Bastion is awful

Fun fact: I believe Bastion is balanced, and it is the community who is bad around him. If a Bastion is on the team, they go auto-tilt because it is a “throw pick”, and refuse to protect/heal him.

1 Like

Yeah, Bastion is awful.

I used to work with the guy, he was always parking in my spot, stealing people’s lunches out of the break room fridge, and telling offensive jokes. I heard him use the word “beep-boop-fwee” on more than one occasion, even when some of them were within earshot.

Thankfully, he was let go due to poor performance.

All in all, a truly awful human being.

New pharah counters bastion pretty hard too. Def needs some kinda buff

1 Like

Oh well then your scenario is both unrealistic and meaningless.

Widowmaker has the highest dps. She does 280 damage within 1 game loop. Math that out (there are thousands of these a second) and that’s doing “”"“hundreds of thousands of dps”"""

I guess if that’s the fantasy land you’re arguing in, then case closed, argument over.

Get back to me when you want to discuss actually meaningful scenarios :+1:

Out of my last 100 games, based on my death average, I died 600 times. Out of those 600 times, I’d take a guess-timate that maybe 20 of those times were to new Pharah. I’d also make the estimate that I killed her at least 100 times. (Probably more)

Doesn’t seem like much of a counter to me. Sounds like people just suck at playing Bastion.

As Bastion, Genji is the only character I struggle against consistently, since it’s really hard to escape, heal, and try to get him when he’s vulnerable and it’s almost impossible to face-to-face him, because he just deflects and cuts you down.

I don’t mind that though, because every hero needs at least 1 hard-counter.

The tick rate isn’t in the thousands, and Widowmaker can’t shoot once per tick. If you’re going by this logic, then why did you limit Reaper to just 280 DPS? Also, Widowmaker has a 2.5x headshot multiplier, so she can deal a maximum of 300 damage per shot.

The fantasy land of the definition of DPS… I showed the Damage that heroes did Per Second…

Here’s one for you. It’s Bastion’s average DPS at different ranges taken over 50 tests each. This can be seen as a best case scenario against squishy targets since the training bot is larger than all squishies, and an average case scenario against things like tanks, Bastion, Doomfist, etc because they’re usually a little larger than the training bot on average. Also take into account that real enemies will be moving, whereas the training bot was not. But given your previous posts, it doesn’t seem like you care too much for reason, and only care about being right, so I’m sure this is probably fantasy land as well…

I have the opposite issue… I can deal with a Genji no problem, but if a Pharah decides to attack me, she’s usually smart about it, and she stays further back so that I’m doing basically no damage to her while she’s doing full damage to me.

Bastion one of few times they get to play well is was pirate ship mode. Being baby sat on the payload with two shields and pocket Mercy.

Since Mercy’s nerf on heals, it’s not as viable. Doomfist and Wrecking Ball can also just dive through double shields with no problem.

In case you see this going forward:
1 second is an arbitrary unit of time that means nothing in terms of game balance, it’s just a convenient way to estimate contribution. That’s what I was trying to show you. All that really matters is:

  • Time between initiating engagement and killing your enemy. So basically:
    damage per bullet * ( x bullets / y seconds) * accuracy * 1 / enemy heath = 1 / seconds to kill the enemy

But it’s a tad bit trickier since there’s slightly different math if your seconds to kill the enemy is greater than seconds to empty your clip. In short, reloading matters, time between shots matters, as they all sway the data slightly in different directions.

Also such math is less than perfect for real world scenarios. Yeah, Reaper beats Hanzo in all the math we’ve done so far, but we both know Hanzo is FAR better than Reaper in actual game play because of how much safer he is when he’s in his optimal effectiveness zone.

With a shield to protect him, Bastion is far more effective at putting out large consistent damage on a greater number of targets than either of the other two. He just requires team work.

I guess that’s what I don’t get. Do people here think that all picks should be at maximum effectiveness with no team around them? That they, in this class based team game, should not ever be impacted by their team composition? Tracer with a Winston and DVA to dive with her, a Zen to heal from a distance regardless of her zipping around, is far more effective than a Tracer on a 6x dps team.

In my opinion, different DPS excelling in different scenarios is a good thing.

