I truly believe these 3 characters feel the best in terms of power level. Balance should revolve around getting everyone else as close as possible in terms of effectiveness.
I’m sure some of you guys agree with Rein and Ashe but disagree with Ana. She is strong but I truly believe strong supports is better for the game now that we have 2-2-2. Ana is strong but with clear weaknesses and her weaknesses are being exposed in the current Meta.
Before balancing around Ashe, explosion damage towards barriers should be have a 1.2x multiplier. After that, you balance around Ashe.
Also, revert the armor changes. This will slightly help most Tanks, Torb and Brig with explosions being more powerful against Barriers.
For Tanks? I think it’s really close. Rein, Zarya, Winston and D.Va are OK. Winston and D.Va aren’t bad. This is just a bad meta for them. Orisa is close. That nerf helped bring her in. Maybe a slight decrease in Barrier size and a Halt Pull range decrease. Sigma will probably need the most changes probably. A slight nerf to his Lt can help. Removing the 50 damage done on the initial pull of his Ult. Try how that works and make micro adjustments accordingly. Roadhog just needs a rework and Blizzard is working on that.
For Supports? I know Moira is powerful in this Meta but she really isn’t that great overall. Bring her ability back to heal through barriers would be just enough IMO. Doing that now during this meta would be an awful idea though. Zen? Honestly? Just revert his Alt Fire nerf, aka the JJonak nerf. That’s about it. Lucio? They did that nerf a while ago where they increased Lucio’s speed and lowered the Speed Boost effect of his team. Revert that and you are good. Brig? Well… I think she is decent right now but she still needs a buff but be careful with her. Increase her shield health to 300 and go from there. No need for mass buffs. Mercy? I honestly don’t know what to do with Mercy so I’ll leave that alone. Everyone else should be good to go.
DPS? I don’t want to get into DPS right now. There is so many characters. Just bring them close to Ashe’s level lol.
EDIT: I didn’t finish this topic before it posted so I’m going to edit in the rest lol.
i agree in general but i also think that the roles arent as simple as just 3 archetypes.
for example having offtanks and offhealers means determining the “powerlevel” can be very difficult and have varying results depending on meta, competition, etc.
but i do kinda agree on your choice of heroes. maybe swap ana for mercy in my personal opinion, but i know i might be the only one with that specific choice.
Honestly, I never really got the saying “balanced around X.” Like, it used to be said that Tracer was how damage was balanced around, to keep her the focus. But you can’t really balance heroes around other heroes because they all do different things, and that’s the point. If all heroes have the same damage rate and the same fire rate and everything is the same except for abilities, it would basically just be a pimped out version of COD.
But, isn’t that how its mostly already done? I like Ashe and how you’re rewarded for landing your shots without getting a one hit kill, like McCree. But then you have Widow that can one shot squishies with enough of a charge. So you could be talking about that, but she doesn’t have any abilities to make up for that, that’s all she has (and I’m not going into how much I absolutely hate her one shot).
As for tanks, you’ve got a lot of other stuff to balance around. Just ignoring shields and looking at damage, the three most different are Rein, Orisa, and Winston. Rein is a melee weapon that you have to be really close to do anything with, but then Orisa has a cannon for an arm. The closest you can do is to give them the same potential DPS, but how do you do that when two of them can’t headshot? And one has an ability that can one shot a lot of stuff as long as he lands it properly?