Are hyper mobile heroes the problem?

I’ve noticed that highly mobile heroes in Overwatch tend to receive the most complaints. Take Sombra, for example—her stealth lets her engage easily, and her translocator gives her a reliable escape. While I personally don’t find her particularly strong or annoying, the number of bans she receives clearly suggests that most players disagree.

The same goes for Wrecking Ball (who I think is the weakest tank) and Doomfist (who I’d argue is underrated). They’re frustrating to play against because their strongest asset is their ability to disengage quickly. Genji, Tracer, and the flying heroes fall into a similar category—high mobility often means low counterplay for a lot of heroes and players.

This brings up a question: should the game introduce more tools to counter mobility? Stuns used to serve that purpose. While it’s true that stuns affected immobile heroes too, we can’t ignore how significantly they impacted mobile ones like Ball, Doomfist, Sombra, and Tracer—especially considering how effective McCree’s old flashbang was against her. She had to play in his area or move past him a lot, and while her recall often saved her from his fan, that’s still a major piece of her kit removed thanks to McCree.

Overall, I think mobility is a major sticking point for the player base. Whether it’s Widow’s grapple, Freja’s kit, or Sojourn’s slide-jump, these abilities often let heroes escape just when you’ve got them cornered—and sometimes they turn around and kill you instead.

Is mobility the actual issue here? Can it all just be a skill issue? Because clearly that doesn’t matter when Sombra’s perma banned; people don’t care about it being a “skill issue”.

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I do, and I think that Blizzard should’ve kept cassidy’s homing grenade, although they should’ve reduced the damage.

Mobility is a very powerful tool that is overlooked when it comes to discussing balance. People tend to ignore it because hyper mobile heroes are popular, so they don’t really think about it as much.

Right now, it’s incredibly hard to punish hyper mobile heroes on anyone not named Sojourn(who’s also mobile) or Cassidy. Mobility lets them take bad fights or misplay a fight and survive, but non mobile heroes don’t have any comperable luxury in duels.

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The characters with low or committal mobility, like Reinhardt, are expected to stand there and take it. But they’re also not allowed to be too tanky because people claim that’s boring or whatever. Its like the mobile heroes are the only ones allowed to be good with no real catch.

And then you have Orisa who has none of the downsides of Reinhardt and all of his upsides plus displacement and a stun and a DM ability. I really don’t get Overwatch balance. I think they got it right with Sigma since he has two mitigation abilities and some range and a stun that’s telegraphed and easy to dodge BUT can work wonders against heroes who can’t afford to focus on Sigma.

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I wish my Reinhardts were low mobile…

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I think the issue with your Reins is the committal part

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I think this is the big stickler for this kind of topic. The majority thought OW1 Orisa was, quote, “the most boring hero in the game”, likely attributed to her usually seen “stand behind shield and fire” playstyle. I personally had a lot of fun with her, but I can see how someone wouldn’t. But, push came to shove, and they changed her for OW2. Now, no one likes her; old Orisas find her boring now (at least I and a few others on the forum do) and people who didn’t like Orisa then definitely don’t like her now.

We’ve started to see some pushback on these heroes; people demanding Genji be bumped to 225 and the typical Ball and Doom hate, but the forever fan favorites see very little.

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Reinhardt is the committal ability guys. He’s locked into his animation and has a long start up and ending time for the move. You’re not Sojourn who can slide, fly and all this nonsense or Mauga who just has the better charge with an AOE stun because Blizzard’s crazy.

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Yeah, I keep saying sigma is one of the better designed tank in OW2. I’m not sure why people are still complaining about his design. He was only an issue in OW1, and that mainly due to oppressive synergy.

Reinhardt to me has always been a team-dependent hero. But with no more zarya to bubble you, I feel like he has become even less flexible than before. You’re generally better off plaing other tanks who aren’t as team-dependent and can pressure the enemy more reliably.

I low-key think rein should get some kind of major perk ability that allows him to jump to the high ground. But with a cooldown of like 10 seconds.

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Part of it is because he can punish lazy hitscan play easily. If you’re the type to not play aggressively on hitscan, Sigma hard counters you. You’re not going to do anything against barrier and suck.

I think that’s a good thing personally.

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I actually faced that yesterday. I was playing Ashe, something I rarely do, and I couldn’t get any value because of Sigma’s shield. Now, that could have been countered by more people shooting his shield, but still I found I had to flank and consider my positioning if I wanted to do anything.

I thought “Is this what people hated about shields?” and laugh because their argument must have been “I can’t sit here and shoot for free value and ego boosts. Nerf shields!”

