Now I won’t deny that Sigma and Hammond are starting to have oppressive pickrates in GM atm, Sigma is at 13.83% (Means he’s played 82.98% of the time) and Hammond is at 11.33% (67.98% of the time), in the last week. Now I won’t argue that Sigma could do with a tuning, but Hammond, I don’t think he needs balance changes
Right now the problem is, his counters are just worthless to play. Sombra is the main counter at shutting him down and she has an abysmal pickrate across the board, 0.17% pickrate in the last week, she has maintained this pickrate for a long time and it’s honestly ridiculous she hasn’t had a balance change since 12th of March 2020 (I believe) which was just to decrease her spread by 10%
The other counter to him is Mei, she also has a whopping pickrate of 0.45% in GM, even lower rank players aren’t even bothering to play her, while she has had balance changes in recent times, none of them have been impactful and moreso just minor tweaks.
Doomfist is another character that can be surprisingly good at Hammond (If Hammond dares go near him) at times and even he’s sitting at a 0.9% pickrate, his last balance change was the 19th of May 2020 (don’t quote me)
So it’s no wonder that Hammond is performing so well of late, because his counters are just garbage, so lets try and make other heroes viable before we just knee-jerk nerf a character (like Blizzard normally do when characters hit this level of pickrate) that may not even have an impact on him (Like I seriously think you’d have to give Hammond a major nerf to actually cull his pickrate at this point)
Have we considered the fact that blizzard has intentionally made a few of the tanks OP because tank players are such wusses that they wont play if they dont have a massive advantage?
The problem with buffing Sombra and Mei to counter Hammond is that those two are also incredibly oppressive to other tanks as well, so, even if they become stronger there is no guarantee that it will force Sigma/Ball to a more sane pick rate. That’s also not to mention just how frustrating characters built around spamming CC are for tanks to play against.
It’s hard to buff Hammond’s counters without making them troublesome for every other tank as well.
Hammond excels because he’s got great mobility, combo’s with Echo/Tracer and a very strong self sustaining cooldown - those are the key to the patch currently if you ask me. Could also be said he can be used to counter snipers.
you say that but mccree/echo tracer sig zen brig should be a pretty damn good comp against ball, hes always been very good but overshadowed throughout goats and double shield, so unless you make heroes that strong again hes gonna be good
I’ve been feeling like hammond needs a little attention for a while personally.
Whilst he’s hard to use he also gets so much value very easily with little to no risk of dying. Even in the case that happens he’s back to the fight so quickly it doesn’t matter.
But the main counters being terrible is also compounding it too I wholly agree.
Edit: I also am kinda sad though because I know he’s loved among a lot of tank players.
Tbh, I would like them to make it so Healthpacks are more useful to Tanks, then nerf Hammond relative to how much that helps him.
Additionally make it so all non-melee sources of knockback are reverted back to how they functioned in 2018.
(I.e. Not Hammond/Rein/DoomFist/D.va/Winston)
Maybe keep it for Roadhog Ult too, just because it’s an Ult.
Balance Dev Josh Noh already admitted Hammond is the epitome of powercreep/mobility creep
The Devs have taken a global nerf to CC approach to make the game less frutrating, and Jeff has said they are going to introduce a system in OW2 to make CC even less annoying and potent
Hammond needs nerfs, CC heroes don’t need buffs. No more powercreep. No more CC.
Picking a hero, solely for countering one hero, and nothing else is usually a bad idea. Moreover, the fact that a specific character is needed to counter a specific Tank, kinda implies that the specific Tank is in a problematic position. Sombra’s issues, aside, Sombra herself, isn’t quite capable of dealing with Zenyatta or Tracer as effectively, either.
Is Mei capable of dealing with other targets in the composition? She has relatively lower damage output in exchange for strong spacial control and individual control of targets, but there’s probably a good reason why she isn’t played, either because the teams haven considered her, or because she’s not capable of dealing with anyone besides one Tank, who is a lot more capable of dodging Mei than you give credit for.
Quoting because you think Doomfist is capable of dealing 600 damage in the span of a few seconds - which is impossible for him. Doomfist is in no way, capable of handling Tanks and more likely to get killed by Wrecking Ball’s Minefield or Sigma’s Accretion than getting ROcket Punch or Seismic Slam off.
You didn’t mention Junkrat, Ana, Bastion, Torb, Sigma, or Roadhog. Clearly capable, perhaps even moreso, than the above mentioned.
While this is true of many Tanks, it’s especially true of Wrecking Ball. He makes better use of Health packs scattered around the map than the rest of the team ever would, and he’s also the fastest moving character in the game, next Primal Rage Winston.
And yet, they still went through with it knowing clearly what was going to happen.
The band-aid fix they introduced in WoW didn’t work very well and even FFXIV toyed around with a longer version of that resistance (up to a full minute) in its PVP-mode before getting rid of most stuns entirely.
