Here’s the problems with perks:
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Most of them are just pickable passives. They just change numbers. They don’t give anything else interesting you can do with a character. There’s no decision making or thing to manage except which perk to pick. It is also pretty trivial to figure out which is better and pick that one everytime.
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Earning them during a game feels bad. Just let people have the thing they want to do when the game starts. This mechanic of getting an extra thing mid match makes the game more stomp heavy and makes the already stomp heavy matches feel worse.
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The implementation is poor. I’m not gonna get into tons of detail, but clearly not a lot of thought was put into how all this is balanced. It’s a mish mash of either useless or broken and not much in between. For example. Zarya beam piercing above 50 percent charge and Hog passing 50 percent hp to his team off take a breather. This is madness.
Solution:
Add an extra ability to each character with no strings attached. Not a passive, but an actual ability on cooldown.
On console make the extra ability the Y button and move ultimate activation to L1+R1.
For example they have a perk where Bastion can heal himself. Put that on the extra button.
Zarya if they want to have her beam pierce maybe have an ability like once every 12 seconds she can make her beam pierce for 2 or 3 seconds. The duration and cooldown timer are knobs they can adjust balance wise to give all these character an extra cool thing they can do and be able to control it better.
And also they need to take more time and put a lot more thought into this because they clearly didn’t.
Do more testing with focus groups. Do a live experiment like they are doing with 6v6.
None of this seems tested well and it shows.