Hello, friends. My name is Kith and I like videogames. Recently in an AMA, Brett Crawford (Blizz_Daybringer) had the following to offer on the subject of D.Va:
Now, normally I don’t dive in on characters that I know are being worked (because I’m not a fan of my work going to waste even though it’s unlikely it’ll be accepted in the first place), but a friend asked me to do one of my Review+Rework threads on D.Va because of Mr. Crawford’s comment. While I am apprehensive about the prospect, I’m going to do it anyways because I like making my friends happy.
The Review will cover Visual Design, Unit Stats, Abilities, Talents, Overall Gameplay Issues, and culminate in a Final Grade. After that, I will present the Rework aimed at solving whatever issues the Review reveals as the second post in the thread.
D.Va’s Mech and Pilot forms are pretty clear in what they communicate:
- The Mech looks well armed and armored and has visible boosters, implying the ability to go fast when needed.
- D.Va herself wears a fitted pilot suit and is armed with a repeater pistol, implying that her personal combat role should be limited.
Given that D.Va’s Mech is significantly more durable than she is and you typically want to stay out of Pilot Mode as much as you can, I’d say this section deserves a perfect score.
D.Va’s Mech is okay-ish - it’s got a lot of nice utilities the offense department (high Attack Speed, AoE, Attack on the Move), but it doesn’t really feel like enough to offset the relatively low durability and damage output. Another major mark against the Mech is the reduced Movement Speed which makes Body Blocking and general mobility significantly harder.
Pilot D.Va’s primary feature is that she exists in the first place: she’s the player’s opportunity to deny the enemy 50% of a takedown, so she gets value just by being there. However, bizarrely, she also features the highest unmodified Basic Attack DPS in the game. I could understand her Pilot form’s DPS being reasonable to give her a chance to ward off attackers, but #1?
Ultimately, the two halves of D.Va feel unbalanced, like the Pilot mode got too much juice and the Mech suffered as a result. Given that D.Va’s listed role is “Bruiser”, that’s not great.
The opportunity to deny the enemy Takedown value is undeniably great, but what’s not great is that the denial potential is really all this setup offers. Even worse, it’s really obvious that the majority of the design value went into this Denial Potential setup and that the other abilities suffered as a result, so that’s not helpful either.
On any other character Boosters would get a higher grade, but Mech D.Va’s bare-bones kit forces a harsher judgment because it has to shoulder so much of the load. Boosters does a little bit of everything, but that’s not necessarily a good thing - if you use it for any of its primary purposes (damage, peel, mobility), you might find that you’ll need it for one of the other ones as soon as it goes on cooldown. It’s not necessarily a bad ability, but it definitely leaves a lot to be desired in context.
Defense Matrix is the star of the show where Mech D.Va is concerned, and what a star it is: a 75% reduction can turn some of the most threatening attacks in the game into pokes.
Unfortunately, for as good as Defense Matrix is, it can be a little tricky to use properly: its range isn’t extensive and mastering the appropriate time to deploy it to negate the damage of powerful attacks can be difficult. Ultimately, despite its potential, Defense Matrix is somewhat situational due to its drawbacks.
Self Destruct is a microcosm of D.Va’s design in general: it’s a situational ability that’s situationally available that locks you out of the rest of your abilities when you use it. Now, granted - it’s really good for what it is and has some amazing potential if you’ve got a teammate that can move it for you, but you’ll rarely see it used more than 4 or 5 times in a match and that whole “forces you out of your core ability set” is really unpleasant.
Bunny Hop is a pretty solid Heroic in theory: it’s got damage, crowd control, Unstoppable, and the animation for it is pretty cute. However, peel back the theorycraft and you start to see the issues:
- The standard “100 Second Cooldown for Strong Heroics” is way too stifling for a kit that’s already pretty bare.
- Like Boosters and Defense Matrix and Self Destruct, Bunny Hop is mutually exclusive with the rest of Mech D.Va’s kit while active.
- Doesn’t really cover any of Mech D.Va’s weaknesses or provide any opportunities that weren’t already available.
- Despite granting Unstoppable, does not disable the 15% Movement Speed Penalty while active.
- Big Shot provides significantly better tactical flexibility and interactivity.
I really, really, really want to like Bunny Hop, but it’s just not good enough.
Big Shot is probably the only thing keeping D.Va above water right now. It covers the vast majority of the Pilot Mode’s weaknesses and allows you to get back to Meching about in an amazingly short amount of time. It’s effective, spammable, and versatile - almost the exact opposite of what Bunny Hop is.
