I’ve had the exact opposite experience, Bastion was trash before the rework and an annoyance after the rework because of Ironclad and sustained damage instead of burst damage - if you want the Sentry changes reverted honestly be my guest as it’ll make certain he never sees any more use if he can’t self heal and get pocket healed with the damage mitigation thru’ a dive.
The whole turret character concept is just awful, they already reinvented the idea via Orisa and making Bastion even more polarizing of a design just skirts the edge of either being broken and unfun or unplayable and a waste of resources. Give Bastion something to do well other than sit behind a shield, and you significantly raise his general applications, his skill cap and his pick rate.
I’d be half tempted to put his Transformation Tank on his E, reduce its damage to 120 per shot and give him Remote Mine again just so the character had more depth.
Who wouldn’t want the old turret damage back? That doesn’t mean giving the old turret damage back is what’s right for the character, he was straight up less viable before the revert than he is now even with the old turret damage because he couldn’t survive being focused compared to having less damage, Iron Sides and meter based Self Healing. If you give the old weapon back, it makes the changes to Recon mode irrelevant because that mode was meant to be the high weapon accuracy mode for Pharmercy etc.
I didn’t go thru’ every sub-tab of the OP, but it doesn’t surprise me that someone else already suggested that change at all because the entire problem with Bastion is that he completely relies on Sentry Mode and Iron Sides to have any impact on the game. What Bastion needs more than anything is a tool re-engae with after a team fight is lost or he gets picked and has to reinforce from spawn because Recon mode isn’t cutting it. The more you depower Sentry Mode, preferably by getting rid of Ironsides altogether so teams can’t pocket him with healing over multiple forms of damage mitigation, the more you can power up Recon Mode (or whatever else) to give him an effective strategy other than El Presidente.
Think about it this way, he used to be able to do 1050 damage and a moderate range vs tanks, now he does way less than 525 at moderate range with only 60 effective HP to show for it.
I’d say losing effectively 465 damage and more at range in a fight is bad for him.
Ironclad sucks completely. He also needed the recon and healing buffs anyways, not the sentry rework. Recon is supposed to be his mobile mode, not his “accurate one”.
Both Sentry and recon should be similar in how they operate except that sentry can’t move and does more damage. Sentry shouldn’t be the “tank busting mode” considering they ruined it’s damage vs tanks but it has always supposed to be his defending mode.
You push or relocate with recon, you dig in with sentry to defend (Or siege if you’re in a good enough position.) That is literally what his lore shows and his whole identity is supposed to be
Thanks! It’s difficult keeping this thread alive, most of what people are going to say about Bastion has been said already so the debate has kind of died down meaning this thread falls quite alot.
What if Bastion’s E ability was like D.Va own new E ability? A barrage of rockets that he can only use in Sentry Mode.
That would give him an option for dealing with targets outside of his effective chain-gun range, and allow him to soften up targets before they enter his effective chain-gun range.
It’s less oppressive and more skill-dependent than simply reverting the changes to his Sentry Mode.
That sounds kind of useless for Bastion at least. The projectiles are too slow and the damage too low to really make any use of it. He needs his primary to not suck, not a missile ability.