If you average the pick rates across Comp and QP for this week these are the bottom 5 least picked heroes:
- Mei (1.29%)
- Soldier 76 (1.27%)
- Sombra (1.02%)
- Torb (0.88%)
- Bastion (0.70%)
And yes, I’m as surprised as you are that Reaper isn’t in the bottom 5, in QP he’s 3rd from the bottom but is 9th out of 29 on competitive… interesting.
What I want to focus on in this thread is the possibilities of buffing these bottom 5 heroes from obscurity just by altering the values of their abilities. I’d really appreciate that it focuses on that as when reworks come up they become all consuming but rarely lead anywhere, it’s not clear how they really would work or if they’d ever practically be applied. Then after all that distraction people overlook how even small and simple changes could have a huge impact.
Maybe reworks should be eventually considered, but the viability of re-balancing values should be gone over first.
What changes would you make to these heroes without taking away (and replacing) any of these heroes existing abilities? So just tweak their numbers to rise them in popularity across both QP and Comp, or at least get them all out of the sub 1.5% pickrate hell. Bug fixes are obviously included as they’re supposed to be done anyway but what bugs really need to be focused on as a priority and any details of exactly how these bugs appear would make a huge difference.
If you’re adding a whole new ability to where there was nothing before (an example would be giving DVA micro missiles) that’s arguably not a rework, that’s just a buff of getting an ability on a button the hero otherwise didn’t use. Or add a passive ability where they otherwise didn’t have one before.
EDIT 1:
CLICK HERE for my take on importance of Immobility
A common theme is these heroes having some aspect of immobility, Bastion sacrifices mobility for sentry mode. Torb has a turret that is immobile. Mei sacrifices mobility for the heals and immunity of iceblock. Soldier 76 also to an extent sacrifices immobility to use his biotic field, he can move around inside it but for 5 seconds for him to use that field he’s going to be in quite a predictable area.
It seems the devs have underappreciated quite how bad a downside immobility is. Or maybe they did accurately account for it but the game has since changed, the general player-base have become much better at exploiting immobility, movement is more and more important.
Yet you can’t just remove this downside, iceblock, sentry and turrets are rather inherently immobile. You need to increase upsides or reduce other related costs.