Is this Season technically more balanced than usual? Maybe on paper.
But in terms of fun? It’s a contender for worst season ever. I’m hard struggling to force myself through the BP.
The Mercy changes are awful for her, but more importantly, they’re an utter nightmare to play into. I have never felt even remotely this miserable and hopeless on DPS and Tank as I do playing into Mercy pocketing now.
But instead of mobility they nurfed her survivability
They were trying to nerf, specifically, her survivability, and her death rate did not change. I am no longer engaging with you on this topic, you can reply but I will ignore it.
Ok this was actually insightful and communicative.
Would even vote this the most transparent post in 6 years.
Good job keep it up 
“Brigitte has such a high win rate but a mediocre play rate.”
Has the dev team ever called something “mediocre” before?
But I’m not surprised by this, you kept removing the hero’s identity and replaced it “lol dps”. She doesn’t have utility.
And in the other hand you keep giving her raw number buffs.
It’s not surprising that the most boring hero in the game is good if you keep inflating her numbers. That doesn’t makes her more engaging to play.
But overal, good blog post, it was interesting to read. Hopefully the matchmakers gets fixed soon.
Problem is that they’re actually both related
It’s genuinely baffling how your own devs can’t see why pickrate is more important than winrate.
I’m beginning to think you’re trolling or you’re ignorant and don’t actually know what’s going on.
Top 500, gm and masters players don’t pick weak heroes… bar the niche otp players.
Literally every single one of them who want to climb pick the strongest meta heroes every game.
STOP PUTTING WINRATE FIRST! Especially when it comes to niche heroes like sym…
Of course the low pickrate niche hero is gonna have a high winrate when she’s exclusively played on her strongest maps…
Literally look at ow1 with Cree and tracer being the strongest dps heroes by far whilst having 51-55% winrates whilst having insanely high pickrates.
Whilst heroes like doom sym torb junk all had lower pick rates (because they’re worse in gm…) with higher winrates.
Kiriko and sojourn still not properly nerfed btw! Delusional.
She has such a low play rate because she isn’t as generalist as other supports imo
Hog historically always had low wr, even when people think he is meta he doesn’t cross 48.
The only issue is they have neutered his core threat ability instead of hard nerfing him.
Oh goodie,widow cass tracer and pharah are running the game
Again…
Who couldve guessed…
Where did they say that? If you could link where they said that that would be great, because here’s what I’ve seen
Dev comments in the patch notes: “For Guardian Angel, the cooldown increase is necessary to reduce the greatly increased mobility resulting from the recent rework to the jump cancel. It enabled Mercy to quickly launch herself long distances in any direction and be overly evasive for such a short downtime.”
And here’s Alec Dawson talking about the changes as/before they went live saying “we’re nerfing Mercy’s movement”
I’m guessing that’s because I just provided proof that they were specifically nerfing her mobility and not “her survivability” like you claimed, and exiting the conversation is easier than admitting you’re wrong.
Their goal was never to “increase her death rate”, it was to nerf her mobility so she isn’t just flying all over the place. If they wanted to increase her death rate they would’ve just flat nerfed her and not given her in combat self healing.
Sadly, it looks like those who liked your comment are just as uninformed as to what the goal of the changes was as well.
Gotta love how the devs prioritise winrate over pickrates! And winrates across all ranks oh boy!
We saw that there were only a few extremely broken heroes in season 2, so we decided to widen the broken hero pool by a few heroes, see the balance is better already.
We couldnt have people being dominated by only orisa, so we added hammond to the oppressive regime. We noticed some hitscans were bordering on projectile hero viability, so we bumped them up to be with the rest of their compatriots. No hitscan left behind.
I would have liked to have seen more detailed information about the matchmaker. The community is really highly concerned about this and needs more deep dives. However what I’m hearing is that they acknowledge that skill ranges got broader when S3 came out, and now it’s close to where it was before. They maintain that S3 has improved “match quality” on average, and I really wish I knew what that meant.
Kiriko widow sojourn Cree orisa ball exist…
Not sure how anyone can say they’re in a good spot?
I don’t care about win rate or pick rate, I care about fun
You have it backwards. They nerfed her mobility but buffed her with in combat healing which helps her survivability (which is why her deathrate didn’t change)
I don’t know if its just me, but I prefer playing against the new mercy. I primarily play Winston and she’s so much easier to dive and kill now. I’d much rather play against this current ‘tank’ mercy.
We dont know what they wanted to nerf but they did nurf both mobility and survivability in certan cases – 1v1, when team is healthy. They did fundamentals changes with her playstyle, was it their goal or just lack of calculations we don’t know.
I don’t put much stock in WR, particularly when role queue is in place. Despite that, this post does reflect my anectodal experience and opinion, so I can say, miracolously, that I’m aligned with the devs, for once - and hopefully constantly from now on.
However, I would love to see more data like the graphs we got for the betas about the tanks, stats like “team deaths per 10 with X tank”, damage mitigated per death and so on. I find stats like that much more… Relatable, if not flat out useful. If we could get more of those, that would drive this curmudgeon up the walls with happiness.
Furthermore, Mercy ain’t fine yo, take some feedback from players with thousands of hours on the hero into account more deeply. She’s arguably even stronger, but that’s not the point and y’all know it. Don’t make this mistake again.