I mained Ball to GM so I feel like I have a decent undersanding of the hero and I feel like he does not need a rework. Just reverting some of the outdated changes from OW1 would already be a huge step into the right direction. Why does his grapple need to be on cooldown for 5 seconds every time on respawn? Kiriko doesn’t have a cooldown on her tp, reworked Doom can launch out of spawn, etc.
Similarly, get rid of the arbitrary 6 second limit on grapple. It feels awful, the visual indicator for time left is hard to look at in the heat of the moment and the grapple duration was never the problem in the first place. The Fireball duration was. Spin2Win was the annoying gimmick (which isn’t even a good play above Gold, but that aside) but putting a limit on the time Ball can be in Fireball is much more direct in stopping the Spin2Win gimmick while maintaining the unique aspects of the grapple, such as for rollouts or edge recoveries.
Finally, make it so his shield doesn’t give ult charge again. Why was this even changed in the first place? People complain all the time that Ball has too much HP (even though his effective HP is not even in the top 3 I think), but the vast majority of that HP is non-armor HP that you can use as an ult battery. Refusing to buff a hero because the community doesn’t know how to play around it just guarantees they never will.
Additional buff ideas I’d potentially like to see. Note, these are options, so I don’t imply that they should ALL be given.
Make Minefield an insta-cast (finally). No one has the intention to actually cancel it, and whenever it happens it’s out of dumb luck and it feels awful.
Refresh the Adaptive Shield or Grapple cooldown upon usage of Minefield, similar to how Genji’s dash cooldown refreshes. This would allow him to go even deeper on a single engage and make even more space to give a second dimension to a lackluster ultimate like Minefield
Make it so Ball can’t be bodyblocked. There’s nothing worse than having a giant, metal ball being blocked from rolling by a 90 lbs British girl.
Give Piledriver the Hinder effect. The Hinder effect is pretty under-used with only Cassidy having access to it. You could balance this by setting a tight threshold radius from the center of the Piledriver landing in which it applies.
Give Adaptive Shield a “momentum cleanse” in which slows don’t affect you upon using the ability
Yikes, no ult charge on shields is how I’ve been playing him this whole time. Thought he was like an “econ hero”. +2s grapple limit is probably enough.
He used to be this way, and it was great. You can turn around and chase the Ball off your Support, but that 200 damage you dumped into him was all into green health (well, dark blue in OW1) that didn’t benefit your ult at all. I don’t know if they changed it because of Tank passive, but I still think it should come back. You don’t get ult charge for shooting into other Tank mitigations like Rein shield or Sigma grasp, why should Ball, who NEEDS to take direct damage to draw attention and tank, be the exception?
Edit: Spitballing, but what if Adaptive Shields, instead of overshield, gave damage reduction for a duration, the amount of reduction (and possibly duration) dependant on how many foes were nearby upon activation? It would make his facetanking last for more consistent periods of time rather than “however fast the enemy can melt his shields”, and result in less ult charge for shooting him. Damage reduction in general seems to be highly effective for tanks, from mt experience. The main problem I could forsee is that this would likely allow it to be disabled by Hack midway through, making a bad matchup worse, though there’s possibly more I didn’t notice.
To be fair, they’re not shields the way Reinhardt or Winston have shields. They apply health to Ball directly, and having overshield health doesn’t prevent being Hacked. You can Hack through Sound Barrier, Tree of Life, Commanding Shout, so on and so forth.
Though I can’t act like I wouldn’t laugh deviously if this was added…
I mostly agree with this post, and I love ball (even though I don’t get to play him much because: a) I suck, and b) my friends that I play with would like a bit more actual ‘protection’ from me. And there’s part of why they want to rework him: because not only do people find it annoying to play against him, but also teammates often don’t feel like he’s an actual “tank” in the way that most players tend to think of a tank in this game.
I think he’s pretty fine, even though he’s probably slightly underperforming for a lot of players. Not every tank can have over 50% winrates XD But if they do something, I’ll be glad if it’s to change him to make teammates feel like he’s actually TANKING (he is, but it doesn’t feel like it to the team)
I always liked the idea that his adaptive shields made a medium size ‘winston bubble’ around him. It’d be easier for enemies to hit, but it would also be doing the job of a shield a bit more.
Just did another check on the Wiki, and it says overshield grants only half the ult charge that normal health does, which I presume stacks with the Tank passive of 30% reduction. Whether this results in 80% reduction (additive stacking) or 90% reduction (multiplicative stacking, if my math is correct), I do not know.
Ball main asking for major ball buffs with 0 compensatory nerfs. Classic
Can tell you right now you dont want the 6 sec grapple timer removed or it would force counterpicking against your hero even more. Youd see a lot more people swapping sombras and anas if we went back to infinite grapple spinning.
Ball is a tank that needs a proper rework. And when i say proper i dont mean slap on 1 new ability like hog. He needs a full transformation like orisa.
You’re saying that as if every game doesn’t follow the same playbook of: win first teamfight → enemy team swaps 2-3 heroes to hard counter Ball. Sombra, Mei, Hog, Orisa, Brig, you name it.
They already said they wouldn’t want to change the identity of the hero since the devs even said Ball has the most unique kit in the entire game. So a full scale rework won’t happen. He needs buffs, and I’ve listed some. These aren’t ‘major’ buffs though, mind you. First, these are ideas, not all of them should be applied together (like I said in my post). Second, Ball simply is a garbage tier pick right now. Hands down the worst tank in the game.