Rush-Down is incredibly handy for helping D.Va get around in a timely manner, basically giving her a Mount where she previously only had a 15% Movement Speed penalty. If you’re one of the people that thinks that Boosters’ damage is negligible and only has value as a mobility/emergency peeling tool, then Rush-Down is perfect.
The downside, of course, is that you’re sacrificing a talent to make sure that Mech D.Va can handle long-distance treks in a reasonable timeframe - something that every other character can do for free.
Hit the Nitrous is a pretty okay choice. The extra squirt of speed that it offers is somewhat helpful in getting around and the extra damage can help you pancake unsuspecting foes.
Because Boosters has so many roles to fill, you have to be very good at using it at the right time and in the right way. With that in mind, barreling into the enemy team is rarely a good example of “the right way to use Boosters” - its damage isn’t impressive and the knockback is unlikely to win the adoration of your teammates unless you’re using it to peel. The Cooldown Reduction per hero hit makes it slightly better, but you have to complete the Quest first.
Overall, Crash Course encourages you to use Boosters badly and then, once the Quest is complete, only gives you minor benefits for one third of its primary uses.
Basically, it’s a trap talent in the purest sense of the term.
I absolutely adore Pro Moves, you want to know why? It provides mobility to Mech D.Va without Boosters being part of the equation. It even allows Mech D.Va to reliably Body Block because her Movement Speed isn’t constantly getting dragged down by her stats!
Diverting Power is a nice idea, but a flawed execution. Part of that is just Defense Matrix’s flaws being magnified, but the extra Movement Speed reduction is really unnecessary. The other choices would be better options even without Diverting Power undercutting Mech D.Va’s already gimped mobility.
Most enemies scatter as soon as Defense Matrix comes out because they don’t want their damage nerfed into uselessness, so while the extended duration sounds good on paper, in reality it rarely gets significant value.
If you took D.Va, chances are it’s because you want to use either Self Destruct or Defense Matrix. Fusion Generator enables more of the former by virtue of using the latter, overall it’s a pretty handy talent to have around.
Depending on the math, Bring It On increases the amount of Self Destruct Charge generated from Mech damage to either 39% (which is laughable) or 60% (which is less awful but still not impressive). If you’re that thirsty for boom juice, just take Fusion Generator instead of turning yourself into a piñata.
Coming Through increases the value of Boosters as a Crowd Control tool, making it much more effective at peel and general disruption.
While the slow isn’t substantial, Dazer Zone does make it easier to keep enemies within the effects of Defense Matrix. Unfortunately, Dazer Zone’s soft CC directly competes with Coming Through’s hard peel, so it’s not not a great choice in context.
Aggression Matrix is good for when you want to mill as much Defense Matrix as possible, either to suppress the enemy team’s damage output as possible or to get as much supplemental Self Destruct charge out of Fusion Generator as possible.
However, it loses points because it only counts Basic Attacks against Heroes, so it doesn’t give you as much uptime on Defense Matrix as you would initially imagine.
Nuclear Option magnifies everything about Self Destruct (including its drawbacks) and as a result only really has three niches:
- You’re fighting something that is static or has predictable positioning, so the increased timer doesn’t matter
- You have a Garrosh on your team who took Into The Fray and can huck the Mech at the enemy team at the last second, bypassing the drawback of an increased timer
- Your sense of timing is absolutely amazing and you can place it in such a way that the detonation threatens the enemy at a critical moment, either for zoning purposes or dealing massive damage
It’s fairly useful in the aforementioned niche situations, but otherwise is very difficult to get value from. Making a ponderously slow ability even more ponderously slow usually isn’t going to be worth whatever upside comes with it unless you’ve got the cheese to bypass it.
Good in theory, but doesn’t have enough oomph to stand on its own.
In the interest of making Pilot D.Va significantly less vulnerable, Big Shot is the default choice at 10.
More health is always nice, but the increased cooldown on Call Mech is unnecessary. Emergency Shielding and Ablative Armor are better in practically every way, up to and including how much relative durability they offer.
What the description of Emergency Shielding doesn’t tell you is that it outright negates what would have been the killing blow, with no limit on how much damage can be blocked. This means that if a Mech D.Va with 10 Health and an available charge of Emergency Shielding gets nailed with Pyroblast, she’ll survive. The shields it provides are honestly secondary most of the time.
