You would expect that from them wouldn’t you as that is what a balance team from any other company would have done. This is the OW balance team though and it seems like they have a really bad history of releasing patches that come full of bugs and take forever fixing those bugs. Whatever happened to the Blizzard polish they were so famous for because it feels like they don’t even try to do that now. Now they just release whatever they have and then take their time to fix whatever it is that they screwed up.
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I think the underlying design choices are terrible and make it harder to balance the game then it should be.
No. I don’t.
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every single competitive game rn is imbalanced jsyk. league, valorant, super smash, apex legends, street fighter. idk
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AHAHAHAHA they rolled out DPS buffs. Good grief. The hits simply do not stop coming.
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All of those games listed are way more balanced than this and at least they try to be balanced. (As a side note, I think Smash Bros got its last balance patch at the end of last year so it is stuck in the state it’s in balance wise.) The balance team at OW say they see our reactions to their experimental cards and take that into account, but from this patch alone that is obviously not true otherwise they wouldn’t have released those changes especially scatter 2.0.
Balance and matchmaking……taking the blame for everything since like 1990
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Remember them ignoring the problem characters like Brig and Bap and his lamp and just totally not doing anything to address the problems they create head-on. I remember. Let’s add role queue and ruin the game, let’s add Brig to hard counter Tracer and then never realize that as a support she doesn’t actually work. Let’s add a lamp device that negates every form of play imaginable that also has no real counterplay to it.
Yes Tracer is a problem character too but she’s never going to be fully and properly nerfed and we remember what happened last time they ‘nerfed’ her by adding a whole new hero that subsequently caused a chain reaction of problems, GOATs, Role Queue, 5v5. All because they can’t balance Brig, not Tracer.
Forum Moderator Note: Removed some bits that were edging perilously close to trolling.
Yes, the balancing is good.
Mistakes happen, many of those things you mentioned were mistakes but,
This current balance patch is a joke, there’s no logic behind it nor was it a mistake, the Cassidy buff just got jammed through after it had previous backlash the first time around, no one wanted Storm Arrow to be buffed and most people who wanted Rein to be buffed, wanted him to be buffed through charge cancelling and not being able to instant-kill through his ultimate
Not to mention, none of these three heroes were underperforming by any means, there was no justifiable reason to buff them
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Hanzo and Cassidy were the last that needed buffing.
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All these changes to DPS looks fun (especially hanzo). But my playtime on DPS is like 5 hours whereas my playtime on support is >500 hours. And this is due to absurdly long queue times on DPS even in quickplay. Priority pass does nothing and the ‘estimated time’ is a lie for some reason and only for the DPS role, it always ends up taking 2 - 3 times longer to find games. So this balance change only allows me to enjoy playing rien and moira but I’m a bit scared to face hanzo even more now as tank or support. Especially with wall hack, I think I’m going to see myself dying to random hanzo arrows even more now. But even better because I won’t even see the hanzo anymore when the storm arrows hits me even when I’m behind cover :’)
Hanzo’s change looks fun to use, but unfun to play against, so I can’t tell if it’s good or bad for the game. I still think people are overreacting to cassidy’s mid-air roll.
Strong bias towards hanzo and cree based on the pattern, so I am starting to main these heroes.
Been pretty fun so far
OW2 is going to be the same design philosophy that drove OW1 into the ground, only the game is going to be rebuilt from the ground up with the philosophy in mind. That was made extremely clear when they declared they are removing 1 tank from the game and making the game more flank friendly (which is hard to imagine given the clown fiesta even at GM that current overwatch is.)
Unless that do a complete 180, OW2 will be legendarily bad balance wise.
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They’ve made balance mistakes before certainly but I think the team is generally competent. Their decisions are based on internal metrics that the community isn’t privy to. And even the public metrics suggest that Cassidy and Hanzo needed buffs.
I get cassidy needing buffs…but hanzo? He wasn’t affected by the hitscan fall-off revert and I see him in >70% of my games already especially in quickplay. So I’m not too sure if he is really that under-powered to where buffs were warranted.
If anything, I think the reason hanzo got buffed was because it was a cool extension to his ability which gives him more skill expression. And less to do with him desperately needing a buff to become more viable.
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But what about heroes with worse statistics?
Bastion, mei, symmetta, sombra just to name a few.
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Not their finest moment, I’ll admit 
I lost it when they nerfed Sombra when she literally had the lowest win rate in every single rank.
Depends where you look. If you are looking at Balancing for GM, Mei’s win rate isn’t awful.
Bastion though… oh man, the buff they would have to give him to make him work there.
idk if you really looked carefully at the stats (which can be flawed especially when a hero has small pr) but Mei months back had worse winrate in that rank than Cassidy so you don’t solely balance by looking at “numbers”.
Reaper and Sombra also fall in throw category, meanwhile Symmetra is crazy strong in certain maps.
You look at the meta which is Ball, the character who Mei is / was supposed to counter (with her slow). She does nothing to him, which means to me that she is useless and has no niche, so I wouldn’t mind something to make her less terrible and clunky
when they stuck with infinite tp nerf, that was THE moment that I gave up on balance for this game.