Course, in FFXIV, it’s incredibly difficult to make one kill wherein WoW and Overwatch, the effort is far, far less.
So we’ll see what they do. I hope there’s a beta so we can make observations and provide feedback if it doesn’t work out well.
no, WB’s counters WRECK him yet those other heroes aren’t being picked because even though hammond bursts in screeches when CCd, he also does it when he simply dies, meaning that his so called “counters” aren’t more effective at dealing with him than say a full charged widow shot with dmg boost and discord orb on the hammond
so the problem isn’t exactly countering him, the problem is the extra amount of value he gets from simply rolling into the enemy team, of course this is just his gameplay so what should devs do? simple, remove the extra amount of value hammond gets from doing other things like infinite stalling, even worse is stealth stalling by staying stuck on surfaces
The change is very straight forward and its how hammond should have worked from the get go, make it so his cd on grapple is also his cd on the hook, once the cd is up he has to hook again, you literally have the chance to spin infinitely if you manage your hook correctly
A lot of these counters are mostly problems for Reinhardt specifically, not tanks in general.
Mei is probably the hardest counter to Reinhardt in the game. Sombra is also pretty good against him. Meanwhile, the tank counter to them both is Orisa, who is totally worthless.
I also would like to see this “global CC nerf” he’s on about, majority of new heroes have had CC in their kits, it’s literally easier to name the heroes that haven’t had CC in their kits, OW has never had more CC then right now
Hammond was designed around knowing he would get stomped by CC, and thus have large counterplay with his kit, if this was an argument against other tanks it’d work but this will always be the case, if there’s a viable counterpick and a Hammond is doing well, the correct solution is to counterpick
Because Mei’s effectiveness was nerfed into the ground, she’s just straight up bad, ever since she got nerfed no one has bothered to play her, she’s consistently been a bottom pick through several metas, there is very little to suggest this isn’t the case
Actually, Doomfist’s primary can do a max of 66 damage per shot (not including critical damage), fully charge punch into a wall = 250 damage, four direct shots = 264 damage, at that point he still has two abilities unused which can easily make up the last 100 damage and even Ball does pop his shield, Doomfist will likely be off CD for one of these, sure it’s not likely to be consistent, but he can do 600 damage in the span of a few seconds if given the chance
But it’s not so much that he can deal with Ball himself, it’s that he stops Ball’s momentum, giving his team a chance to deal with Ball, if the ball does try to escape he can slam the ball to stun him in place briefly on top of this, Doomfist is can be quite strong against tanks, it’s that his character is full of bugs and part of his abilities also make his movement very predictable, often requiring a Zarya to get value from his kit
He’s definitely not counter-level against him, but he’s a lot better than people realise and I’d take him against Ball over Reaper who most people think is really good against Ball because he’s supposed to be a tank shedder
Sorry but out of those only Ana and Roadhog to a degree can be decent against Ball
I’ve tried running Bastion myself and it’s rare to get a clean kill on Ball, without getting absolutely destroyed yourself and good Ball players will just avoid Bastions LoS, I don’t see how Junkrat is good other than his trap which is easily avoidable, Torb I’m utterly confused in how he is in anyway good against Ball
While Sigma’s Accretion is good against Ball there is no way he can kill the Ball without any help from his team, not to mention I doubt good Ball players get hit often by it
Roadhog is definitely good against Ball and for a while his pickrate was high there but it’s dropped off so either Ball players have learnt how to play around Roadhog or they’ve worked out that Roadhog just isn’t as useful as having Ball
And while Ana’s sleep is great against Ball, her kit counters Roadhog more than Ball, considering how dominant she has been, I think that while on paper she sounds good against Ball, I think the reality is not so much
I’ll agree that Mei is problematic for tanks, people really overexaggerate Sombra’s effectiveness against tanks because no one really tries to learn how to play Sombra to understand how she gets success, you can’t firestrike in Sombra’s LoS without getting hacked, a lot of Winston’s just jump into an area knowing full well there is a Sombra there, while Zarya’s play aggressive thinking they can bubble back which a well timed hack will counteract this play, Roadhog players who go out of positioning thinking they can heal and fall back if they’re in trouble, well guess what shuts this down? A well timed hack
Sombra is very good at punishing bad tank players but doesn’t do great against skilled tank players
I think the solution is that we need OTHER VIABLE TANK OPTIONS in GM. People don’t pick Ball because he’s just mad OP in GM, they pick him because what else are they going to pick? Rein sucks in a hitscan/mobility meta, D.va’s been hot garbage for a while now, Orisa’s been nerfed to death, Hog’s been nerfed pretty hard and sucks in a hitscan meta, Winston’s not been a good pick for a while now, and rarely, if ever, ends up being strong in GM unless it’s a winston/dva dive comp, and Zarya just doesn’t pair well with Sigma (who’s totally must pick).
Ball isn’t in his high pick status by any virtue on his part, he’s just picked because there’s no other good option for the GM meta.