In more straightforward speak, Ablative Armor reduces damage effects that deal 80 damage or less per hit/tick by 50%. It’s a very solid passive counter to characters like Lunara and Nazeebo (who rely heavily on Damage Over Time) and characters like Tracer and Tychus (whose Basic Attacks are weak but extremely fast), but where it really shines is how it interacts with Defense Matrix. The 75% Damage Reduction causes a LOT of things to fall below the threshold and can render D.Va nearly impervious to damage from debuffed enemies.
Also, perhaps a bit ironically, Ablative Armor functions excellently against Mech D.Va and Pilot D.Va due to their high-speed, low-damage Basic Attacks.
Similarly to Big Shot, Torpedo Dash goes a long way towards covering Pilot D.Va’s weaknesses - with the two in hand, she’s basically a full Hero. The ability itself has significant range and only a 12 second cooldown, granting Pilot D.Va excellent mobility and making her much more difficult to pin down.
GG, WP doesn’t really offer anything that you don’t already get from Big Shot. The damage bonus makes Pilot D.Va’s DPS even more frightening, but you’re rarely going to have the opportunity to sit and shoot (and usually if you do have that opportunity, you want your damage to be low so you get as much Cooldown Reduction for Call Mech out of the target as possible). The Takedown refresh is handy, but usually if you’re getting a Takedown as D.Va it’s because you used Self Destruct - which gives you a new Mech for free anyways.
Ultimately, you’re better off relying on Big Shot for supplemental damage and milling the cooldown of Call Mech and taking Torpedo Dash to keep Pilot D.Va alive.
The extra Armor is nice to try and ward off getting blown up immediately, but Torpedo Dash’s ability to get you away from the danger is more valuable pound for pound. Pilot D.Va doesn’t have a ton of health, so the 50 Armor does a lot less than you would think.
Additionally, while the Cooldown Reduction for Basic Attacks is a nice idea, you have Big Shot.
I can understand the concept of Suppressive Fire - it makes Pilot D.Va’s Basic Attacks slightly safer by giving you more positioning flexibility, so you can mill the cooldown of Call Mech more reliably. However, just like GG, WP and Nanoweave Suit, Big Shot already covers those bases, so why not take Torpedo Dash instead and broaden your horizons?
Bunny Hop is underwhelming and Stop and Pop is very difficult to use effectively.
Keep in mind that’s three shots over 0.5 seconds, not three shots with a 0.5 second cooldown in-between. Pew! Pew! Pew! is a massive power spike to Big Shot and the increased cast duration is frankly negligible.
Concussive Pulse is a nice talent that would’ve been useful at Level 7. At Level 20, it’s massively outclassed by its neighbors.
If you’re comfortable with the amount of damage and cooldown you’re getting from Big Shot’s default form, MEKAfall is a very viable alternative that makes Call Mech much safer and much more versatile.
- Mech D.Va is a mediocre Bruiser
- Pilot D.Va is a mediocre Assassin
- The novel portions of the design (Defense Matrix, Self Destruct, and Pilot Mode) are not nearly enough to carry the rest
- Talent selection leaves much to be desired
Before we talk about D.Va, let’s talk about Rexxar. I know, weird change of subject after I wrote all those words about D.Va, but try to bear with me here. Heh.
In a sense, Rexxar is comparable to D.Va because of their shared emphasis on half-heroes. Basic logic dictates that adding two halves together results in a whole, and in Rexxar’s case that’s very true: constantly managing both Rexxar and Misha gives a whole gameplay experience because the two halves are always present, so the gaps are rarely revealed.
However, unlike Rexxar, D.Va’s halves cannot be added because they’re mutually exclusive: the player can only ever be Mech D.Va or Pilot D.Va, never having access to both ability sets at the same time. Instead of how Rexxar’s halves are added together, the two half experiences of D.Va are averaged, and the average of two halves is merely a half - leaving the gaps clearly visible.
To quote the friend who inspired me to write this: “D.Va doesn’t have a lot and what she does have isn’t very much.” Neither of her Modes has a significant presence or impact because so much value has been sunk into the wrong place - all of the effort to cover her weaknesses would’ve been better spent building up her strengths to ensure that she could perform admirably in her element instead of softening the blow of her inevitable failures.
![:smile:](https://d3rakab8gpdsa3.cloudfront.net/en/heroes/images/emoji/twitter/smile.png?v=6" ":smile:")
vs 
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