Dev interview by Heather Newman

General Discussion
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Some good, worrying and controversial excerpts below that I personally found interesting:

" Newman: Are there things, both with Baptiste and some of the earlier characters, that you can walk through as examples of, “This particular ability we introduced as a way to counter this other ability or this other play that was becoming a little too dominant in the meta?”

Goodman: Sure. I think the most notable one is Brigette. At that point the meta was heavily the dive meta, with all those super fast heroes jumping around, high damage, Tracer, Genji, kind of characters that are really hard to counter.

For a while, we tried a decent amount of changes to help curb that a little bit within the game that’s already live, tweaking Tracer down, things like that. But it wasn’t enough. We’d get to a place where we’re like, "Well, I don’t know if we want to just completely halve Tracer’s damage or something like that, to just try to like reduce the impact of this meta.“”

Excuse me, did he just say that he wasn’t willing to halve an overperforming hero’s damage to reduce their impact on the meta when Tracer had like 70% pickrate in owl… but they were completely willing to nerf everything else on another hero named Dva who was scapegoated for another meta existing?

Balance hypocricy much? Oh right, this is not a new thing, Nerf Dva is the ultimate solution to every balance problems in this game apparently.

Newman: What was Baptiste countering?

Goodman: For Baptiste, it was less of that. The immortality shield is really strong against some prominent [ultimate abilities], such as D.Va’s; it helps with Junkrat ults as well.

TIL Dva ulti is prominent in a meta with Shatter and Graviton surge.

TIL Baptiste was created to counter Dva and her ulti as they went and nerfed the rest of her.

Why does he hate dva so much that he’s willing to kill said hero? And mock it’s playerbase by saying to escort around riptires and genji ultimates? Is Dva the Lich King of HoTS?

You can disagree about Dva’s current balance, but plummeting ladder stats and lack of usage in OWL speak for themselves.

Goodman: -there’s been a decent amount of what they call “ghost meta,” which is three tank and three support.

Rofl.

Newman: What hero backstories do players ask for?

Goodman: I think it would be really interesting to get into, and I think it’s often requested, to get into Mercy a little bit more. I think Zenyatta is commonly asked for. I think he is a really interesting character that really fits into the world in a way that could show a lot about the world and robots and Omnics and how they’re treated. So those are two that really spring to mind. I wish we had time to do all of them. I think all these characters are itching to have their stories told.

Heavy breathing

Unfortunately what he’s implying though that we will never get lore for all heroes before they move to better pastures. It doesn’t even mean they will do mercy and zen lore. RIP.

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This one’s wild to me but also I expect it

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Lmao is this just another ‘dva is bad now and not okay my baby’ thread. Embarrassing.

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What does this mean? Lol

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What caught my eye first was the excerpts for potential Zenyatta and Mercy lore, but it was ruined by apparent balance team baffling decisions regarding my main hero.

Don’t like it? Don’t read it.

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i came into this thread thinking it was unbiased information but literally everything you posted and wrote about boiled down to how d.va’s been treated badly or something LMAO.

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You’re free to read the interview yourself and get the information.

I commented on the excerpts that interested me the most. =p

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I learned nothing new.

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It’s almost like they realized introducing a hero to counter an entire meta breaks their game or something. Who knew doing something so catastrophically bad would have lasting effects they don’t want to repeat.

I’m as mad at the DVa nerfs as anyone, but what is this trash?

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ghost meta ??? xdddd

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“But the big concern is, we want to make sure that we’re not creating just color variations of mechanics and characters we already have. We want to make sure that every hero stands alone both in gameplay and as a character.”

I’m so glad he said this…more heroes is not necessarily a good thing imo

It’s actually not a bad read…plenty about thought processes behind character development process

though as with everything…perhaps go in with an open mind (cough OP cough)

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Unique hero designs is what makes Overwatch as a game strive forward if the heroes are likeable enough. Wrecking ball has definitely grown on me as a hero, but I cannot say the same about Ashe and Baptiste.

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The fact they thought DVa’s ult was something to worry about on her confirm to me that they really have no idea what is going on in their own game

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We still do not have more Earthshatter and GravitonSurge counters, now we just have less. Even though they are ten times more used, dangerous and prominent in goats and generally. :roll_eyes:

We had a meta revolving around Gravdragons. That didn’t have a dva in it. Why is self-destruction apparently prominent ultimate to warrant building a hero to counter it? Even in OWL dva players are lucky to build ultimate half as fast as the other tanks and get 1/4th of the kills with it.

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The thing is, the singular approach can run into issues when the characters appeal and mechanical appeal don’t line up which can lead to players not playing characters they’d play with different mechanics and not playing characters with mechanics due to the character.

You also can run into the issue that someone may be unique for a good reason.

When Overwatch launched it had lots of characters that were basically copies of characters from other games with some adjustments. They had some of the more unique ideas like Hammond back then but, they didn’t put them in for a reason.

