Hate to break it to some of you, but Bastion is viable. He has two effective strategies built around him (bunker and pirate ship) which see use at all levels of play, including OWL.
The thing is, he isn’t super flexible. He is hard to use outside of comps like these without significant time investment learning his nuances. Could he use a few small adjustments? Probably. Does he need to be reworked so he is usable in every situation? No.
Every characters should be usable is some situations, but not all. The core of this game is changing to fit the team comp, map, and circumstances. You can’t play the same character 100% of the time and expect them to always work.
Sorry dude, I have stuff going on now, but I should be able to join you in educating people in a couple hours. In the mean time just explain twice as hard to make up for my absence.
No one uses pirateship or bunker anymore… other than Bastion mains I guess… and the only real use he saw in OWL recently was for breaking shields on King’s Row A, and once on Hanamura by LAG. And even then, he’s normally swapped out immediately as soon as they don’t win the first team fight… That’s not “viability”…
We’re not asking for that, we’re asking for him to be usable in general… He doesn’t need to be good on every map against every comp. We want him to be good against something.
Not really, but okay… If he keeps Ironclad, either reduce the base damage to 12, apply Hammond’s spread, add headshots. OR, keep damage at 15, apply Hammond’s spread, add 1.5x multiplier headshots (this puts him at 675 DPS max instead of 900 with 2x headshots).
Also, his ammo is reduced in all of these instances. Probably 250 ammo with 12 damage, and 200 with 15.
No, not at all, I want recon to be his main mode, but to be able to very rapidly switch to sentry temporarily, when the resource timer runs out, he goes back to recon while it charges (like DVas defense matrix, or his heal).
Bastion will never be able to be viable as a fixed murderbox. There is no middle ground that transcends rank. This would let him pop into the mode for, say 12 seconds, then back out. If recon mode were decent enough, it would make him more mobile, but able to dispatch area control for a limited period, then required to move around.
This stops stupid uses of Bastion, such as Pirate Ship, or double shield support, and converts the skill in using him from 95% aim centric, and 5% immediate surroundings to knowing when and where to dispatch what modes, and game centric.
His ult needs to be different. I dont hate it now, although I’d like to see him convert more like his highlight intro with a rapid forward burst and instant change. It is currently pretty on par with other Ults, maybe even erring on the strong side, since his model is so much smaller.
I always assumed that was part of the strategy. Ride the payload as far as you can, then fall back to an overwatch position until you can clear the enemy team off the payload. Reestablish payload presence as needed.
I may as well post my average DPS statistics for him as well for the “He has so much DPS, he’s fine” people…
Training dummy stats
Distance
Tests
RTK
Std Dev
TTK
DPS
DPR
Miss
Spread
0m
0
13.3
0
0.44
450
15
0%
0'0"
20m
50
20.7
1.71
0.69
290.42
9.68
35.5%
3'5"
25m
50
26.5
2.98
0.88
226.76
7.56
49.6%
4'3"
30m
50
30.6
4.16
1.02
195.69
6.52
56.5%
5'2"
35m
50
43.5
9.19
1.45
137.87
4.60
69.4%
6'0"
40m
50
50.6
9.13
1.69
118.48
3.95
73.7%
6'10"
RTK: Rounds to kill (measured in bullets)
TTK: Time to kill (measured in seconds)
DPS: Damage per second (measured in damage / 1 second)
DPR: Damage per round equivalent (total damage / rounds fired)
Miss: Percentage of bullets that missed (lower is better)
Spread: Diameter of the circle at the given distance (measured in feet)
Note: These tests were done on a Training Bot in the practice range. Since it is much bigger, and also doesn’t move, his actual DPS when playing will be lower than these numbers. To do these tests, I sat at the recorded distance from the Training Bot, placed my crosshair on the center of it’s body, and used J to shoot (so that I didn’t move the mouse). As soon as he died, I released J, and recorded the remaining ammo (and then did 300 - remaining ammo for the ammo used). Then I calculated the other stats from that information.
The issue with bastion is that he can be downright oppressive at chokes when you know how to aim. Otherwise, he’s just trash. He’s very good at one thing and sucks at everything else. He’s poorly designed from the ground up. I think he should be fundamentally reworked. As you can see from the recent redesigns and new hero intros, Blizzard is realizing that making heroes that are OP in very limited contexts while extremely weak in others is not a smart idea. Hopefully, they keep going in the direction of reason.
I think it would be better to just encourage the player to use other modes than to put a hard limit on Sentry mode… If they really want to limit the player’s time in Sentry mode, then I would rather they remove his ability to reload. Then the player can stay in Sentry as long as they want, but they only have 300 bullets to work with before they need to leave for a while. If you use your ammo wisely, you can get a lot done. If not, you won’t.
I still wouldn’t want a restriction on Sentry though, this is just the best way to do it imo.
That is a resource, but it shouldnt affect his recon mode ammo, and should have a fixed time reload time, I think that is pretty much what I was going for.
In higher ranks he’s less via and sombra is more so but thats because they both require a team to work around them. But bastion needs a team to babysit him almost.
As he is now there isn’t much you could to do him outside buff his recon mode but that’s almost pointless.
He’d need a complete rework.
He’s gimmick is as useful as it can be right now without it being OP. But his whole mythos revolves around sentry mode and tank mode. Maybe they could do something silly like a ult that let him go in and out of sentry at the cost of ult meter (wouldn’t need to be max to use perhaps and based on time?) While buffing his recon mode a bit.
He does have a fixed reload time… It’s possible to do now, if you stay in Recon mode for about half a second (this would probably be increased if they did do this, just have transformations not count towards reload time), then his Sentry mode reloads.
Recon mode is fine… All he really needs for Sentry mode is his spread back. His spread is awful. It’s the same as Sombra’s was before her 10% reduction, but Bastion is meant to be used at medium range. If you scroll up a bit, you can see some math I did on his spread… While not moving the mouse at all, I missed roughly 50% of my shots at just 25 meters away from a training bot, and those things are huge.
Headshots would also be nice, but not really needed…
