This is a change you won’t be able to adjust to, because adjusting to the range limitation would mean playing dangerously close to any enemy you want to peel from. Adjusting would mean getting demeched constantly, because she won’t be able to play any closer.
A very big example and very meta currently is roadhog. He has 20 meter hook and you will always, ALWAYS, want to play outside of that hook range. If your teammate got hooked at maximum range, with quick reaction, you only needed to step forward quickly to catch the bullets. And all of this happens in roughly half a second, there is very little time to booster and you have to be ready to boost, that is if you even have boosters.
With this change, it means you won’t be able to matrix for teammates when they get hook comboed, unless you stood in hook’s range yourself, which is extremely inadvisable or you always had boosters available (also inadvisable because you want to be repositioning where needed) and then you will need extra 0.41 seconds time to cover the missing 5 meter range that they cut off from your matrix, so just walking forward and quickly pointing matrix will no longer do it, you will 100% always have to be using the booster…
People won’t always react in time with the boosters or won’t always have them available and reacting to missed hook’s 0.3 cast time is not recommended either, so you don’t get more than half a second at best to react to people getting hooked. Every single extra button press will add to player reaction time too. Roadhog having advantage in distance is only exacerbated by this change and with this, they just made it really hard to peel against him.
And this is just one example why this change is really bad. And it’s just not against roadhog, you will generally have to play far closer to your team than you would like because of all the enemy fire and melee range dva is a dead dva. She wants to take high ground to both contest and be safer.
There are some enemies like Reaper who you will want to envelop completely in the matrix, to stop them from leeching but you want to be at max distance because being close to reaper without matrix is death sentence, you don’t want to get caught in a scenario where reaper is coming at you and you have no boosters nor matrix and he’s within his optimal range. Yet matrixing reaper is very crucial.
This also makes it significantly harder to catch important arching projectiles because Dva’s matrix can be sweeped to catch them, but the area she can use on the spot has been significantly lessened, by as much as 70%. So it makes all the abilities that barrier doesn’t block significantly stronger and there are abilities like graviton and ana’s anti-heal that do not need to become any stronger.
This change also makes it significantly harder to play in the middle and peel for both frontline and backline whenever necessary. While the remainder of all peels still continue to have 15-30meter ranges.
Tl;dr Dva wants to matrix enemies, but she has to get too close for comfort now to peel, putting her in danger and she’s too fragile to facetank any of them. It also denies her high ground advantage.
Just like 2 second matrix crippled her matchup with tracer by denying her feathering and making it sooooo easy to just spam her down, this will negatively affect dva who wants to peel for her teammates.
They joke about how we should matrix and follow around riptires and Genji’s ulting… but with these changes, they certainly aren’t possible anymore.