Another attempt at a Brigitte powershift

General Discussion
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UPDATE: I just made some more changes today, inspired by what’s been going on with the “pro experimental”

–

OK, so this may be my most carefully-thought-out attempt yet. Before I first posted this, I’d been going over the numbers for days, making comparisons and trying to make things fit in. Then, after I posted it, I’d been continuing to make changes to it as new thoughts and concerns come to light. My goal being, of course, to properly define Brigitte as a close-range melee support who needs to be actively participating in the fight to properly support her team on the front line.

Anyway, here we go (I’ll try to explain my reasoning along the way too)

Health: Changed from 150 to 200

[As the intention is to have Brigitte actively participating in the fight at close range, with her large hitbox and slow speed, she’s going to need more HP.]

Inspire–

  • Self-Heal is now reduced to 80% (12 hps)
  • Duration is now canceled when Brigitte dies

[When Brigitte’s health got nerfed to 150, her self-healing also went up quite a bit. Then, when they tried giving +25 health back to her in October, they didn’t adjust her self-healing accordingly, which I think is one of the reasons why it went wrong. Here, her self-healing has been reduced to just a bit higher than what it was before the nerf (which was 10.8333… hps).

I’ve also incorporated the nerf from the “pro experimental”, as I felt like it made sense and would be very reasonable as part of a larger powershift. It makes staying alive even more important, which I think justifies buffs to her survivability; although Brigitte is going to be bulkier here, killing her is now going to have more of an immediate impact on her team’s survival, hopefully making things feel fairer.]

Repair Pack–

  • Charges reduced from 3 to 1
  • Range reduced from 30m to 20m
  • Healing changed from 110 over 2 seconds to 150 instant burst
  • Can now provide 75 armor overheal lasting for 2 seconds
  • Armor does not stack over Rally’s armor cap
  • Cooldown increased from 6 to 8

[Repair Pack is a controversial ability, so I’ve changed a lot here. I’ve kind of reverted it to how it was before the addition of extra charges, but with a longer cooldown and shorter range. My intention here was to prevent Brigitte from enabling flankers/divers, but still give her a good single-target emergency healing and/or protection option. For the cooldown, I used Zarya’s Projected Barrier as reference.]

Whip Shot–

  • Now procs Inspire for half the duration (3 seconds)

[The idea behind this change is to make it impossible for Brig to just keep her distance and keep Inspire up constantly with Whip alone. Now there’s always going to be a small gap in the healing if only Whip is used.]

Barrier Shield–

  • Health increased from 250 to 300

[With a little more HP on her shield, I hope that Brigitte can actually use it to shield an ally more often. She’s probably going to need it for her own protection on the front lines, too.]

Shield Bash–

  • Damage increased from 5 to 10

[The damage increase doesn’t look like much, but I had a specific combo in mind with it: two strikes from Brigitte’s primary, Bash, then Whip. Currently, that combo does 145 damage, but with this change, it will do exactly 150, becoming lethal to Tracer if it succeeds.]

Rally–

  • Duration decreased from 10 seconds to 8 seconds
  • Rally armor’s maximum duration decreased from 30 seconds to 15 seconds
  • Hacking Brigitte during Rally now stops armor from being given to Brigitte or her allies for the duration of the hack

[I have heard that Rally is considered to be one of the strongest ults in the game, so I’ve tried to tone down the duration a bit. I’ve also added in some important counterplay with the Hack interaction.]

1 Like
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As a Brig main I’m all for changes. I’m not sure about all of these but I wouldn;t be opposed to some of them.

But why buff Shield Bashes damage AND let it activate Inspire? Just remove the damage altogether, it’d still be a great ability since it’s, basically, a stun-on-demand so long as you have your shield. Which, with the Shield health increase, would make this even easier to do.

3 Likes
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I like these changes :dancer:

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Actually, thinking about it, I think I may have gotten a little carried away adding Inspire to Bash. With the extra bulk, she’d probably be proccing Inspire enough with her flail already. Also, as you said, her shield would be in less danger of breaking with more HP, and it already has a very useful stun

I’ll just casually… adjust that :sweat_smile: Thanks for the input

2 Likes
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This is a nerf to her survivability no matter how you look at it, and just makes her rely on her team even more. Whip Shot at 5 seconds is… actually devastating. Inspire at 4 seconds on top of a lower self heal seems a bit much. The health and barrier increase is not enough, she will just become an even better dive target. Giving Rally an arbitrary hack weakness is weird, and double nerfing it on top of that is also unnecessary.

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The duration of Inspire and any changes to Whip are actually some of the things I’ve been really unsure on. As for the self-healing, I have read that she actually had even HIGHER self-healing than now just before they gave Pack multiple charges, but I’m really nervous to give her higher than 12 hps self-heal with 250HP because of the apparent chaos that ensued in response to the October HP change. I’d only like to raise it to the full 15hps at 250HP if ABSOLUTELY necessary

I don’t think she should go over 250 total HP, but the Barrier could get buffs if 300 HP isn’t enough. Not necessarily even an actual health buff, either; reverting one or both of the cooldown/regeraration nerfs it got in June is always an option

For Rally, if the Hack interaction is too much in combination with the other nerfs, I could definitely drop it if needed. I just wanted to give people another option to shut it down, as I have heard that Rally is considered to be an extremely powerful ult, second only to EMP

If the Whip cooldown is a big concern, though, then we could always do this: leave it at 4 second cooldown, and keep Inspire at 6 second duration for her primary, but have Whip only proc Inspire for 3. Cut it in half. 3 seconds of Inspire on a 4-second cooldown ability still sounds like it would accomplish what I was going for with those particular changes. But I would like to get some opinions on that first before I edit anything

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This right here is dead on arrival, even with less packs. Flankers are too strong with overarmor on a cooldown that can apply at range.

