Binary Area-of-effect ultimates are bad design

General Discussion
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With this I’m talking about ults like Doomfist’s, Orisa’s, and Bastions. Where there is a circle of damage, where if you’re inside of it when it activates, you die, and if you’re outside of it, you don’t.

These ultimates are bad. Everyone knows these are some of the worst ultimates in the game. And the problem with it is that they sort of have to be.

You can’t balance an ultimate like these. Because ultimately, it’s either possible to get out of the ring in time, in which case the ult does nothing 90% of the time, or it’s impossible to and the ult has almost no counterplay for a huge swath of characters.

Sigma’s ult is the only one I might be able to say is decently designed.
It doesn’t do enough damage to kill on it’s own even if you’re caught in it, but it provides a powerful root that makes it very easy to land a kill, and since you can dodge the damage both in the activation and before slamming into the ground, you have two opportunities for counterplay, with counterplay opportunities ranging from: Stunning Sigma, using an invulnerability ability, using a mobility ability, killing sigma, or healing a teammate to keep them alive.

Orisa’s ultimate gets close to being good, since it also provides a powerful pull/slow effect that can be useful… But since you can’t shoot or move or do anything while ulting, this relies entirely on your teammates (unless you’re pulling someone off the map in a suicide play) and is overall less engaging and less effective. Add to that the fact that the only real counterplay is to get out of the circle, since Orisa is immune to stuns and is quite tanky during it, it’s harder to make it more powerful without making it unfun to be on the receiving end of.

Bastion’s ult is a bit better since you can box people in with the three shots, but that’s really hard to do. If even when it was bugged and had unlimited shots it still wasn’t that good… There’s really a problem with this ult.

Meteor strike… I mean. We all know it’s bad, right? Even after numerous buffs… Most of the time you’re still just going to use it as an escape ability, or now to get empowered punch for free.

I do not understand why we keep adding these into the game. We literally removed two other ults that were good and highly effective from heroes in order to give them this type of ult, and I don’t get it. Orisa’s I can understand changing in general, since supercharger might not have been very effective without a barrier to protect it but… I don’t feel like putting more of these ults into the game was the way to go.

Why didn’t you make her activate the charger on her back in a radius around her? Make her lead the charge with a more offensive up close brawl? Or make her spin her javelin upward, just like the current animation but preferably moving, to lift and damage people in a radius consistently? Or do any number of things like that?

Bastion’s ult being changed, imo, is practically unjustifiable, though. Tank was a strong ultimate with solid counterplay, cool movement tech, and the skill requirement to actually aim the shots that was rewarded by getting a kill when you did. If it was too strong with 1 less tank, then all you had to do was lower the duration or make him slower during it like he is now in sentry. It didn’t need to become discount 3-shot meteorstrike.

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I have no clue what you’re on but I want some.

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If you’re arguing that it’s too strong now after it’s buffs, we can happily agree to disagree… Because that won’t really change the argument that they’re near impossible to balance due to their binary nature. If a small buff changes it from unusable to too powerful that’s probably bad, right?

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Removing the only reliable counter (shields blocking it) to an ult that makes a hero practically invulnerable, slows you, and one shots you is not exactly what I’d call a small buff.

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Yeah. It’s a badly designed ultimate when it’s either completely useless and does nothing (blocked by a barrier, dodged, or any other reason) or kills you without you being able to do anything about it.

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It was never useless and it could be easily balanced by lowering damage. The area of effect slow by itsself is crazy utility.

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It’s not very engaging for the Orisa player then if all the ultimate is, is to stand still and let her teammates play the game while she’s locked out of it. At least Mei’s area of effect slow lets her continue playing.

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It also doesn’t give her damage reduction nor does it have 1-hit kill potential.

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I’m actually a huge fan of Doom’s ult.

In Overwatch 1 it was multi-situational as either a get-out-of-jail free card or a combo extender. It gave you a free pass to go in fast and increase your temp shield count, or quickly dodge a stun/sticky and keep fighting.

In Overwatch 2 it was pretty bad for the fact that there’s one less person to hit, but with one less mobility option, it also left him a sitting duck sometimes. I think the buff to it to give him an empowered punch was a very smart idea, because he can still use it to force a kill, or he can use the extra distance to escape when he needs.

I swear they must have nerfed it hard in some other aspect though. Is the radius smaller? Does it do less damage, and in turn give less shield? In 1 you were at least able to usually, you know, do some chip damage with it to start a kill. In 2 you just can rarely hit someone unless they’re in an unusually garbage position, and end up dying out of it more than not.

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My reply was in response to the person saying we should reduce the damage so that it wouldn’t have the 1 shot kill.

