Can you fix the least-picked heroes without reworks?

Mei:

Let allies see the outline of your wall prior to placement

Soldier:

Allow reloading while sprinting
Holding E activates Biotic Field in your hand, releasing drops it. Increased radius, maybe lower cooldown

Bastion:

Switch out most of the changes to sentry. Keep the increase in transform speed and reduce Recon’s model size by 5-8%

Torb:

Revert but lower armor scrap cost to 40, keep tightened hitbox, Molten Core upgrades level 1 Turrets to 2, Weapon Switch speed increased. Dropping armor on Turret will armor it.

New Passive: Thick Skull, crits do 175% rather than 200% damage.

You leave my wife Mei out of this.

She is perfectly fine.

120+ hrs on all modes played with my her.

3 Likes

This. Please. This is the best thing I have ever seen for Mei.

2 Likes

How long has it been since you played Torb? All that’s completely gone now.

I think he just needed tweaks before. Not an overhaul. He became more of a generic DPS hero but that doesn’t seem to be helping his pick rates.

But yeah he was one of my favorites.

He said “Revert” silly lol

The only thing I would like changed about torbjorn is his molten core, its really boring, give him a new ability.

I’ll admit I am no genius at all on game balance, but I can give my thoughts. I’d be open to hear what you guys think.

Bastion

I see Bastion’s role as an area-denial hero that can punish tightly-packed groups with blisteringly high damage at the cost of immobility. A GOATSbuster, if you will. However, the combination of D.va’s Defense Matrix and other shielding abilities make it easy to just take this Omnic buddy head-on, which is quite the opposite of what’s should happen. I have a couple ideas to combat that, but they’re by no means perfect.

Configuration: Recon
Fine as-is. Not intended to be a super strong aspect of Bastion’s kit.

Configuration: Sentry and New Passive: Overclocked
Spread tightens and damage increases in stages similarly to Symmetra’s primary fire as you continue firing in Configuration: Sentry. This rewards good aim and discourages clumped-up enemy comps. However, the caveat is that changing your aim too drastically or ceasing to fire puts primary on a small cooldown and reverts your primary fire to the first stage of Overclocked. This opens counterplay against Bastion in spread-out divey teams.

This is kind of a rough draft of the idea, so if you see flaws, let me know. I’d be happy to discuss it!

Oh this is easy to fix: Actually make them more engaging and impactful.

Mei: I’d just speed up her ult deployment, I think her kit is in a good spot, possible reduction of cooldown on her ice wall by 1 second

Soldier: reduce cooldown of healing station by 2 seconds and rocket by 1 second. Increase bullet damage to 19-20 damage per bullet.

Sombra : Reduce her spread by a 20-25%. Give her a reload speed buff after executing her EMP.

Torb: Change rivet gun projectile size and speed. Increase distance on turret throw.

Bastion: Bring back his frontnt shield - shield should be 100 hp. To compensate for this he should only be allowed to rotate 180 degrees. Keep the spread buffs.

Reaper: should get an “armor” pierce passive, maybe an extra 10-15% on armor.

Sombra is easy. First give all hacked targets a visible indicator that they are hacked so that your team know the hack is in effect. In fact I’m ok if all players from both teams can see that they are hacked, that gives the hacked players teammates a chance to help them.

A small weapon buff wouldn’t be unwelcomed, 25 rounds per second and 75 rounds total.

If that’s not enough then add a small damage element to hack, say 25 like McCree’s flashbang.

Get out.

{I’m stealing that by the way.}

1 Like

there is no way to fix bastion without reworking him

IDk about bringing back his shield. I mean, it must still be sitting there in the files at Overwatch HQ somewhere, unsure what to do with it. I’ve got one idea:

Give him a shield with… 5hp

I know what you’re all going to say “whoopee a whopping 5hp, that’s a freaking joke”

Oh no, I’ve got one better, you have to press the E button to activate it.

“WHAT! I can’t think of anything more pointlessly useless. Only 5 health points… all that could stop is a… an… an ana sleep dart…”

Exactly.

Shields are special.

They stop things that otherwise have massive effect such as sleep darts, discord orbs, roadhog hooks, flashbang detonations, and it doesn’t matter how much HP a shield has, it will entirely absorb the first instance of damage with no “over damage”. So snipers charging all that damage up into a single first shot, the shield just negates that initial burst of damage.

But this kinda gets to why a shield, any shield, would be way too good. Even bringing back his shield with 1hp would be too good. And why reworks are generally a bad idea, loads of unintended consequences start popping up out of everywhere.

Also, his shield was last implemented long before most of his newer character models were in the game, newer character models may be completely incompatible with a personal shield returning, it just wouldn’t fit.

Reworks don’t fix problems, they just replace old problems with new problems.

Note: I would have to test these out to really determine if I thought they were the right solutions to these problems. Also I don’t really do much competitive or follow detailed counters, etc, so take this with a grain (or five) of salt.

Bastion: +25% movespeed, and shrink him by about 10% in recon form. In sentry form, slowly decrease damage from 130% to 70% over 10s. Going back to recon form will reverse the process. This encourages repositioning, and punishes camping. Also, +25% speed makes Bastion far more playable in recon form. Alternatively, swipe an idea from my Bastion rework and allow movement during Reconfigure, while also making it faster.

