We're tired of asking, but we'll continue to ask until Genji gets buffs

Greetings Devs,

It’s been 6 weeks since the patch where Genji saw significant changes, many of us Genji mains have given the updated Genji a try and found the changes did not address his core issues that have been overlooked in the past. Genji mains still have to put in far more effort than their peers (*read a league… or three higher) to get similar results. I will list his current issues (*unintended but glaring weaknesses) that affect his viability and along with proposed changes without making him OP. Before we start, we’ll list out his intended weaknesses which are supposed to be:

  • Lack of Sustain
  • Lack of and Vulnerable to CC
  • Lack of Waveclear
  • Marginal Merc camps (clearing and taking) ability.
  • Lack of utility (enemy debuff)

He doesn’t have the healthpool to sustain his (underpowered) *mostly AA playstyle

  • It’s fine Genji doesn’t have sustain, but asking him to whittle down heroic targets with AAs at 4.5 range is a losing proposition for him. Tanks just laugh off his damage with their own healthpool/armor/sustain abilities/talents, he’s within the engage abilities of most melee assassins, true ranged AA assassins significantly out range and out damage him with AA modifiers (spd/dmg) and most likely have sustain of some sort to boot. This leaves mages… which you’re supposed to burst down lest you get bursted yourself trying to AA them to death… The small healthpool and lack of sustain coupled with an underwhelming AA at short range forces Genji to be a passive hero until enemy team is <40% health. It’s only then he pops in to secure kills, but that just makes him a win more hero with very little influence during most of a team fight’s duration.

Way of the Shimada is a crutch that doesn’t fix any of his issues

  • It comes mid game transitioning into late game when talent trees are coming online. Genji’s still out ranged/out dmg by most ranged assassins with their + 6 range and assortment of dmg/defensive modifiers even with + 1 range. The added range further exacerbates Genji’s issue of being passive during teamfights “poking” safety until the end of time doing next to no damage to anyone with > 4.5k hp and or >20 armor. Lastly it competes with arguably his best talent in game: Shingan (which has its own inherent issues). His burst is severely diminished without it and makes him into a bad "imitation Valla.

33% Trait nerf for 55hp for “survivability” just doesn’t make sense.

  • This change angered and confounded many Genji players. A 33% CD increase for a 3% increase in health (literally 1 more tick of Tychus AA) is a terrible compromise. 55hp is not going to give him more survivability in more “general situations,” and a 33% increase in trait cool down when will just hurt him further.

Shingan’s effectiveness is too extreme against certain targets and harder to land then ever

  • Against squishies Shingan bonus damage can secure up to 30% of their lives by successfully landing all 3 charges while barely reaching 9% against a tank anything over 2.3k base hp. The damage drops significantly against defensive buffs which are most prevalent on high health heroes. Shingan already required some level of skill to land. That difficulty is compounded with the introduction of the new nexus anomaly which introduced frame drops and increased movement speed. For NA players this is further worsened by the merging of servers forcing players to play on less optimal servers with higher ping *cough central cough.

His talent tree is littered with bad talents, bad talent placements and imbalanced talent tiers

  • Some can be combined with existing talents, polished and/or moved to a different tier while others need to be completely removed. I’ll list out their issues here and give proposed solutions at the bottom
  1. Pathfinder: With Trait nerfed even further and a conditional speed increase it’s hard justifying this as a talent pick when Swift as the Wind gives you the speed bonus upon hitting the target and agile dismount gives you cooldown reduction on your significantly nerfed trait.
  2. Dodge: Simply outclassed by Perfect Defense which offers complete damage mitigation for more than 1 AA and possibility to lower its cooldown to 5 seconds compared to Dodges 7.
  3. Way of the Shimada: Most reasons have been stated above furthermore it has no synergy with the rest of the talent tree.
  4. Reflect: Single target damage increase with its value dependent on enemy misplay (dumping their burst on you while your Deflect is up)
  5. Steady Blade: Undependable damage increase. Furthermore with Swift Strike damage nerfed to it’s current iteration, there’s hardly any justification for picking Steady Blade especially when Final Cut does more damage and does not have to wait for the NEXT Swift Strike opportunity to get value
  6. Sharpened Stars: Shingan’s effective range is >2, unless enemy is clumped together there is little change in hitting multiple targets with a single shuriken spread. This talent brings little value outside of trolling and stat padding.
  7. On a whole, Perfect Defense outshines all the talents on Genji’s tier 3 (Level 7 talents). The solution is to make other talents on the tier competitive with Perfect Defense, not nerf Perfect Defense to the ground so you’re forced to pick your poison when you hit lv 7.
  8. While some people believe it’s a good talent after increasing the shield to 100% of damage blocked, the design itself is still heavily dependent on enemy misplay to generate a decent shield and is therefore an unreliable survivability tool.

