Breakdown of the Weekly Recall and what it gets wrong

General Discussion
1

I thought I would add my 2c to what was said in the Weekly Recall as so much of it seems way off and fluff that hides the true problems they are not addressing

  1. Widowmaker

NO PLAYERS like to be randomly 1-shot from narnia by a hero they can’t interact with. If you are looking at the experience of playing against heroes, then she would be on the list of one needing changes, which you know because you have been trying to warp the maps around her. Stop wasting all that time reworking maps to add cover and sort out WIdow.

  1. Freja

These are 2 separate things: how much she is airborne and her constant spamming of damage. Both need addressed.

Wow, a real swing and miss. Her biggest issue is her take aim and how frequently she has it. Spamming those high damage arrows from ranges outside where most heroes can interact with her is a pain. Her lack of sound and the lack of ability to know which direction an arrow came from are also problematic. But the main issue, which received no nerf is take aim.

And the data shows this. They said

And they show a graph which has her win-rate climbing and, more importantly, her ban rate sitting at 90% with an increase at the end to above 90%. The changes did not bring her ban-rate down and she is effectively at about as high a ban rate as a hero will get (Sombra averages 89% across platforms). If their changes actually addressed, her issues then her ban-rate would have dropped. But it didn’t so clearly nothing was addressed with her changes.

  1. bastion

It’s true that bastion can often be killed too easily. However, with the right comp, he’s a menace and destroys the game for tanks, especially in low ranks. He’s a glass-cannon that is supposed to be hard survive because in the time he’s alive he can do such devastating damage. I’m not opposed to the changes to try them, but if he becomes too hard to kill then he needs to lose some damage. And if this means he gets played a lot more, enjoy more tanks moving to other roles.

  1. dps role passive

Really? This impacts tanks the most by far. And it impacts them so differently. Hog and Mauga, with their massive hitboxes and no shield, are constantly affected by the passive. Sigma, Rein, DVa and Monkey are much less affected. Note that some of these tanks also have armour to reduce damage.

Why not address the elephant in the room - you mention it in the above quote - THERE IS TOO MUCH HEALING. Don’t punish the tanks over everyone else, and don’t punish them so unevenly. Just reduce overall healing in the game.

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It returns us to OW1 again. Where team should be built around Bastion to make it effective. Nobody likes being forced to pick certain hero just cause your teammate chose Bastion. SELF-REPAIR really fixes Bastion’s survivability. Thanks to passive DPS Bastion still destroyable but not the “free ez, easy kill”. Devs can juggle hp, hitbox, damage number but it mostly will break hero’s design/philosophy. Yeah Bastion also earns ult while self-healing, but what the point? Its ult is just trash, so while Bastion repairing it receives less advantage than enemy. But survivability becomes balanced. Return self-repair as basic ability and done with Bastion

That’s exactly correct change for these two. Cause Hog/Mauga were balanced around Ana’s nade, so if Ana is banned these two becomes really oppressive. The ideal decion would be nerf Ana’s nade and Hog/Mauga at same time. But, Ana never will be reworked, so we still will se that clunky passives which will break game more than fix

3

The part that gets me most is saying that Freya’s winrate and banrate has “stabilized” while showing a graph of her banrate at 90%.

Yeah. Her banrate is not climbing because it cannot. It is as high as it can realistically be. And her winrate is stabilizing because she’s being mirrored every match where she isn’t banned.

But the logic of making Bastion changes is pretty wild. He’s getting decimated at high ranks but fine at low ranks, so the solution is… make him harder to hit? And Scott’s here telling us about how he had this idea a year ago and nobody listened to him. Gee Scott I wonder why.

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I’ve never been bothered by Widow, for probably 2 reasons :

  1. I played other FPS games before, like the original CS, where one shots were normal, and where the scout snipe could kill you even with a bullet to the foot. So a required headshot with no leeway regarding aiming seems pretty fair to me.
  2. I play in lower ranks, where people probably cannot be as oppressive with Widow as they can at higher ranks.
    Widow is the only (AFAIK) hero that doesn’t have any bullet size on her snipe shots. She needs to be 100% accurate, unlike Hanzo. This feels pretty fair to me. I do not see a reason to nerf her more.

Yes, 100% agree.

