Because of the reduction in effectiveness of barriers in the game, Sentry Mode simply cannot be Bastion’s focus. Bastion needs barriers to be as strong as possible for him to be a lot more effective in Sentry Mode, because he does more damage than any other hero to break barriers faster than them, but he himself needs a barrier in-front of him to protect him from spam while in Sentry Mode. So the stronger the barriers are in the game the more percentage effectiveness you get out of Sentry Mode.
I think buffing Recon Mode’s effectiveness is the best route to go at the moment for making Bastion more effective. Sentry Mode is now a situational option because of the barrier nerf patch, and so Bastion needs more from his Recon Mode so he doesn’t have to be stationary all the time. Making Recon stronger should scale better throughout the ranks than making Sentry stronger because the high spread & worse movement of lower rank players make Sentry better than it would be in high ranks.
The problem here is that if you keep buffing Sentry Mode, it either becomes absolutely broken or it is too weak. The mode does way too much damage for Bastion to have any of his defense or offense to go up even more without him being either trash or OP. Because of barriers being much weaker, Sentry Mode is a lot more situational for barrier break than it ever has been. Making Recon Mode better also rewards higher ranked players more than buffing Sentry Mode because the spread is so much.
I think it’s ok to buff Bastion’s Recon Mode even if it’s by 5 or 10 damage per second. Bastion is probably the least used character in the whole game. The devs don’t seem to think power creep is out of control to where it is messing the core experience up.
I think Bastion with a smaller hit-box & 40% damage reduction during Recon Mode would make him impossible to kill.
Recon is really good though. The primary fire is the same as S76 and has 10 more ammo. There isn’t much you can do to it without just making it “flat out better S76 that can turn into a turret”.
With 40% DR you’re basically adding nearly 150 HP to a character capable of hitscan melting people as fast as S76 with the base HP of a tank plus having armor.
Except Recon is worse than Soldier:76’s gun because it does 160 damage per second whereas Soldier’s does 180 damage per second. Even if they increase the fire-rate to 8.25 or 8.5 to make Bastion’s damage 165 or 170 per second, that would help Bastion not be the throw pick he is now. If you make his Recon Mode better, it scales much better through the ranks than if you made Sentry Mode a lot stronger because Sentry is so much better in low ranks than in the high ranks.
Mobility has pretty much always been the key to OW. The only time it wasn’t important was when some hero had over whelming power to the degree it just didn’t matter. Because of this bastion needs two major changes to ever be considered a balanced hero imo.
First off yes his Recon mode needs something to be valid. As it stands he’s just a big easy to hit Soldier 76 in where his healing doesn’t heal his team and he has no helix rockets or sprint.
One thing I always pushed was it’s called “recon” for a reason. Give him some ability to detect enemies or something, either an ability or some kind of passive always on thing while in the mode. Or silent his foot steps to some degree and make him sneaky.
The second big thing is his transformation speed needs to be increased so switching between modes is more valid. Even his ult suffers from an insanely long transformation that if your under fire can easily die before you finish.
As long as it’s not too strong at low ranks. I still think that his Recon Mode is too weak in comparison to his Sentry Mode, so it would be nice to have a reason to not constantly be in Sentry Mode.
I think his ability to repair should change to something different in recon.
You could be pretty creative with the kinds of abilities this could be due to him being a robot.
Perhaps even giving him visual queues on ults as a passive as well just like dvas bomb gives everyone an exclamation point, perhaps as a passive he got this exclamation point on all ults/luring hero’s. ( not that this would really amount to a ton but it would make sense for him being in recon mode)
But to take a step back I’d like a different ability for recon than repair that could make his recon more useful than it is now.
Until they put cool downs on bastions sentry and fundamentally move around his power he will be an underperforming niche pick.
My suggested changes from forever ago:
Bastion changes
Self heal remains unchanged
Recon mode same
Turret mode, 10 second cool down, can’t reload, keeps standard iron clad, 20% reduction of spread.
New tank mode: 50% movement speed reduction, shells deal 120 damage, fire slower then ult mode (about 20% slower). 6 shells. Keeps standard ironclad. No reload 15 second cool down
Ult: hunter killer mode: buffs each mode, duration drains meter at different rates depending on mode, vastly reduces time it takes to change forms and there is no meter drain during configuration change (.5ish seconds)
Recon - targets that remain in line of site for 2 second (pending balance) are “marked” and are revealed through walls just like widow ult or hanzo sonic arrow (get it he is in recon mode he’s doing reconasance for his team) gains iron clad for 30%. drains meter at 5% per second
Turret mode - gains the ability to reload, reload cut in half compared to live, when curser is over a “marked” target spread is reduced by a further 20% buffs iron clad to 40% drains meter at 7.5%
Tank mode - still standard 6 shots with no reload, missles home in on targets if they are marked, buff to speed, fire rate, and damage to live values iron clad buffed to 50% drains meter at 10% a second
Bastion’s Recon Mode is only meant to reposition and escape. I would like to see a nerf to the recon gun but a (huge) buff to his recon mobility. Like adding some damage reduction to self-repair in sentry mode while adding movement speed to self-repair in Recon mode.
And risk him being protected from by up to 3 shields each game?
And all that when Sentry mode already was one of, if not the worst - designed ability I the entire game??
Yeah, that’s a huge no from me, unless Bastion also receives significant compensation nerfs for the above buffs, which are pretty much mandatory for obvious reasons concerning his current state…
Not quite. I’d say the switching animation is the weakest, not only because he literally can’t do anything, but also because it’s long enough to prevent his power from being the actual sum of it’s parts.