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So make Orisa’s ult useless??

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Not every ultimate needs to do 5K.

Doomfists allows him to scout the area and reposition himself. Effectively giving himself an escape.

Orisa’s isn’t meant to be used solo, it’s meant to be combined with focus fire.

Bastion can scout a whole map in his Ultimate and unless they panic press the buttons without thinking it’s really easy to land kills on certain heroes. Sucks to be Ana if Bastion is around.

it’s perfectly fine when ultimates aren’t sure kills and it’s perfectly fine to have ultimates countered by abilities, positioning or Es.

Having your ultimate doesn’t mean your owed brain dead plays.

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My problem isn’t that they aren’t sure kills. My problem is that they are either sure kills or don’t get almost any value.

Doomfist’s ult has about as much value and purpose, most of the time, as an amped-up reaper’s wraith form. They’re both essentially invulnerability and a reset of abilities. As an ultimate, that’s not a lot of value. But you couldn’t make it so that it could reliably secure kills, because heroes like Ana don’t have any counterplay. There’s literally nothing they can do about it.

Bastion has the same problem. Orisa has the same problem. They either provide less/equal value as regular cooldown abilities, as ultimates, or they kill an enemy without them being able to do anything about it.

In fact, the majority of these abilities can’t even be directly countered by anything besides moving out of the way. Bastion can be across the map. Doom is completely invulnerable. And Orisa can’t be stunned and is almost impossible to kill in time. Only Sigma is properly counterable, and like I said in the original post, his ultimate is by far the best out of all of them.

The only thing that keeps these ults in line is being able to move out of them, which is so easy to do that it’s hard to get value out of them and creates an opposite problem.

And I think that’s really bad design.

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You might want to include a few others then, because those aren’t the only ones.

D.va’s Self Destruct, Sigma’s Gravitic Flux (which does percentile damage), Junkrat’s Riptire, Mei’s Blizzard, and Ramattra’s Annihilation.

Then there’s the non-aggressive ones.

Which is why most of them aren’t actually binary, but scaling damage. With the furthest incurring some minimums. See Self-Destruct, Bastion’s Arillery or Meteor Strike.

This one is actually binary.

Hack, EMP, Rocket Punch, Sound Barrier, Immortality Field all work.

Thing about damage is, there’s no real value to it unless you manage to kill someone. So the Damage-role tends to have very powerful ultimates that can wipe out whole teams, or nearly. Getting at least 1 or 2 kills with these is valuable, and so they’re justified.

But Ana does have counter play.

Bastion’s isn’t binary, though.

Bastion’s can be deflected, or barrier blocked. You can interrupt or shut down the cast by killing him or stunning him too.

You can stop him before him climbs.

Orisa can be stunned and interrupted on her Ultimate.

People are dying to these ultimates quite frequently. Ultimates like Dragonblade are much harder to gain value from.

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There’s nothing wrong with an ultimate that’s basically guaranteed to kill you if you have no mobility options and are in the center of its range. It’s effectively the same binary logic as pulse bomb; You have a condition to meet, and if you fail to meet that condition, you die. As an individual, you aren’t supposed to counter every ultimate in the game. As a group, there’s clear counterplay. Don’t tightly cluster up if Tracer or Orisa have their ultimates.

No? She has automatic fortify during her ultimate, making her immune to stuns. The only way to interrupt it is to kill her outright, which itself is fairly difficult due to the whole DR and headshot immunity thing.

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OP, dont try to get smart conversation from the people here, a lot of them dont understand how Sigma’s ult is better designed than all 3 you mentioned.

The buff that Orisa got made it even worse in this aspect: now its either be a mobile flanker or die.

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What rank are you? 2c

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bruh them indie devs dont have budget, so lead dev opens paint draws a circle with with brush thickness 12 and copies png into game adds some effects and gives you all ultimates.

please remember indie studio needs to manage resources, it means some heroes get paint hand made circle ults when reworked.

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Any of y’all noticed how this forum has now figured out it can call anything it doesn’t like “bad game design” and act as if it’s an objective fact?

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I mean, OP’s not wrong that all-or-nothing ults are trash. Tank mode is demonstrably, and statistically, better than artillery strike; supercharger is a better ult than yoyorube unless you get meme killed by it; and we’ve all largely memed on meteor strike as hot garbo for years but now people are defending it as “good, actually”?

Comparing artillery strike to d.VA bomb is insanely disingenuous because bomb can be deployed in a way that you can’t do anything about it and that’s part of the skill expression. Bastion just has to hope someone unplugged your keyboard in order to get a kill, and the elims/10 for self-destruct versus artillery strike tell the story.

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