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Well have this in mind. Tracer is their poster character, under no circumstances do they want to make her unplayable, when she is one hero next to another 12+ dps.
And D.va on the other hand, is a tank. She has only like 5 other heroes in her pick ratio commpetition, and even then, she is more usefull with her kit than any of them. She works great in almost every situation.

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I still one-trick D.Va, and play her almost exclusively with close friends who know me and my playstyle well. I have played her in almost every situation. She is not good, let alone great, all all. You must build a comp around D.Va and coordinate closely with her for her to be any good. Thanks to her last several nerfs, you haven’t been able to “just throw her in” any comp and expect her to manage, let alone excel, for some time now—and that was before they introduced Baptiste to hard counter her yolo-dives and especially her bombs.

Currently, against anything remotely serious (even in QP), if you want to run D.Va, either you run her in Goats, or else you will need to accommodate her with:

  1. A main shield tank (i.e., Winston, Reinhardt, or Orisa, in that order. Hammond+D.Va is a joke: D.Va dives in with him and protects him and shoots at what he's shooting at; he doesn't reciprocate, but instead zips out in the next moment, leaving her to die). Running D.Va with only another off tank usually results in both tanks falling back and feeding, even D.Va+Zarya.
  2. A Sombra (preferrably) to counter shield spam comps, and especially Baptiste when he throws his Immortality Field up when you use Self-destruct. Failing a Sombra, you could fall back on using an aggressive Mei for her wide-area CC, and sic her on Baptiste when you want to ult. If there is no shield spam and no Baptiste, this spot can be opened up as flex position (the EMP/Bomb doesn't work well against mobility or spread out DPS-heavy comps).
  3. A main healer, and one who is willing to keep a close eye on D.Va, if not outright pocket her (and pocketing any hero is bad healer play).
  4. (Optional) A second healer. You will very likely need this healer to help the main healer, who is often easily overwhelmed. Without a second healer, D.Va will often either end up dying (and thus be unable to be there to ult-counter all the additional ultimates caused by her feeding) all game or be forced to stand back doing little more than shooting shields and tickle damage from afar.

That is a minimum of three—realistically four—team spots occupied just to support D.Va, leaving just one free to be played typically as a “flex DPS.” In my experience, that is usually too much cooperation to ask of a team of randomly paired-together people. I find it sad how D.Va is becoming like Bastion. Just like him, you need to build a comp around her to succeed. At least she isn’t at the point where she is only usable in niche situations on certain maps like he is (yet).

Sorry, that’s hardly “great in almost every situation.”

At least it goes with 2-2-2.

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Comparing what has happened to DVA to halving Tracers damage is… not logical

You are seemingly intentionally overreacting

He literally just used DVA as an example.

He wasn’t made to counter DVA and you know that isn’t what he said.

That’s pretty understandable as the cast keeps getting larger.

I agree we could have more, but still.

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https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DentalHonoredBigmouthbass-small.gif

She already has a decent backstory imo.
She has the whole Gency thing and Uprising/Rising Storm PVE modes.

This one doesn’t.
Not to mention Lucio and Symmetra.

But I get it.
Mercy has the largest playerbase by a mile so I’m not surprised to see that there is more demand for her than any of the lesser popular heroes.

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he never said that she was overperforming

he only said that she was difficult to counter, which is true but not because of tracer or genji

but beacuse of winston and dva making infinite space for them and pushing all their counters out of meta (soldier, cree, junkrat, pharah, hanzo, etc.)

tracer always had average stats in terms of winrate/damage/elims/kdr etc
genji was much worse

dva on the other hand was a must pick in almost all metas and was picked just as much as broken mercy during most of season 1 of OWL and for the good part of season 2 of OWL

In fact, D.Va despite all the nerfs that she received still remained a must pick for a long time

That just shows you how drastically broken she was. That’s the true overperforming. Tracer did well mostly in dive and that’s pretty much it. Outside of it she was a mediocre pick and a somewhat risky one. D.Va was a good pick basically everywhere and did the job of other off-tanks better than they could in some situations while also having mobility and best peeling abiltiy in the game.

So basically you have 1 hero that is enabled by 4 or 5 others (in case of Tracer) and you have 1 hero that is played in basically every comp because it counters everything… Seems legit

In fact, massive part of the reason why Tracer and Genji were so prominent is because most other DPS were troll picks at high level because dive tanks would just render them useless and hard counter them

Tracer has no cooldowns that can be eaten and is less affected by matrix than heroes that depend on cooldowns (that can and will be eaten) are

Genji has dash and blade that go through matrix

For the longest time, meta heroes were mostly determined by what can play around d.va’s matrix

In fact, in terms of how oppressive some heroes were, D.Va is probably the #1 hero, countering most of the roster to some degree

Tracer doesn’t really counter anyone, not even Zen. All of those heroes can still get a good chunk of their value and all of them have winnable matchups vs Tracer

Meanwhile D.Va completely nullifies most of the DPS roster and turns them into a wet noodle

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