The format is amazing and I say this as a Tank and Dps player but 3 major things the current mode has need to go for it to truly be amazing.
The Dps heal passive has to go. Supports have to heal more in 6v6 from the get go but can’t as effectively because everything is sliced by 30% meaning they need to burn their emergency cooldowns frequently in order to do anything relevant. This passive also especially screws over more utility based supports like Zen Lucio and Brig, and since its role queue you can’t run 3 supports to offset that. So instead the passive should go and you just tune down the high heal and sustain supports like Ana Baptiste and Juno for example.
Tank cooldowns have to be lowered. Right now it’s annoying for 5v5 tank players trying out 6v6 for the first time and having their muscle memory cooked. Tank cooldowns are super strong but too long, instead they should have their 5v5 cooldown numbers but be lowered in potency so I can output the same amount of pressure as a tank but with lower kill threat since I’m not solo tanking.
And this is a bit of a hot take but I believe the season 9 health pool and projectile size changes should go. The changes inherently buff hitscans and mess up the break points of non hitscan characters. Things like Genji damage, Junkrats combo, Doomfist slam, etc have been rough considering they didn’t receive compensation for the patch but the hitscans did. I’d like that removed.
This is just some feedback I hope the devs see! Fingers crossed for 6v6 as the main mode and 5v5 cut.
However, the healing reduction passive must stay while triple Support is plausible. If they were to ship a 6v6 mode that limits Supports to two, it could be reduced or removed (with healing nerfs).
5v5 can stay, but 6v6 should get the same dev resources. 6v6 vs. 5v5 has never been a fair competition, because 5v5 has always gotten resources while 6v6 has gotten next to none. It will never be fair until development attention is equal.
Did you really think about this? What resources are you talking about?
hero development : applies to both
new maps : applies to both
cosmetics : applies to both
That is probably 99% of resources put into the game. Then we have 1% for balance which, let’s face it, is a couple of interns getting drunk and randomly making some changes every month. Not exactly a massive difference in resources?
What resources are you talking about other than the random balance changes?
I really hope the s9 changes get reversed at some point. Hero hitboxes, projectile sizes, auto-regen - they all dumbed down the game significantly and took away from the competitiveness of the game.
I’d also really like to see perks go away as well. I think the failure of Stadium indicates that these “player choices” suffer from solved game problems so perks should just be part of a heroes kit, if at all. Perks make the game less readable and are unnecessary fluff imo.
There are so many things that have never been addressed. Off the top of my head:
Healing reduction passive being too strong.
Lack of DPS balance - having an off-tank makes a huge difference to the balance of Flex DPS in particular. Some of them could be made a tiny bit stronger as they now have an off-tank to contest them.
Lack of tank balance or design consideration - some tanks are built for better sustain potential in 5v5 and it doesn’t transfer well to 6v6 (Hog, Ram, Mauga).
Bad tank cooldown tuning - rather than reducing the strength of abilities for some tanks, they instead chose to reduce their frequency, which hurts their gameplay loops and overall tempo.
Heroes like Bastion, Torb, and Mei (and formerly Reaper) have more HP than they should have in the 6v6 format.
We simply have not had enough balance changes that actually consider the ecosystem as a whole. Only the most extreme outliers have really seen significant 6v6 specific changes.
We are also too beholden to changes in 5v5. For example, DVa got damage nerfs in 5v5, and it makes her kinda poopy in 6v6, where she was already less oppressive.
So you agree that it is a balance issue. This is not some massive difference in resources between modes. I imagine the balance “team” being about 2 people with a bunch of people testing changes.
What they are not giving 6v6 is time. Maybe it needs another 2 people to form a balance team just for 6v6 - not a lot of resources.
Hawk and other streamers (GM+) created a 6v6 mode in the workshop and a lot of people were playing it. Comments in discord were mostly positive from 6v6 enjoyers. They spent something like a year making tweaks to it to get the balance right. Unfortunately team4 “know better” and just went with the laziest possible incarnation of 6v6 with minimal changes.
All they had to do was use the community created mode as the baseline and make a few tweaks to that if necessary. But they were too high-and-mighty with a “we can do this ourselves” attitude, and all it achieved was creating a bad 6v6 mode which is unbalanced and got no love.
I think they should go back and look at why the community created mode was seen as balanced and fun and take what they can from that and apply it to the current 6v6.
Or maybe they should look at whether Hawk is interested in working for them instead of that other streamer they hired who has done nothing useful as far as the balancing goes since he was hired.
I think Blizz is perfectly capable of doing it without the help of players like Hawk. They just have to recognize that the mode is viable, and that giving it the support it deserves will yield value.
I mean, would you not consider a year’s worth of time investment tweaking the balance to get it right a considerable amount of resources? I feel like this is exactly what PepeHanz is referring to when they say that the mode hasnt gotten the same resources.
The bad decision was to just throw tanks into it with reduced HP and minimal changes and think it would be good enough. That was a bad decision and to believe that would be enough suggests they have no clue.
I agree with this. The effect should only come into play if three or more supports are on the field, almost like a “debuff”. Perhaps that would be a good way to balance it.
Yes to all of this, especially season 9 being reverted. I’m a big advocate for 6v6 being the main mode but I honestly wouldn’t mind if it got seperate balance like this, one thing as well you should mention though is toning back all the damage/healing buffs that have been gotten since season 9 as straight up removing the healing debuff passive and health without any other changes would either cause things to die instantly or not at all
Idk if I prefer 5 or 6, but I do really like the dps flex role. I think ideally, the game would be able to balance the tanks based on if there are 2 or 1 on the fly, but idk how that would possibly feel to get nerfed mid fight. Maybe replace the health diff with over health that decays?
You’d think so but the amount of braindead hitscan casuals defending them whenever the flaws of s9 get brought up makes it hard to communicate to blizzard that those changes gotta go
