I just saw a video by AndrewJRT on Illari, and at the end he essentially said this
“I think instead of nerfing strong heroes, we should buff the weaker heroes. The power you feel in games is fun, and that’s what makes it fun”
I feel like he has a good point, actually. I’m not saying it’s the solution to all balance changes, but I mean yeah, why don’t we have a load of buff increases for once?
Perhaps on experimental first, so we can actually see what it does before going to real in-game changes, but I dunno I thought he had a point
thing is, with this philosophy we would end up in an pretty strong power creep.
We need a good balance between buffs and nerfs and not Giga buffing Heros (like Soldier recently) unless they are f tier.
Power creep is already an issue on the rise again right? So I do agree with this, but honestly whenever patches come out it always seems nerf nerf nerf, rather than “a few nerfs, little buffs”
But then again, people usually highlight negatives
The power is relative. If you buff everyone to same level then you will no longer feel more powerful than them.
That said, I do agree the dev team has been rather nerf heavy lately. Many heroes have been straight up ruined, and Illari mains can only hope they use a lighter hand this time.
And lets, for argument sake, say that we do this. We buff every support to have Ilari level of sustain. Then nothing dies… So we have another OHKO meta. Every one loves oneshots right?
Right?
After that we do what? Buff HP and damage to keep TTK at the level we have now? So nerfing Ilari is just simpler solution to the problem.
Hell, they already started giga buffing lifeweaver so now he’s just a chore to try and kill with 225 hp, the dash buff, + being able to rotate elevator and dash constantly.
Went from a hero that wasn’t all that bad, but mostly outshined by the rest of the support cast being overpowered, to now just being near on par with them from getting giga buffed constantly.
Which further proves why the balance team needs to be replaced with people who have an ounce of understanding on how the game works, so they can actually put context towards their changes. If they had context, they would’ve realized that lifeweaver wasn’t the issue, the rest of the supports being hilariously too strong is.
The cost of power creep is old content becomes irrelevant. The cost of avoiding power creep is new content becomes irrelevant.
Given we already have imbalance in the game, some power creep to ‘even things out’ wouldn’t be a bad thing, but after that re-balance, you’d want to avoid it going forward.
Balance with buffs is, on paper, the best thing to do as everyone would feel powerful.
But in a team based game, its a very bad idea as the more powerful you’d get, the less you would have to rely on teamplay.
Nerfing Illari healing output makes the 2nd support feeling more important.
Lets take a player who wants to play Brig with Illari, they’d quickly feel useless. So what, people should stop playing Brig cause she’s not meta or unable to have fun anymore ?
So buffing Brig yeah, but how without making 2 monster healers in one team ? Then what, buffing the only answer to massive healings : anti-heal grenade ? Well, its not considered as fun and it would melt all other teams not playing Illari/Buffed Brig.
There’s a vicious circle starting from here.
It sounds like he just wants each character to have the ability to make plays and elims. In a perfect world that sounds great. It’s just if everyone can, I assume the overall ttk rate that gets changed where it becomes really low and hard to play.
As others have been pointing out in this thread, it can lead to issues of power creeping if there is a constant series of buffs and not reductions. You generally don’t want to do this unless you have a host of heroes that are collectively seen as weak or in need of buffs to improve their viability.
At the moment, no. There’s been several pretty hefty reductions over the past few patches and past series.
This recent patch, for example, saw a collective reduction in damage reduction stacking via heroes that could do this, such as Orisa, Doomfist, and Ramattra. Placing a hard cap of 50%.
The last real power creep occurred with Supports back in OW1, and towards Tanks when GOATS ended its rein when OW1 entered its Role-Queue phase.
To be fair, there are plenty of Supports that do as well as Illari does in sustain, or better. However, it isn’t really in the best interests for Illari to have the kind of sustain she does have, while also having the kind of firepower she has (and I mostly point at Captive Sun, here and not her weapon).
Collectively, Ramattra as seen a near 40% increase in Ult Charge cost since his introduction.
Not everything can be seen as a power creep, you have look very specifically at the trends of what’s going on.
Part of this is because he’s not winning games. Note that his healing isn’t seeing consistent increases since his introduction, as they have recorded and stated that he is one of the highest effective healers in the game. They’re happy with that, but there are other avenues where they can increase his power to be competitive.
The original idea was that his devices such as Petal Platform and Tree of Life would be powerful tools, and create a lot of value for the players. That did not happen, nor did it appear to create that value. So it seemed that Lifeweaver was lacking in “power” in his original kit and needed improvements where they could put them.
I guess he wants a bit more oomph to some heroes I guess? Maybe less reliant on others?
I think it helps if we are a bit more specific with which hero we think could do a bit more, or maybe more on their own in a way a hero like Illari can. Maybe then we can get a better sense of what the community would like.
I think we also forget that making saving plays, protection plays, mitigation plays, etc. are as big and as important as elimination plays. Like a well timed Lucio beat or something. But I guess it’s all perspective.
I am of the mind that all overtuned heroes need to be nerfed first before anyone else is buffed.
Overpowered heroes is fun for a moment, but then you get bored of playing the same overpowered hero again and again, and in this day and age with dwindling attention spans, you get bored pretty quickly. Then when you play another hero, you’re handicapped because you’re fighting the overpowered hero.
No, nerf the overtuned heroes to be in line with the balanced heroes. Then every hero is fun and viable.
Slight buffs can still be made, across the board, and after the playing field has been leveled. I also think all damage and healing numbers on all heroes needs about a 10-15% nerf across the board.
Legitimately everything has too high of damage and healing so it all feels bad to everyone. Either nothing dies or everything dies instantly. There’s rarely a happy medium at the moment.
Many things work in PvE don’t work in PvP, and it often even harms the game.
Powercreep is one of them. You can buff all the characters against AI mobs, cause AI mobs don’t whine. Different difficulties of characters also work good in PvE, but it harms the game when it’s PvP.
Some argue when everyone is op, then it is balanced. But it often ruins the whole game, cause it ignores many details.(Think how the game will be when everyone can oneshot)
There are many types of fun, and not all types of fun are good. We should, for example, ignore and avoid the fun of abusing op-ness.