Does Bastion need buffs? Yes. Should Bastion be buffed to the point where he doesn’t care if there are any tanks/healers around him? No. His “everyone protect me and I’ll clean house” is a very common “carry” dynamic that many games/sports utilize. I think it’s worth preserving that dynamic to provide diversity of playstyles.

1 Like

Well, nearly… You need to multiply the enemy health by the inverse adjusted DPS (or divide the health by the adjusted dps). With that one, it would take 0.75 second for 225 DPS to deal 300 damage, which isn’t right… Don’t take that as me being a dick though, it’s good math other than that. Also, this is what my thread calculated, his real-world DPS at some various ranges, plus or minus because of factors present in a game, but absent in the training grounds.

I’m not arguing that DPS is the best or even a good measure of a heroe’s real damage output, I’m just saying that in a perfect world, Bastion does not have the best damage in the game. Calculating Bastion’s accuracy is easy, because he’s at a constant spread, and can’t get headshots meaning that you’re always aiming for the center of mass. Heroes such as Widow and McCree are harder to calculate for because they’re pinpoint accurate, so technically they’re at 100%, but that’s not really useful for real world applications.

Yes, Bastion has the largest (non-infinite) clip size in the game, which means he can output the most consistent damage, but he doesn’t have the highest damage even still… He’s the fastest at taking out things like barriers or tanks (at close range), but he’s definitely not the most effective because he has to sit in one spot in LoS of the enemy to do it. Other heroes such as Junkrat don’t even need to be in LoS, and some others only need to see the shield for a split second because they can corner peek, shoot a projectile, and then hide again, leaving nearly no time for the enemy to shoot them, even if they don’t have a shield.

I don’t think that Bastion should be completely independent, we agree on that much. But I think he should be able to be at least decent without them constantly pocketing him, and he should feel consistent. I think “balance” by inconsistency is a very bad way to balance a game. I’m fine with him requiring teamwork, but at the moment, his team is more working for him rather than with him…

That math took me as long to formulate as it did to write, so I’d be unsurprised if it had a mistake. Pre-coffee morning-math is always a good time :joy:

I was using my hyperbolic example to demonstrate that “best damage” is too vague to be meaningful. If you’re talking about a 8 second span, he does. a .1 second span, Widow does. There’s no reason that time span should be arbitrarily “1 second long”.

You’re right that sitting in one spot DOES make him vulnerable. But that’s exactly his niche. Think of it like a sliding scale.

Like… basketball analogy: a team with 5x average all-around players, or a team with 4x great defenders and then Michael Jordon dropping 100 points a game. It’s the “carry” dynamic I mentioned, and it’s really easy to see in games like DOTA 2 or League of Legends. You have 1 guy that does all the killing, and 4 supportive players around him… or you have 3-4 people doing the killing, and 1 generalist support.

Bastion is just the “hyper carry” of Overwatch.

That’s not wrong, it’s also just not bad. It’s different. This allows for diversity of team composition / style of play. It’s the “feed this guy the ball because he’s our playmaker” strategy, and as I mentioned, you see it in tons of e-sport titles, as well as tons of conventional sports.

But yes, again, at the end of the day, Bastion isn’t quite strong enough to fulfill that role as it’s meant to be. His mobility handicap outweighs his damage contribution. There are a ton of hypothetical ways to address this, so there’s not much point getting into that now… but I think we’re actually sort of agreeing on this, numbers aside.

I like the idea of 5 members protecting one turbo-dps… he’s just not quite turbo-enough at the moment. My hope is that they increase his effectiveness while retaining his playstyle, rather than reworking him into a different niche (Like Recon mode could easily feel close to S76, and if they buffed the heck out of that, while nerfing turret mode, that would be a bad direction, imo)

I’m not gonna get that at all… I’m a CS major with a math minor, I don’t really do sportsball…

Yeah, he should be vulnerable, but if you’re thinking about it as a scale, then he needs good and consistent damage to make up for that vulnerability. That’s why I like playing him. I like the mobility tradeoff, I like how that affects his playstyle. I just want him to be more reliable… Not really sure if I’d call Bastion a “hyper carry” though…

Oh, you literally said what I just said… oh well, don’t feel like erasing it…

I believe there are only 2 possibilities here:

  1. they are holding off on a rework due to at least one new character in their planned release schedule, or…

  2. They kind of regret their decision to put him in the game and therefore want him to remain niche and thus are not changing him. I believe this is the case due to OWL, which the game was not designed for.

