Blame yourselves for wanting more “balance”.
One of the biggest reasons why it is so hard to have unique and engaging abilities in OW is that OW adopted MMORPG character design. I mean, characters lack pretty much everything but one. It was because the old MMORPG devs wanted to force that people play together as a tool of a group.
OW characters are like tac fps characters and have pretty much nothing, and even the basic abilities are provided as special abilities for some limited characters.
Such lacking-everything-but-one design makes characters feel like a tool in a group, the counter relations are clearer and a small toy could feel far too op.
But, when all the characters are mobile enough and have enough tools against everything,
Could hypermobility feel so op when all other characters have the basic mobility like sprint(S76), high jump(Bapt), vault(Hazard), slide(Sojourn)?
Could perma-fliers be a problem when all the characters have a basic hitscan machinegun(Ball)?
Could too many CCs a problem when all characters have a defense for it like fortify(Orisa)?
Such hypermobility or other unique abilities could even be designed more unique and engaging in this setting, because it won’t harm the balance much when everyone has enough tools against everything basically.
Also, bigger maps like FP won’t be a problem in this case.
Characters will be more flexible(more than a tool good at one thing which can easily be countered) and resilient against unique abilities and maps. When Blizz wanted to create unique abilities/maps without much thoughts and balance concern, then it’d be much better to elevate the basic abilities of all characters.
Doomfist is not as original as you think, he is actually a character with too many inspirations from the Dungeon Defender lavamancar, he basically has the same abilities and his design is very similar
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0WqDkQ0s-M
Also, there were already similar characters in several games, melee characters are not a novelty for this genre, games like Gigantic had a lot of melee characters even before Overwatch was announced, for example this WU who is also similar to Doomfist but with a hook ability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nqdnSO6NeM
Venture and weaver are great designs though
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I would add Ram to that list as well, consider all he does is cycling his defensive cd and holding block, not exactly “unique and engagaing”.
Actually Kiriko is the only ow2 hero maintain her popularity regardless of meta shift/win rate (and Juno to some extent, but it’s still a bit early to say). Most ow2 hero is only picked when they are broken and frankly they doesn’t really bring much player attention outside their launch season.
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only good hero designs are garbage in bronze and S tier in gm.
easy to fail, hard to dominate.
True, but all the launch heroes were made by the old team, who do have successful heroes under their belt
They have some of the worst pick rates and are aggravating to play against. I don’t think Lifeweaver has literally ever in 10 seasons had higher than a 45% win rate, or been above B-tier
I’m convinced that what the forum considers unique and what the devs consider unique are completely disconnected.
Tank Doom is pretty dang unique still. Seeing YT videos from one tricks kind of solidifies that for me. Regardless turning him into a tank from a dps didn’t hurt his uniqueness. Them purposefully removing tech is what did.
Disagree for multiple reasons but MR is going to have a much easier time adopting melee characters because the nature of MR allows for it. OW being an FPS and prioritizing FPS over moba like elements makes certain concepts like melee based heros very difficult to add.
You probably think 1 note is unique.
Nearly every Hero made for OW2 has been more unique then a vast majority of OW1 characters. I think what sours OW2 is that some of the more interesting kits from OW1 had to be squished to fit OW2. Which makes OW2’s roster feel less than OW1’s despite much stronger designs.
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Yeah all they’ve done since launch is either publish material that was made way back when, or merge various different hero abilities into “new” heroes and change the model and voice.
If there’s one phrase to describe OW2 it’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle… 
Hey that’s good, somebody should turn that into a post.
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