i was challenging your statement that she’s a ‘jack of all trades and a master of none’. she clearly has niches that she performs better in than her competition.
winston and d.va are the core of dive, together with zen. (this can be trivially tested by running winston with any other off tank or none at all. he is way weaker without the extra burst and mobile mitigation d.va provides. and he’s also extremely bad in deathball since he has no support when he engages.)
it reduces the synergy between winston and d.va and in doing so reduces dive’s stifling prominence in the meta.
there are maps that will clearly always be dive territory because there’s so much high ground and the high ground is so important positionally that having heroes that can’t contest it on your team will just be a liability. maps such as gibraltar 1st and 2nd phase and numbani 1st are good examples. however, not every map is like this and dive is also dominant on maps that aren’t high ground dependent. that’s an issue.
of the three heroes i stated in the core of dive we see three things:
- winston is a dive specialist and suffers heavily when played with any off tank that isn’t d.va or is lineups that aren’t dive.
- zen’s purpose in a dive is largely sacrificial. your team makes the most use possible out of discord orb before you die a horrible death because of your unforgiving hitbox and complete lack of mobility. he can get picks with right click but really, only the best of the best zens can do that at a frequency worth noting.
- d.va is a ridiculous enabler of winston due to her unique role as a mobile off tank with burst. she’s also respectable in deathball due to her having the best mobility (good for pouncing on out of position enemies if solo diving, which she has the burst and natural bulk to survive, unlike winston) and she still has the best mitigation ability of all the off tanks. of the three i think she’s the most likely to eat a nerf because of how she functions on a wide range of maps and in a wide range of compositions.
- as an aside, we have also seen almost exclusively counters to dive heroes or alternatives to dive heroes be released or buffed in the past few months, and it has done almost nothing to reduce how good dive is in the game. the issue with high ground being important isn’t going to be solved by buffing heroes that can’t access or take advantage of it, so i think we should look at the issue at the source.
i’d personally accomplish this by doing two things: d.va can’t missile and DM at the same time, and hitting someone with your boosters no longer does that extra 25 damage - it’s only a knockback.