight to get that good value. But I totally agree that he will still be very annoying.
They could have buffed his trap build without destroying Q by forcing yet another AA build onto a perfectly good ability-based hero. It’s one thing to make an AA build available (also a waste of good talent slots for most heroes IMO - not every hero is meant to be an AA monster), but quite another level of bad to force AA synergy into an existing and fun ability build.
Oh god no, please not another baseline quest. Don’t we have enough?
Chattering teeth at 4 isn’t a buff? Along with “blowem up” boosting his damage output for using said traps?
Plus his AAs are solid, AoE damage, no reason to not have some talents for it, if more or less just bombard being straight damage, I don’t see them “forcing” it tbh, like tricky shuffles is just adding damage
Personally, I really like what I see for the Junkrat rework. It’s interesting, and hopefully gives him better talent diversity.
They did buff his trap build, I know - that’s my point. There was a way to go about it without ruining his Q build. He has strong AAs and it’s already worth weaving them in, so I don’t understand why they have to keep forcing AA talents into reworked heroes.
How exactly did they ruin his Q build? If I remember right there was only 1 talent that was really apart of that which was changed and that was only really changed by making the 100 damage at the end of the quest to a 40% extra damage, which is actually better scaling lategame, granted it only really helps by 20 but at the same time you’re getting damage bonuses from blowemup and armor reductions, last nade in wound timers and so on. I don’t see how they ruined it.
Between the announcement that they were reallocating the bulk of the dev team to other projects and off of HotS, I was willing to give them a little trust. It would make sense to speed up projects, and starting with Blizzcon, if we start hearing about the next generation of games involving the various IP’s… I think they earned it.
Specifically relating to this game, however, they have admitted themselves that Qhira was the last hero the larger old dev team worked on… so from here forward, every change to the game is on them. They can’t blame the old crew as much anymore, and they get a loan of trust from me… And this Junkrat change is the first chance where they can show if they’re gonna make the payments on time.
Largely, there hasn’t been a full breakdown, and the summaries I’ve seen are incomplete at best, messy at worst… I understand they are trying to boost power to the other tricks Junkrat has with the traps, but I still kinda am skeptical of the reductions to the Q and AA stats. I’m kinda curious why they didn’t opt for threshold talents rather than scaling ones (rather than giving small bonuses each time, instead waiting for a set number for a large increase) but I’ll be patient.
I’m not trying to be hostile, but I’m hoping that the way it’s being explained is what’s causing the confusion. One sentence for the overall idea, one for each talent level summarizing the changes and overall aim of the changes at those levels… One for the changes to traits (or whatever new stuff that comes in) and an extra for anything else that you may need to cover. That would go a long way in my understanding, I think.
However, we are getting to the end of September, and it’s roughly a month away from Blizzcon… Depending on the logistics, they could be busier with other things. So, I’m gonna be patient…
Don’t mean I have to like it…
Im slightly confused whats the problem. You’re missing explanation why Junkrat rework looks the way it looks?
two of his level 1 talents give him effective increaes in damage (versus before) of his Q and AA once you fire your last grenade.
And the third gives him higher than baseline if you hit an enemy with trap or mine.
So basically they nerfed his baseline slightly, and added that power into his level 1 talents.
That means while his “power floor” is lowered slightly, his skill ceiling is increased.
If you take Tricky Shuffle: after firing all grenades, your AA is ~9% stronger than before, including the nerf to it.
If you take Extra Wound Timers: hitting your final grenade means your grenades overall did about 6% more damage, assuming 1 enemy damaged per grenade. Although this will vary drastically from how many targets you hit.
If you get a mine or trap off, you’re sitting at massive 15% grenade damage buff, and 19% AA damage buff for the next 6 seconds.
This is generally better in terms of damage output compared to what his old level 1 talents gave him. So I think saying his baseline got that much weaker isn’t reasonable.
There are only two pieces of information that I have about the rework.
The first were the PTR patch notes, in those, it just says what’s been changed, what’s been moved, and what’s been deleted. It entirely lacks the developer comment.
The second piece of information is from the blog. They give a vauge overview, they talk about the new talents, then they give a general ‘update goals’ paragraph. This one helped a little… but I don’t think it’s that hard to follow a simple formula…
A generic example of what I’m advocating for:
While monitoring the statistics we continue to gather from the game, combined with the player feedback regarding this character, we have recognized that the player base feels limited to a single talent build for the character. Our first change was to change the currently passive trait to an active one, this lets us give the trait more power, while requiring that the player recognize when the trait will have the most impact. With the first tier of the talent tree, the old one has only a single talent that doesn’t apply to the hero’s Q ability, so while we altered some of the numbers behind some first-tier talents, we moved higher talents down to give players more options to alter W and E talents. At second tier, we saw the very very niche benefit (and subsequent low pick-rate) to this one talent and decided to remove it and add things to this remaining talent to add appeal to the other talent while not removing anything from the players toolkit. At third tier, the existing talents were fine, but to help add to diversity we’ve included this new talent that hopefully makes this ability more desirable. The heroic tier was largely fine, again stat changes were made to compensate for the alterations to the trait, but we did want to add a little more appeal to this talent. The next tier was okay, didn’t see any point to changes, but we’ll monitor to see how the community responds to the rework… (and so on)
It’s not giving a huge dissertation, but just a sentence at each ‘level’ of the character to say what they were thinking with the changes. With the PTR notes, I had to pull up outside resources to see where he was and see what was moving where, but didn’t have their thinking… so it was hard not to be negative. With the blog post, I got very vague ‘what they were thinking’ and ‘what’s new’ but didn’t hear the details enough to see what they saw.
Does that make sense?
One of the first things I seized on in other threads was the changes to the Q and AA, and there were other people who crunched the math down and came to the realization that the damage wasn’t significantly lower. I just am concerned because the traps are something you place and the enemy has to wander into, which involves either luck or intuition to put them where the enemy triggers them… the Q on the other hand is much easier to ‘manage’ by it’s nature of being something that detonates on enemy contact. I’m skeptical of the impact simply because I’m lacking first-hand experience with it, but I’m not declaring doom. It’s just lumped with a buncha confusion on my part about what specifically is going on overall with the character.