I’m writing this as a GM Baptiste main (season 23).
Recently I have not been able to play Baptiste at all, literally. No matter what team comp, map, situation, etc. Baptiste has not been doing well in any rank. Me and fellow Baptiste mains have received countless defeats, avoids, reports for gameplay sabotage, insults, etc. simply for picking Baptiste.
As for the time of writing this, Baptiste has now reached a terrible winrate of 35.42% which has never been seen for any other hero before.
Bap is definitely bad, but not as bad as Brig. The problem with those two heroes is that they provide AoE healing, and that is something that is very hard to balance.
PS: Before someone plays the s i t u a t i o n a l card, there are so many situational heroes in the game, Sym, Torb, Sombra, and Brig to name a few. All of these heroes have been performing very well in all ranks and the word “situational” is not an excuse to make a hero absolutely unplayable.
I love Baptiste so much and wish he was playable… Teams don’t even try to play around him anymore. So much easier to choose Ana and just ‘lolhighskillsnipe’ your team into victory.
Sadly the statistics show that he is WAY worse than Brig right now. Baptiste definitely does not require a healing buff, there are so many other aspects that can be improved to become somewhat close to useful. To name some:
Amp matrix - increase duration or width.
Immortality field - increase projectile speed or area, remove or reduce the 0.8s cast time.
Exo boots - reduce charge time or increase jump height.
Not even Rein Zarya play around him very well. To be completely honest, with his current kit he is only able to play around Orisa Sigma, nothing other than that.
Like, AoE heals just got a hit by nerfs everywhere, of course people are playing Ana and Mercy more, juggling with high single target heals is better at the moment.
Moira has good single target heal and good AoE potential, but no real good utility else to offer and the team can’t spread that much, so she can’t keep up with all the repositionings.
Well, Brig has her packs, but the rest of her kit is just too much effort against risks for little utility reward.
Why would you play Baptiste to heal a spread team trying to dive enemies in this meta? No need for that with other good options.
Lucio and Zen won’t heal much, but they are good sometimes for the utility or the ult.
It is funny because I play in gold but he is equally useless there as well. I have to play Ana now and I’m rubbish on her but still better than I am with Bap these days.
Agreed. Nerfing Ana will not solve the problem, we need to either rework Bap or give him a significant buff that will actually give a reason to be picked.
Sure. Its so easy. Anything we don’t like doesn’t take skill, like Widomaker.
Fact is that Baptiste is even easier than Ana, since he used to be able to dump insane amount of AOE healing from both his primary healing source and a button ability. To ensure he gets his healing out, he can even deny the enemy kills.
If you think Ana doesn’t take skill, then you must admit that Baptiste takes even less skill.
You misused the word narrative. Narrative implies I’m telling a story; I only said I want to make a collage of how salty people get when skill comes into play.
You didn’t point anything out, actually. You said one thing, which is completely subjective, and decided to act like you made a point.
Let me show you what a point is:
Ana has to aim and land her shots. This is easy on tanks, but harder on anyone with a smaller hit box. The difficulty increases depending on how far your target is. You can only heal one person per shot unless you use her nade.
Baptise heals from a shorter range, but can heal multiple people per shot. He can also run to his team and use another AOE healing ability that heals himself as well. He can deny deaths by using and ability.
There’s clearly places where Baptiste outshined ana, and any single target healer, by a clear margin. This isn’t something we can just ignore because we hate the old lady.
he definetely needs projectile speed buff, this is the only way to capitalase on his skill plays. He is like hanzo after reverted rework, can oneshot on paper only. But our plat devs are too far away from gm, but they get closer when it comes to owl, where they make money aswell.
offtopic: Valorant devs hired a guy who was threating B to share cheat code (something like that) if they will not start actually dealing with cheaters in their game.
You can go to some shooting gallery and miss all your shots, but in a live game, where you can communicate with real people and get them to group up (or you can just group with them) it was easy to dump out crazy amounts of healing.
No amount of hating or pretending it wasn’t true will change the fact that AOE healing was the objective best choice for healing for a while, hence the nerfs.
Just revert the nerfs on his Regen Burst please, or at least reduce its cooldown to 10 seconds or something. 13 seconds is way too long for an ability that heals less that both Lucio’s aura and Brig’s inspire