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nah, you can press that button one more time to cancel the charge

“High mobility Rein can’t hurt you, go back to bed Tommy”

Black and white flashes of Stadium Rein with 30% move speed and 45% attack speed flying through the air with his shield up

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Not mobility, but HYPER mobility is an issue. As soon as a character mostly moves with its ability and less with normal walking, I would considder the character to be hypermobile. This inclues characters like Genji, Tracer, Ball, DF or Mercy.

The problem with hypermobile characters is mainly that they are less affected by a death, can outmaneuver almost every hero and that the main way to stop them is hard CC, that is much easier to apply to slower characters than the fast ones.

Not to mention that its MUCH harder to get them into the crosshairs or hit with a projectile. This is a massive passive buff for many heroes.

It is a skill issue, yes, but so is “not reaching top 500”. This should not be seen as a valid argument to disregard the general sentiment, that hypermobile heroes are a problem in a game like OW, where speed is maybe one, if not THE best thing to have.

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You cut out the context there though.

When you cancel the charge, you still can’t attack for a little bit. You’re vulnerable to everything and could even die with the way this game is. Compare that to Mauga’s charge which controls better, has an AOE stomp, CC immunity, and I swear it starts and stops faster than Reinhardt. Rein could, at least, get CC cleanse and a defense boost while charging.

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When a species has no Predators to keep the population in check, they will multiply endlessly until they saturate the environment to the point their continuous thriving will deteriorate the environment to the point of ruin.

Yes, mobility are a problem BUT because there’s no reliable counters.

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I’ve seen Rein-posting before, but that read like Doomfist-posting. I can hear his voice actor saying this in my head. Moira too, TBH.

Yeah, that’s what I think. And I’m not saying hard stuns are fun, but I genuinely find them better than having characters who can come and go as they please. I think people will adopt that opinion now that Sombra’s banned more.

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I wouldn’t even consider mercy a problem even if she has hyper mobility. She’s not a threat to you and you can still deal damage to her while flying, especially if your’e a hitscan. Anyone who thinks otherwise is coping.

I agree with Genji, Tracer, Ball, and Doomfist though. Hyper mobility + lethal damage is where the problem can stem from. If you add high HP to it, it becomes even more of a problem. That’s why ball is probably a balancing nightmare for devs.

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I think it depends on what you define as hypermobility.

For example, I consider Sombra mobile. Same with Genji, Echo, Pharah, Juno, etc.

I consider Doomfist and Wrecking Ball hypermobile because they can cover far more distance, far faster, more frequently, and more consistently. They can use it to escape or engage. And they can do it from vertical and horizontal advantages. Same goes for Lucio - their mobility is available a lot more frequently and they have the independency to use it whenever.

Mercy and Tracer are somewhere in the middle. Mercy’s mobility is contingent on an ally. And Tracer has a lot of mobility but it is on a cooldown. Fliers are not that horizontally mobile, they’re just vertically mobile. I consider that vertical mobility, not hypermobility. Juno is mobile, too, it’s tied to cooldowns.

I would say no. The last time we tried that, we got Brigitte and Cass’ flashbang. And it ended up being less effective against the mobile heroes and more effective against the non-mobile heroes.

If they have mobility, they should have drawbacks. A lot of them were given one, but others didn’t.

The issue is on some heroes, like Genji or Wrecking Ball, they have too little risk for what they can do. Wrecking Ball having that much mobility and hiding his critbox during it is unfair to me. Doomfist be able to scale walls and constantly CC people, then press a button to fly into the sky with no cast time while he heals, is unfair to me.

For heroes like Echo and Pharah, there is enough risk there. Same with Tracer and Sombra, and Mercy, and Moira. They lost some HP because of their mobility, so they play at a bit more risk. If they’re going to have high kill power, it has to be risky. Right now, it’s not risky enough.

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Its not about Mercy being dangerous, its about what she does to enable broken DPS to be even more broken and play much more freely. If Freja and Soj would not be the top picks, I am sure Mercy would not be a problem. She always gets dragged into a mess if some long range/burst DPS is meta, because thats her complete identity.

Like Spiderman in Rivals, I think an unconventional nerf to such characters would be to give them a longer respawn timer of like 15 seconds instead of 10. But that is highly controversial.

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I think that’d actually be fair since they get back to the fight quicker. However, I think a better way would be to just give characters who are meant to stand there some kind of improved durability. If Reinhardt can get literally kidnapped by Orisa, shouldn’t he have a better way to dig in his heels?

I really would have something like Reinhardt can stop characters like Orisa in their tracks with his charge. Even if they’re immune to CC, he’ll sorta hold them in place until they move past him. And not this “well, we made them better than Rein” stuff.

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