His perk allows him great survivability now, and he gets to keep his damage. He’s often quite effective. I don’t know why they would give him even more survivability by reducing his hitbox…

I honestly do not think there is too much healing. With the bullet size increase, people hit a lot more often. A lot of dps heroes have very high lethality, and reducing the amount of healing would pretty much render healing ineffective in a lot of situations.
Hog and Mauga have very high self sustain (and some other tanks too). I’m not opposed to making them more vulnerable.

That’s a fair point. Ana’s nade keeps those tanks in check. I’m not opposed to nerfing it, provided those tanks are nerfed too.

5

Ha. I originally skimmed over that bit in the article. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

It’s kinda funny to me that Widow gets banned on maps where she’s relevant and the response is "this is fine :slight_smile: ". Especially when you consider that at the moment, the Widow ban rate is probably lower than it would be, given that Freja is on the safe side of strong and Sombra has a good chance of soaking up the other DPS ban slot just 'cos.

At least we have bans, I guess. Hopefully the upcoming map voting also allows me to simply cut Corridor Royale out of my life altogether.

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It was both hilarious and scary that they don’t understand this.

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“Freya’s win and ban rates are sitting at a hundred percent, and don’t look to be coming down at all.”

“Sounds as though they’ve stabilised. Phew! What a relief!”

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“To be on the safe side we’ve increased a cooldown by 0.1 seconds. Surely everyone will love the new hero now.”

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So what would happen if bans happened before players know what map they are playing? Would that give better idea of what characters are truly trouble?

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Yes, this. Hog and Mauga can be made to be more fun (less unfun?) in general comps without Ana if they didn’t have to be viable against current nade. Ana is the problem here, as she is in so many ways against tanks. Change nade, nerf hog/mauga/queen sustain and it would be better all round.

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But that kind of is sorting out Widow, no?

Just give up on that one. Devs are incapable of seeing the issue. You’ll just go insane like I did :pray:

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Think of the amount of time and resources going into changing maps just for 1 hero rather than changing that 1 hero. Those resources could be used on other content.

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Freja is so hard to get in check for every role.
As a support I need to pre heal, especially if Freja is pocketed by Mercy, we talk about 170damage and a 25% damage reduction.

It is is incredibly stressful to make sure that my teammates or myself won’t get blown up by hero who is more silent and sneaky than Sombra and has a high mobility

On DPS: It’s hard to pin her down, she is twitch and provide more burst and more pressure than any DPS hero I can play at mid diamond level

On tank: I mostly have to ignore her, especially on maps with high verticality and hope my DPS and Supports can buffer it

She is the knew pharmercy in worse and the mood in the community was really bad back then.

Freja, as you pointed out, is accumulation of many issuesm doing a bit of this and a bit of that won’t fix the fundamental frustration.

14

That’s not necessarily true. Hero bans are largely perception based. Peni quite literally invalidates melee heroes and has a 60% winrate which is above even what Blizzard feels is acceptable and her bans are only just FINALLY picking up. This was obvious to anyone with a triple digit IQ WEEKS ago. The proof is that I was crying about it before it even happened.

In other words, people are a bit slow to realize the influence of changes. We won’t see a decrease in bans until the people realize she is worse. And that can take awhile. It’s not as if the Sombra nerfs that objectively made her worse had any influence. Albeit, she is getting banned for a different reason, allegedly.

You get the point, though. A ban system based on US is not indicative of anything beyond what we perceive.

15

So tired of this excuse. People always tear down characters who “bully low ranks,” yet never ever want to provide reworks that allow these characters to exist outside of low ranks because they would become a threat to the status quo.

We can’t have any of “muh meta picks” falling out of meta for even just a single season. No! That would be too much!

Provide some actual beneficial changes to the characters you want to nerf that make the gap between both skill and value floors/ceilings wider.

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Team 4 cites 5v5 as the main reason for adding more cover… Which is self-defeating in its own way. They removed a tank to open up more room for offensive gameplay, but in the same update, they added all this extra terrain to camp behind and j!ggle-peek from. Which actually strongly favors the likes of Widowmaker and Hanzo, who always want cover to hide behind, and can punish anyone who tries to peek them by killing them with a single, frame-perfect headshot. The heroes who really got shafted are the ones who don’t possess a lot of burst damage, and need their targets to spend more time moving between cover. So, if you think about it, all the maps were balanced around this one hero - in her favor.