Torb: Literally just revert everything but being able to throw the turret, the reload speed increase, turret targeting enemies hit with primary fire, and the hitbox change. If they’re so concerned with ‘feast or famine mechanics’, swap out the on-kill scrap to on-hit scrap, perhaps as something like 10% of Rivet Gun damage.

Anyway, you talked about not reworking things. Here’s how to (kind of) fix Torb without reverting the rework. New passive: Targeted: Enemies hit by primary fire take 10% more damage from Torb until either they go 5 seconds without being hit by primary fire, or Torb fires primary fire and doesn’t hit them. Enemies inflicted with this will be targeted by the turret. Can affect deployables. Stacks damage buff. This 1: rewards consistent aim, 2: allows picking off enemies with turret better, 3: makes Torb more versatile, allowing him to deal with tanks using his scaling damage, and allows him to deal with mobility heroes using his turret. Also perhaps make his turret explode and hit enemies if he destroys it up. Maybe allow his hammer to move the turret a bit if it’s at full health?

Sombra: Not sure as to which of these would be good or not, so here’s a few smallish ideas.
Revealing targets damaged or hacked by her for a second or two
Make hacked targets unable to charge their ultimate while hacked.
Allow a small amount of damage before interrupting invisibility and hack (15hp, or something. Also remove hitmarker when hitting an invisible Sombra if you don’t break the buffer)
Hacked enemies cannot cool down their abilities (currently if you hack someone who has an ability on cooldown, that cooldown will still be running while hacked, they just won’t be able to use the ability)
Hack map features? Raise/lower blast shields on Busan, etc? Probably too gimmicky though.
Lower Hack CD if it’s interrupted?
Just more DPS or ammo?
Cause hacked targets to take or deal friendly fire?
Destroy non-ult enemy projectiles with EMP? (graphically, causing them to fall out of the air, dearmed)

Soldier: Separate Helix Missiles into multiple shots? Damage resistance while being healed by Biotic Field? CC cleansing on Biotic Field? Throwable Bio Field? Perhaps make Helix Missiles homing during his ultimate? Headshots during ult? Reveal enemies within LOS during ult? More accuracy while crouched? IDK.

Mei: Slide during Cryo-Freeze. Not controllable while frozen, but able to use your momentum before freezing to slide. Vulnerable to knockback while frozen, though. Slow effect near other abilities, perhaps? Near-miss with secondary fire, close to wall or Cryo-Freeze, or near the ult, that is.

This seems a bit implausible, that a clunking robot with huge steel limbs would move faster than Tracer.

shrink him by about 10% in recon form.

Reducing the size of his head hitbox would probably have the same effect in reducing damage without

In sentry form, slowly decrease damage from 130% to 70% over 10s.

There are already enough incentives not to stay in sentry form, this is NOT a Bastion buff, this is not changing the numbers, this is a rework, this is far more punishing Bastion players when they are already far too vulnerable.

Inconsistent damage is only going to push more people off Bastion. They need to KNOW if they can frag a charging Rein before he reaches them… not have to keep track of how many seconds they have been in turret.

This encourages repositioning, and punishes camping.

There are better ways to encourage repositioning than punishing them.

Buff Bastion.

Stop With All The Suggestions Of Nerfing Bastion.

Nerf bastion

1 Like

That’s great, because it’s a mechanism already in the game, but just change the values of who it’s visible to.

I don’t think the problem with Sombras’ gun is her DPS, bringing het DPS up to 200dps (as high as Junkrat) may be using a sledge hammer on a nail. It might be better to give her far better spread. Bastion has almost identical DPS (8 shots per second at 20 damage each vs 20 shots per second at 8 damage each) but but does remarkably well with that because he has a 1.25 degree spread.

2.7 degree spread of Sombra’s machine pistol is ridiculous, the damage is effectively spread over an area 4x as large.

Reduce the max spread and increase the ammo to 80. Though it’s crazy having an 80 round mag in a gun that small… who really cares?

i’M aLReaDy TrACeR

Yes, the spread could be better, but it doesn’t seem to give me much trouble, even at farther ranges. I think it may be because I only aim for the head, so the critical damage makes up for the missed rounds.

But a tighter spread may be too powerful at close ranges. When I’m right behind a Widow she’d have no chance.

Sym should be included by virtue, if not by factual statistics.

Easy Peasy:

  • Mei : Primary fire damage increased to 2.75 damage per tick (55 DPS). This may not seem like much but when mixed with other cleaving heroes it hits some cool DPS breakpoints.

  • Soldier 76: Reduce Biotic Field cooldown by 2 seconds. This allows a smidge more utility.

  • Sombra: Hacked enemies with full Ult charge will have the ultimate ready symbol on next to their health until they activate their ultimate ability. Realistically there aren’t many times an enemy holds an ultimate that long, this is just a nice QoL to simply tracking.

  • Torb: Turret HP reduced to 175 but it’s all armor. This’ll make destroying a turret more of an investment of valuable resources without making it too good vs. everything.

  • Bastion: Self-Repair resource is refilled upon entering Configuration: Tank. Additionally tank shots have their knockback increased by 50% against enemies and 100% to self. Let’s see Bastion fly.

P.S. Sombra is actually super balanced and strong in my opinion. she’s just unpopular right now, that’s all.