Of the few truly good Bastion mains I have seen (they do exist), they seem as a rule to be very good at reading the enemy teams movements and setting up and knowing when to change position. This and ult management make for a good Bastion ( I am definitely not one btw ). As a result, most Bastions are there to be used like a fire alarm, losing game, break glass call Bastion and hope just planting him to gun down the enemy works… leading to this charge.

The fact that they haven’t said anything for coming on two years is what’s more annoying… I can understand them wanting to hold off on a buff/rework for this or that reason, but at least say something…

I mean, they don’t owe us updates or anything, but it would be really nice to have…

That is in large part why I think it’s due to his impact on OWL… I suspect if it were today he might not even be included in the game tbh.

I like to think of all the heroes who were in the base gam that, if added now, you be called OP.

Almost every hero would fit.

1 Like

Honestly it’s not very hard to balance bastion, look at all the ideas on the bastion megathread for example and if people can think that up then the devs could do even more then that in terms of possibilities available, i do think he will be the next in line since it’s between him and reaper and he’s obviously in more of a dire need for changes, i don’t think overwatch league is the problem.

2 Likes

Don’t get me wrong, I like Bastion, I even have a knock-off “Freeman” (very well made btw) action figure on my desk including Ganymede… the problem is the way Blizz acts about him, I just think they either don’t know what to do with him, or want him niche to not “spoil” OWL games… I suspect the latter. That being said, I hope I am wrong.

1 Like

Aw that doesn’t mean you can’t like sports! Molecular Biology and CS degrees here and I work as an engineer at a triple A studio :stuck_out_tongue:

Just get into Tennis, it’s the best sport.

Yeah I kinda trailed off on that point…

It’s like… from 0 to 10 on the scale of “potential to dominate vs reliance on team support”. If a character requires no team work, they should only be moderately dominant. If your pick is capable of team wiping your enemies, then they should rely on a vast supporting cast to employ that power.

If you were really reliant on your team with only a moderate pay off, that’s awful. Likewise, if you could team wipe with no reliance on your team, you’d be OP as heck.

That’s my take on what he’s supposed to be. Without team support Almost any dps > bastion (because that’s a 1v1 and most heroes should be able to either out gun him in sentry mode, or edge heckle him in turret mode). WITH a large amount of team support, Bastion should be able to out class almost any other dps.

So far that’s pretty true, but his lack of mobility does make that difficult at times.

If we’re musing, I’d actually be interested in giving him an e or something in turret mode that has some local proximity damage (like imagine if he had shoulder mounted sym turrets). I feel like Bastion is susceptible to having a Tracer or something get in his face and just circle him until he dies. A “Stay away from me” button would be a neat way to compensate for some of his weaknesses.

Tennis is pretty good… I like baseball, but it’s so boring to watch…

Oh, okay… I thought you meant mobility vs damage.

I can kinda agree on that, but I think his reliance needs to be toned down a bit. I think that’s what you said in the previous one too…

I don’t remember if it was this thread or not, but somewhere I said that I have a rework idea for pretty much every post I’ve come across on the forums…

Here's what I have for this one
  • Configuration Sentry
    • Spread reduced to 1.5° (Formerly 3°)
    • Headshots added
  • Ganymede (Passive)
    • Ganymede will watch over Bastion, and warn him if any enemies get too close
    • If an enemy gets within 3 meters of Bastion, Ganymede will start tweeting, alerting Bastion to the threat.
    • Ganymede cannot attack the enemy, he only warns Bastion
  • Self-repair
    • No longer consumes resources when it cannot heal Bastion
    • Starts healing instantly instead of having an 0.5 second delay
  • Configuration Tank
    • Ironclad increased to 35%
    • Ironclad applies immediately instead of after the transformation
    • Tank tread sound reduced

It’s a somewhat old one, so it hasn’t been updated with my normal spread values and such, but the general idea is there… Just remove the part where Ganymede can’t attack, and there ya go. Not really my favorite rework, but it’s an idea I suppose… I would prefer if his left mouse button was his deterrent, but maybe that’s just me…