One thing to consider is that the Cooldown for BF begins the moment the ability is activated. I missed that for ages, there’s no consistency across the heroes on which cooldowns begin immediately after activation and which don’t.
With the current Soldier, when you activate biotic field, as the BF is running, the 15 second cooldown starts from the frame the BF activates. When BF ends, it’s 10 seconds before you can activate BF again.
So if it worked the same way then literally 50% of the game Soldier 76 could have his biotic field up. Or if it was changed to act more like how Winston’s bubble shield works then it would be no net change, Soldier 76 would get would still be able to put down a Biotic field until 10 seconds after the field ends.
increase the radius, (a lot) increase the duration (maybe 7-8 seconds) and keep the healing
Any one of these would be good… but all together they’d make Soldier 76 a de-facto support hero.
Soldier 76’s biotic field being large AND with such high healing over such a long time without making him too much like Lucio or Brig. Especially if cooldown worked the same way, there’d be only a 2 second gap between each Biotic Field being up.
The problem with a longer duration is Soldier is supposed to be a HIGH dps hero with a pretty small clip size, he’s better at shorter sharper bursts but BF fails because too often the healing rate can still be exceeded because the sacrifice of Soldier staying close to the field makes him too predictable.
For example, with 40hp/sec healing rate if soldier is hit by a fully charged hanzo arrow then he’s knocked down to 75hp, in the time it takes for Hanzo to shoot another fully charged arrow at Soldier then 40hp/sec will have healed Soldier to only 123hp… Biotic field is worthless if the Hanzo is (not unreasonably) firing at maximum rate. Soldier 76 is dead either way from the same body shots.
Healing at 50hp/sec and in the time a Hanzo fully charges another arrow then Soldier has been healed up to 135. Enough to survive.
This means Hanzo needs to get either of the arrows be a headshot when against a Soldier using BF. Or burn a storm arrows still 50hp/sec means soldier will survive even 3 storm arrows hitting in rapid succession.