You’re not going to gain anybody by nerfing heroes. Sure, you might save yourself some losses, but your ultimate goal should be to make everyone happy, including the minorities. The point of a game is to be fun for everyone. Furthermore, new players don’t give a crap about balance. You gain new players post-launch by making the game look as fun as possible to play.
And frankly, nothing is more important than the integrity of each and every characters’ fun qualities. Making a hero less and less fun to play for the sake of retaining a dying playerbase isn’t a healthy design philosophy to have. As a game dev, there is not a single thing more important than making each character fun. If you don’t have this philosophy, you should be fired.
If they nerf/remove a bunch of oneshot spam, that’s similar to removing a bunch of CC.
Similarly, it makes healing more worthwhile, because heals can’t counter oneshots.
Additionally, it makes Tank design easier, and makes it so they can lower Tank defences a bit without them popping like balloons.
Additionally, DPS is probably the least important role to focus on right now, since there’s more than enough of them to have a decent variety of DPS heroes at all ELO. And they are the least important role when it comes to Matchmaker issues.
They should be focused on growing the playerbase and pulling in inactive players. Not the relatively tiny active playerbase they have now.
To be fair, even if you are playing out of sniper sight lines, that greatly limits the effective area you can play in, even if you aren’t getting killed. If I’m not peeking a sightline as Zen to apply Discord regularly, that’s a big deal.
Basically, even if her opponents are playing smart and not standing in Widow’s sightline, she still imposes immense pressure from great range.
(I know the OP mentions Hanzo as well, but seriously, does anyone lock down sightlines with Hanzo the way Widow can?)
The problem with the snipers comes from teams not working together and Kiriko. It takes at least two to dive Widow/Mercy and one has to be a tank. Then when you have either of them down, Kiriko appears to save one or both then Widow grapples out with Mercy or without and still gets kills from a distance. During that time, you have to hope that your two supports and DPS can deal with the other tank/DPS. Junkertown is a pain because there’s so much space to cover. I feel like the 175hp needs to be put back on the table as Mercy keeps Widow alive too easily.
Which is a giant gamble, especially considering right now, nobody is going to want to play the game period. Even when a character’s strong, they’re not fun to play. Everyone feels overly watered down compared to launch due to Blizz’s questionable balance philosophy, and it clearly shows.
Ultimately, if you REALLY want your playerbase to grow, you’ve got to make sure your characters are fun to play. Balance doesn’t mean jack in the face of the game’s fun factor. That’s why I think they should nerf supports’ heals and give them something else. They enable comps that nobody likes playing. People like aggressive comps, and high healing numbers completely go against that.
I feel like if supports’ healing were changed, the one-shot problem would go away on its own. Kind of like what would happen to the Diamondback in TF2 if Ambassador were reverted. Ultimately, people are going to gravitate towards what they find fun to play, so by nerfing heals, more dps heroes’ options open up. This means that there will be significantly more variety in dps heroes played. This means you’d have way less games running double sniper.
I agree with you about 1 shots, it’s unbearable. But 195dmg for a headshot is always a kill, the reality is that in the middle of a game, you’re rarely full health. I see this a lot : reduce this and this, but it only works on paper or in a vacuum, unfortunately
Sniper in tf2 was also unfun. Quick scope one shotted most of the classes and slow classes can’t contest him. Playing against good tf2 sniper in pubs was awful. Are OW sniper more or less fun is hard to tell, but they both sucked a lot of fun out of the game. The thing about TF2 is that pubs have literally no matchmaking, so you can play against complete trash snipers and feel like they don’t do anything. I remember playing on some servers with stable communities and good snipers absolutely did a ton of frags and it wasn’t fun dying to them.
TF2 sniper had more weaknesses than Widow because he had low mobility and lowest hp available. But TF2 had no dive tanks so anything could die to sniper one shots (if you want to rocket jump on him, you may enter engineer sentries LOS and you damage yourself so sniper can pick you off). Imo they are equally unfun, just different environments. Let’s not forget also that he could charge shot to the point of one tapping 7 out of 9 classes with bodyshot…
Razorback didn’t counter spy at all, because he could just kill him with revolver instead. Jarate also won’t help you against flanking Scout or Pyro next to you. It’s all about landing shots and being able to quick scope kill before they kill you. Long range sniper is oppressive, close range sniper is weak af unless you can land headshots at close range as well. Then it gets to the point where you can’t do anything about him. But at least there was a Spy class so they could try to deny sniper value. In OW we have Sombra which plays similar role, problem is that in OW Widow will survive if she gets some pocket. In TF2 healing wasn’t nearly as strong as in OW.
Just play Spy and all your sniper problems go away instantly. If you close the distance on a sniper, if you get quickscoped, you seriously need to check your movement. 9 out of 10 times, you getting headshot is entirely your fault.
Razorback enables situations where Sniper’s completely unkillable by a Spy. If he’s next to a level 3 sentry, not even an Ambassador can kill him fast enough before the Spy dies.
Fortunately, this is only really a problem in comp.
I haven’t played tf2 since many years, but people with time got really good at detecting spies quickly. If you just protect your sniper with Pyro (or even general classes by shooting the suspicious guy with shotgun twice) then Spy can’t do much. Play with your team and flanking sniper is colossal task.