Proposals to address his issues:

He doesn’t have the healthpool to sustain his (underpowered) *mostly AA playstyle + Way of the Shimada is a crutch that doesn’t fix any of his issues

  • Give him 200 more base hp, increase his baseline AA from 44 to 55, keep his AA range at 4.5, increasing his range just exacerbates his passive play style which leads to lack of impact in team fight situations, pretty much the only other place he can shine outside ganking squishies or <15% health tanks.

33% Trait nerf for 55hp for “survivability” just doesn’t make sense.

  • Genji’s trait was never a balance issue, it was clearly evident when his range was nerfed back in late November of 2018 from 5.5 to 4.5 and cyber agility cool down stayed at 15 seconds. His trait added to his survivability but did little in terms of macro of teamfights adding little to his impact during a match. This change really frustrated many Genji players, please revert.

Shingan’s effectiveness is too extreme against certain targets and harder to land than ever

  • Change Shingan bonus damage to % with 6% per successful proc totaling 18% all around. Squishies won’t need to be so terrified and allows him to be more proactive against beefier teams. Narrow the Shuriken spread by 2 degrees each side to account for the movement speed boost due to the anomaly.

His talent tree is littered with bad talents and bad talent placements and imbalanced talent tiers

  1. Pathfinder: replace it with double jump, completing Shuriken Mastery gives you pierce on shuriken instead of refilling charges preventing the insane synergy of having 5 charges of Shuriken with % damage Shingan (Yikes!) after using trait.
  2. Dodge: Change it to duration based (1.25 seconds) physical damage mitigation with a 7 second Cooldown.
  3. Way of the Shimada: Repurposed and moved to lv 16, base damage would be increased and range stays at 4.5 to prevent passive playstyle. Way of the Shimada can be split into 2 talents to provide utility such as armor reduction or healing mitigation, if this is the case, please move to it to 16.
  4. Reflect: Move it to 13 to compete with Shingan, have the bonus damage affect Dragon Claw.
  5. Steady Blade: Combine it with Final Cut, hitting multiple heroes increases the damage of Swift Strike’s afterimage by up to 60%. Switch Tiers with Flow with Water so the updated Steady Blade competes with Shingan and Reflect making tier 5 (lv 13) talents a damage tier.
  6. With reversion of trait CD, spell shield duration should be reverted back to 3 seconds instead of 4 with a maximum of 6 seconds duration when you reactivate it with 2x jump
  7. This would leave 16 as a utility tier with Flow with Water and Way of the Shimada split into 2 talents to provide utility vs enemy heroes. Shuriken charges deal armor reduction, AA provides healing mitigation.
  8. Augmented Guard: Upon Deflect’s expiration generate a shield equal to 10% of Genji’s health, create a shield equivalent to 50% of damage blocked.

Genji players just want him to be a viable hero without stripping away his identity. The 4.5 range has been his achilles since the nerf but with the right tweaks he can be competitive without what made him first pick first pick material when he was released. I’ve stated our issues with him, Dev feedback would be most appreciated.

6 Likes

You are tired to ask for genji buffs.
But who isn’t tired of asking for more SC \ Diablo heroes, asking to repair DeathWing, etc… they are still out there tho.

Genji is always going to be on the same tier as Nova, pretty good against average players, but not going to cut it in the higher leagues. You can’t buff him while keeping his super high mobility. Any buffs he gets will come at the cost of mobility, just like that 55 HP buff nerfed his trait.

Also you’re asking for ridiculous things like double jump at level 1. lol

7 Likes

The problem is Genji has one of those cycles that’s insanely unfun and frustrating to play against if it’s even a little successful, while losing as Genji is so overwhelmingly hard to come back from and feel like you still contribute.

The design itself needs a look. Feast or famine designs are awful, in my personal opinion, because they basically remove the player consideration from the equation.

11 Likes

Often when i lose with genji its in games that i could have carried with other heroes. If my team is bad there is nothing i can do about it. That being said i think that the playerbase needs to get better at accepting losses. If my team is awful we should lose. My days of instalocking valla/jaina to win games are over.