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This is probably blasphemy, but why not remove the mobility in her kit? She does have the reputation of being unkillable and inescapable. They’ve really only tried messing with the first part of that when her defensive abilities were part of what was meant to make her unique from other healers.

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I want to deny this because 1 pack harmed flankers more than it helped them

The reason current pack (before armor removal) helped flankers is because

  1. Enabled up to 3 of them
  2. It was over time, which means they were either constantly building armor or technically getting mercy pocket heals

With only 1 pack, although it can benefit 1, it’s just 1, and once the armor is removed he doesn’t get any effects like with over time, which is why OG pack harmed them more than helped

2 Likes
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^ This right here was my train of thought, too. Once the burst healing/armor is applied, that’s it. No heal-over-time shenaniganry to deal with. Considering it also only lasts 2 seconds, and the range has been nerfed to 20m, I don’t think a flanker would have nearly enough time to take advantage of it anyway

On the other hand, I also made sure to raise the cooldown so it doesn’t get thrown around too much. I’m not quite sure if I went overboard with that decision or not though

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I can already see Tracer mains frothing at the mouth.

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Her kit is great for an area denial healer…

Let’s leave her alone and let new healers fill in a different role so there’s more to choose from

The more healers and more variety of strengths, the more power healers will have to make meaningful hero choice impact.

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So, I was thinking about making some changes to the OP, partially based on the feedback I’ve gotten here (thanks for your input :+1:)–

Inspire–

  • Radius reduced from 20m to 15m
  • Self-Heal is now reduced to 80% (12 hps)
    (Removed duration nerf)

Whip Shot–

  • Now procs Inspire for half the duration (3 seconds)
    (Removed cooldown nerf)

Actually, I think this might be even better at achieving what I intended to. Also, I threw in an Inspire range nerf to kind of try and prevent her from healing the entire team at once. I’d like it so that even if she does go to fend off a flanker on the backline every now and then, she ends up sacrificing supporting the frontline in the process. I want it to be really impractical to keep her in the back all the time

EDIT: I’ve gone and edited these changes into the OP now

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Apologies for posting here again, but I’ve gone and made some more changes inspired by today’s events. I would have made a new thread, but I felt like there weren’t enough changes made to justify that, so I just added it on here. I hope that’s acceptable, and apologies if I’ve made a mistake in judgment

For those of you just joining us now: don’t worry, this is part of a MUCH larger list of changes. Please scroll up to the OP to see the whole thing

Changes in bold:

Inspire–

  • Self-Heal is now reduced to 80% (12 hps)
  • Duration is now canceled when Brigitte dies

[When Brigitte’s health got nerfed to 150, her self-healing also went up quite a bit. Then, when they tried giving +25 health back to her in October, they didn’t adjust her self-healing accordingly, which I think is one of the reasons why it went wrong. Here, her self-healing has been reduced to just a bit higher than what it was before the nerf (which was 10.8333… hps).

I’ve also incorporated the nerf from the “pro experimental”, as I felt like it made sense and would be very reasonable as part of a larger powershift. It makes staying alive even more important, which I think justifies buffs to her survivability; although Brigitte is going to be bulkier here, killing her is now going to have more of an immediate impact on her team’s survival, hopefully making things feel fairer.]

A lot of the “pro experimental” thing may have been really controversial, but I actually felt like the Brig Inspire nerf had potential for the reasons I stated up there in the notes. I felt like it helped lay the groundwork for the changes that a majority of Brig players want to see

Also, I went and reverted Inspire’s radius back to 20m after changing it to 15m last time. I’m still unsure about that one tbh

As always, feedback is appreciated, and several things may still be subject to change :sparkling_heart:

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That would be almost how she was before her rework, right? That was before my time as a player, so apologies if I’m wrong. Anyway, I would definitely be willing to try something like that, too. I’m just nervous about how non-Brig players would react to it in the present day. If there’s enough outcry all at once, then it’s possible that she could get hastily panic-nerfed, and end up in a bad spot

I feel like it might be better to carefully, gradually work our way up, to avoid causing too much of a commotion. Something like my take could very well just be the first stepping stone towards our intended goal; further tweaks could be done as people play and get a feel for the changes

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You just need to go back to how it was before with the shield at 500 and the cure / armor of 75 maybe with some extra charge or remove that of the barriers cutting the healing, I don’t know, it is asking a lot for dpswatch maybe if you are lucky they will give you 300 of shield removing 90% of the self-healing I say if Jeff himself said that they were going to nerf the supports and tanks until they were useless
PD: And even if this happened, I’m sure the legion of crying main genji would start again with the #deletebrigitte