I like how she’s a mech and pilot. But wtf does she do?
Playing against her, she does nothing. Literally nothing. In a teamfight I straight up ignore her and kill the important squishy targets. You don’t even need to walk out of the defense matrix. Its duration is pitiful, its aoe is puny and cant change directions, and its interrupted by any form of crowd control. Her Self Destruct? I just take the hit. it does such pathetic damage its not even worth walking out of. If she gets her nuclear core talent then the self destruct hurts a lot, but it takes ****ing forever to detonate to the point you can finish what you were doing and walk out afterwards.
And worst of all, her mech is squishy. 2 seconds of focus and it blows up. Can’t tank, does no damage, all of her “disruption” can be ignored. So wtf does she do?
Playing as her, i get ignored. The literal only time she kicked *** was with an abathur hatting me. I solo’d 1v3 with abathur’s support (so its actually 2v3) but that was it. Every other game I played her she was 0 impact. I got carried.
Sure but it’s not as it is literally impossible to use DM in general as people make it sound, it is timing and you have a frontier tank there, obviously he always IS THERE when playing Bruiser, but people don’t get this part specifically.
If I play her, I mostly go in a DM build and use it as often as possible (and useful). It can mitigate a whole lot of damage, if the timing is correct.
I like D.Va because if everything goes well you can deal a lot of damage (because you can fight forever without needing to go back to your base) and never really die for real.
If the Mech gets destroyed it gives a little bit of exp to the enemy team but personally i think that it’s not a big deal. When baby-D.Va can’t enter a new Mech then she just has to play extra safe for a moment.
The good thing about letting her Mech explode is not only the zoning, it’s the fact that you get a new Mech afterwards --> It’s like resetting your HP bar back to full without giving exp or going back to your base.
I also like the lvl16 talent “GG WP” but it’s a very risky one. With that talent you can get a new Mech (another full HP bar) if an enemy player dies. Also her Pilot form DPS with that talent is pretty insane.
As an example, you fight until your Mech is at 1%, then you use your Mechexplosion and get into a new Mech. You fight again until your Mech dies, kill enemy player finally as Pilot and get back into your Mech. Until this 2nd new Mech is down to 1% you can already let it explode by yourself and start over again.
So if you are a good player and have some luck you never really die while playing D.Va. It’s almost similar to Murky - He will just come back if you kill him. D.Va will just get a new Mech if you kill her Mech.
I once played QM with a premade team and our strategy was feeding the enemy team hard but never let them any room to breathe.
We had Murky, D.Va, Leoric, Vikings and Abathur - Our team was never really dead and we contested objectives forever. There was never really a point where Abathur had no one available to use his hat. The enemy team had so many kills but wasn’t able to do anything with it
She plays defensively, negating high amounts of damage with her W and peeling with Q. Excellent in comps that are going against a low amount of stuns and silences but plenty of burst.
Since burst is generally followed by or incorporates a stun to initiate though it’s often not the greatest idea to draft dva in most situations.
She’s a murky-ied version of Chen. She’s pretty much there to be annoying and mitigate large chunks of enemy numbers.
Healing is a form of anti-damage and offsets damage dealt; shields are temporary hp and semi-act like healing; summons are also a form of temporary hp (blocking damage) and D.va is pretty much like a big Summon that sinks enemy damage into nothing. aram tip; picking heroes with ‘temporary hp’ can outsiege the enemy team on matches without healers)
Like with a murky bubble, if players try to focus D.va, its supposed to be offset by a last-moment escape that then ‘forces’ enemies to either flee the explosion radius, or run away from their tower/fort space as the mech explodes on those.
There’s 3 main issues with D.va
All her cooldowns can be used mindlessly on rotation for people going through the motions, so they end up doing nothing
Her contributions are heavily tied to talents, so, like murky, she doesn’t feel like a ‘real hero’ till much later in the game.
She takes a ‘bruiser’ slot, but doesn’t really solo. Sure, her aoe attacks help some waveclear, and just attacking accumulates detonation meter, but in the early game, she doesn’t trade up on any match-ups, so it re-affirms the idea that she does ‘nothing’.
Similarly, her ability to waste numbers applies to allies and any healing done to try to sustain D.va can largely be wasted, and thus use cooldowns that could have been used on another ally.
Bad/new d.va’s feel like something worse than murky (as he splits better, is more annoying, and has cc) but the select that actually get to play her really well almost feel like some OP multiclass OW-gamebreaking nonsense as she tops siege/hero damage while feeling ‘unkillable’.
It’s really easy to do nothing with her, plus, her being an obnoxious character just adds to the notion of her being a bunch of nothing; at the mid-level it seems like she’s just a worse version of other heroes, but on the select super holiday for people that put in the time and work to actually make her shine, she does stand out as a unique contribution, but until someone sees that done (and wonders if it’s even worth the investment) she’s pretty much regulated to the ‘uuuuggghhh’ reaction.