When my team is avg or just as good as the enemy team then my genji will put us over The edge. In one game we were tied at 20 and i managed to get 3 x strikes off in one fight which turned the teamfight and won us the game.

I know how this sounds “oh its always my team’s fault”. I recognize that some of my genji losses were because i was not playing well enough. But ive kept a record and 2 had an afk, 4 had a hero with 6+ deaths (which in plat is feeding).

2 Likes

Well Genji have lots of engage and escape tools, I haven’t played much as Genji (level 10) however I found mixture of shurkien+deflect build being good enough - lets not forget how broken deflect can get later. There are a lot of mains and each one would love to see it’s main being more powerful - for example I, as Murky main would love to see its basic hp being that of Baelog. It would be broken as in overall balance it needs to considerate other characters to.

Genji is terrible imo but mobility is oppressive so :man_shrugging: GL.

On the other hand, master plays laugh at me because he’s good, just not in a pleb’s hand. Fan’s tier list rates genji a tier and other master streamers say he’s fine. Genji isn’t supposed to trade against “marksmen” just like tracer shouldn’t either

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oh yes please bring back the genji meta. It was such a good time to quit playing hots.

Also could you buff my main but 20% hp and damage too. Thanks Blizzard.

5 Likes

Issue with that argument is that it’s Fan, who regularly goes on Bronze to GM runs and even in SL he’ll face against Diamonds who play more like High Gold/Mid Plat before the TL HL merger. Genji like any carry hero will dominate in an uneven match up, he can’t stand against a team with similar skill. NicHeroes, LeonBlack, McIntyre, Liam have all stated he’s in an awful state.

2 Likes

I hereby name you “hailfail number two”.

Well if that works it will be time to buff medivh, maeiv and illidank.

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Blizzard please at minimum revert the nerf to his trait.

I know I’ve been sarcastic/snarky about that change because I disagree with it but I really do feel strongly that genji did not need his mobility nerfed further. It really made genji significantly less fun to play and no one was really complaining about genji being too strong before this patch anyway (quite the opposite in fact)

That’s nonsense because there are many heroes more mobile than genji with a higher win rate who are considered balanced. Zeratul, tracer for a start

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It remains to be said that tracer is balanced.

Zeratul becomes more mobile than genji when you reach level 20 with a specific build.
Also him being balanced is not something everyone seems to agree on.

All in all patiently await for genji to be all buffed so that we can buff back maeiv and illidan.
It also would be time one stopped being niche and the other being a meme.

Zeratul is definitely more mobile than genji before 20. Not sure why you’re trying to suggest that genji is more mobile before 20 which is untrue.

Also, even before tracers rework, back when she was considered garbage, she was STILL more mobile than genji and also had a higher win rate. And she was considered garbage,hence the rework.

So its just not true that heroes cannot be balanced around being mobile

3 Likes

“lol nerf hammer go boom”
-dev team about Genji

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notice carefully how Zera is also MELEE

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Genji cannot have sustain because he is simply a hero who has a lot of mobility without collision of Terrain (E) with a conditional reset and if that was not enough there is his shield that protects him from all damage with a reducible cd that is practically a mandatory talent . If Genji receives more buffs, he would no longer have any weaknesses, and would no longer be balanced, so Genji does not need more buffs.

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I can argue he is not. There are no restrictions on genji’s base mobility.

The only mobility with no restriction that zeratul has is his E.
If you did not melee before hand or missed W you have one blink.
I can push E or D or hit and run from range as genji anytime.

Even motn does not guarantee i can use two blink depending on how you use it until 20.

At least this how zertaul’s mobility seems to be seen from a balance stand point.

3 Likes

I like how people pretend genji tracer and greymane are melee heroes lmfao.

The only heroes that have not between 1 and 2 in attack range who deserve to be called melee heroes would be probius and the alpha of all tychus.

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Are you dumb? Nowhere did I say genji had less range than zera I simply said zera has more mobility.

If u pay close attention u might also realise zeratul is stealth and genji is not. None of that is relevant to the statement that zeratul is more mobile than genji

Maybe arguable before the trait nerf. Now that zeratul can blink twice for every one time genji uses trait (since its half the cooldown of genji’s trait) with longer range and no travel time, combined with vorpal blades, seeker and might of the nerazim (versus swift strike) , zeratul definitely is more mobile than genji. Even seekers cooldown is shorter than swift strike. True though that zeratul mobility is more conditional unless u take wormhole

20 seconds cooldown on a spell shorter than blink is just ridiculously bad for genji’s trait

3 Likes