2-2-2 has completely revamped the game’s meta and character balance has been thrown entirely out of whack. Blizzard’s slow, methodological style of patching may have worked in the past, but now it really isn’t cutting it… Nearly every character needs some kind of tweak, buff, or nerf to accomodate the new forced role lock, and it has made playing competitive matchmaking genuinely exhausting.
They should be frequently hammering out balance changes in the PTR. If a change is a mistake, just don’t commit it like the moira fade buff, but just sitting around and ‘waiting for more data’ or whatever really lowers any incentive to play this game, especially when certain characters are just stomping on the rest of the cast and heavily punishing non-meta gameplay.
Look at how their only focus rn is how out of balance beam weapons are.
Meanwhile:
We are in a dual barrier meta, with an overtuned tank.
The power creep in this game makes the TTK basically instant.
There is too much healing.
There is too much tanking.
There is too much damage.
Most DPS heros are a joke, because they have not been brough up in the power creep, thus by default they have fallen to F and D tier, despite being balanced in the past [or in Bastion’s and Sombra’s case, never making it out of F-tier] (Pharah, Soldier, Torb, Tracer, Sombra, Junkrat, Bastion, Ashe, Genji, Winston, and Dva).
Their sidestepping balance approach will always the their forefront, and 2-2-2 will not expitite that nor change that.
Can’t say I didn’t warn you all. If you care to dive into why, more, check out my thread where I go into extensive detail about the meta shifts being the result of inaccurate balance changes, power creeps, and more recently, hero additions being broken.
At this point the devs are either busy creating new content for the game, or the team is only working in small numbers. Regarding the fact, that there is so much wrong about this game, i wish they would finally make drastic changes on the ptr. Without making changes, things wont get better. And the ptr is there to test them. But right now, this game feels like it got completely abandoned by its devs.
I wish they would work on OW2, but after the diablo immortal announcement, i am afraid they are using all their capacities to create something much worse. But thats just speculation. I hope, they will actually reveal their plans and ideas for the future of this game at blizzcon. Cause right now, it feels like its going nowhere.
I don’t feel like it’s been ‘abandoned’, I just think they’re used to taking their time with changes. Problem is, changing the way the game played on a dime completely broke whatever tenuous balance they had.
Number tweaking shouldn’t require that much work and is harmless on the PTR, so I don’t understand why they don’t at least try more frequent balance tweaks out.
They should make a community rework section of the arcade on ptr and then they should take a look at the most popular reworks (ones that make sense, not meme ones like 5k dps Torb or whatever) and make that the PTR standard, if people like it try it on live if not then scrap it, whats the harm in testing.
Their pace is still much faster and more-to-the-point than a standard MMO-type game. So I see no problem with it.
However, they do have a problem in terms of resource distribution. Like, creating new characters is lovely and will refresh the game/bring in older players again. But how about making the entire roster as viable as possible first? There’s 31 characters and they all need to be viable and consistent; yet not oppressive. All based on average play, not high tier play.
So that means:
Bastion
Pharah
Symmetra
Mei
Widowmaker
Hanzo
Torbjorn
Doomfist
Sombra
All need a good lookin’ at. So… 29% of the roster needs to be looked at. Yeah. So. No new Heroes. Fix up the quarter of the roster instead. Then new Heroes. I didn’t even include the maybes, such as Mercy, Junkrat, and whatever other few.
Imagine how much easier it would be to roll out a new Hero if they were let loose on a slightly bumpy field instead of a field littered with series of jagged mounds and craters.