Lot of words warning. Read if you want. If you don’t want to that’s fine just move on. Just wanted to put my thoughts out there. Some of this is also opinion based so keep that in mind(it’s pretty clear what is presenting the facts and what is my own conjecture on the facts).
So hear me out. I’m not in any way saying genji does not require skill to use. In fact he is one of the higher skilled heroes in the game. I’m also not saying he is easy to use at full potential. And I am not claiming he is monstrously OP. My main point here is that when you look at Genji’s kit and see all the shortcuts that kinda diminish skill, it doesn’t look like his skill ceiling is as high as people make him out. And not only that, but the logic of genji really doesn’t fit, so many of his abilities don’t match with the role of type of playstyle he is supposed to have.
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Mobility: Genji despite not being an aerial hero, is the only one in the game that has three different vertical movement abilities with wallclimb, double jump, and dash when looking up. Why does he have wallclimb? Obviously it helps him maneuver the map, but it’s just weird that they decided he should have this ability when really there isn’t a need for it. If he is just getting on slighter higher ground like the high ground in front of the entrance to temple of anubis, then just a higher double jump would work. If he needs to get onto much higher ground then he could just wait for dash, I mean heroes that are much less mobile and much more vulnerable like widowmaker need to wait on a cooldown to reach it, so genji could manage. Especially with the dash reset. It feels less like a neccessary part of his kit and more like padding his mobility, instead of just giving a boost to dash’s mobility or double jump’s height they just gave him hanzo’s ability. I get that it connects the two as brothers, but really? Wallclimbing isn’t something I think of when i think of brothers. Besides it works for hanzo because as a sniper the very high ground is important to his positioning, and he needs something to escape when he can. Genji is better suited in a fight rather than outside it poking with burst shurikens, and he already has a disengage with dash, so it’s weird he has the same ability that is just as good even tho it is significantly less important to his gameplay or how he functions. I’m not saying it’s useless. But I’m saying from a design perspective it doesn’t make sense to throw in another vertical movement ability when he has two different abilities that could handle the exact same job separately and actually have function inside of his better playstyle.
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Dash: Okay this is the part where I can see the most hate coming in. But the reality is dash would be an incredibly skill heavy move, had it been made in a way that requires skill to use to it’s full potential. As everyone knows dash resets on a kill. Except it doesn’t. It resets on a death. Any death. So long as you did any amount of damage in a fairly generous time frame and that person ends up dead, you get dash back. Instead of it being given back to him when he gets a kill on his own, something that fits significantly better to his high burst dps and mobility, he gains back a crucial part of his kit by basically just participating in a fight. And I know why they did it like that. But again I feel like balancing it to be more powerful on it’s own, so that it’s your responsibility to obtain the reset, would all around make more sense than just him doing anything to anyone and then poof another dash even tho he didn’t even know he damaged the mercy when his teammates killed her. Again he is meant to be a high burst damage hero, getting kills himself is not asking too much, especially with his ultimate.
The rest of this has to do primarily with his hitboxes, which sounds like a small thing, but the various hitboxes he has from he model to his weapons to his abilities massively contribute to his performance, and also are major parts to why it isn’t as hard to do things that people think require a mastery.
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Deflect: We all know deflect is broken in a lot of way. But the main thing is his hitbox. We know it is big, but it’s actually massive. It’s calculated that deflect’s hitbox is actually around 65% of reinhardt’s shield. In fact, to scale if rein was the size of genji then his shield would match up perfectly with deflect’s hitbox. So there’s multiple problems to this. For one thing it doesn’t illustrate this at all, on his sides and above him the hitbox reaches significantly beyond what the animation shows, meaning in an intense split second reaction you could have made the right move to throw your flashbang around his deflect, only to be flashed because deflect reached a place outside of it’s visual display. This isn’t the case for pretty much every defensive ability. Every barrier is extremely precise, if something isn’t behind it, they can be hit. Even defense matrix doesn’t have a very generous area around the actual visual that still works. Deflect not only has the single best side effect of any ability in the game, it also has a hitbox wildly bigger than it shows. Now I have my own problems with a hero built around mobility and burst damage to be given a very strong defensive ability, it just seems counter intuitive, but either way I wouldn’t want it gone, after all it is incredibly important to his kit, it’s just personal opinion that it doesn’t make sense on a design level to add that in, mobility is meant to cover the lack of defensive capabilities, so giving him it doesn’t make much sense. The thing I will say is that if deflect has the potential to have so much impact in a fight by reflecting ultimates like graviton(something we see happen in OWL multiple times), then it should be a low hitbox. It makes sense that if you are going to give an ability so much value, that it should have a small hitbox. Especially considering that genji is a small hero with tons of mobility, the thing I would not tie to that is an extremely large barrier that allows him to do both damage and block most damage types all at once when reflecting.
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Double Jump: This ability actually has a major side effect that I feel is completely unjust. Obviously he flips, but he flips, like actually flips, his hitbox literally flips around. This actually hides his head behind his body. Meaning if you are shooting a genji facing you and you hit him while he is flipping, that is likely a headshot you would have gotten, but was just blocked from you. And as we all know, a headshot can be the difference between living or dying, especially when you are being dived by a high burst dps hero like genji. Not only does it give genji brief headshot protection, it comes at no cost. You gain a boost in the air, no delay to any ability, no change in view, and no interupption of things like abilities and primary fire. It’s weird to give a bonus like headshot protection to an ability that already has no negative side effect. I feel like they give up both design and balance sense, so that it makes sense with the animation. Which cosmetics should not take priority over design and balance.
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Shuriken: There’s not a lot to say here. His Shurikens have massive hitboxes. Confirmed by the devs to be 2.5x bigger than hanzo’s arrows. They also have perfect accuracy, travel decently fast, and have almost no falloff damage. Like why? He’s a close range hero. Why would they design it where he can do so much at a range? In close range(where he should be) you don’t need a fast travel speed or a large hitbox on projectiles because you are so close. Not only that but the fact that they have no fall off doesn’t make a lot of sense to how he is normally played. It’s another one of those things like with double jump, where they very unneccessarily gave this thing he does more pros than it needed. If shurikens had a large fall off damage, and had a slower travel speed, and a smaller hitbox, it wouldn’t impact him that much because he is meant to be close range, yet they give him all this stuff to engage at a distance even though he isn’t supposed to be fighting at a distance and that isn’t his role. It’s not like the shurikens need big hitboxes, they have high damage, travel pretty fast, each fire shoots multiple ones, fire rate is pretty good, and the accuracy is perfect on primary fire, they are pretty well covered so giving them a large hitbox seems unnecessary. This all kinda solidifies him not needing that much skill in certain areas. With the size of the hitbox and the speed of their travel, it makes it incredibly easy to use his secondary fire to hit people. Just another scenario where they cut a couple corners to make him that much easier to play.
Like I said the point of this was not to say he is very OP, or that these abilities need to be just removed, because I know he isn’t massively OP and that each ability (except for wall climb) is incredibly important to his kit and removing them would kill him. I’m just trying to spell out that his design should be looked at. Everything he does either makes no sense when it comes to his design or role, like having a defensive ability on a high mobility and dps hero even tho mobility is made as a substitute for defensive capabilities(citing tracer, lucio, pharah). Or his kit is changed in certain ways that only serve to lessen the overall skill it requires to play him (like making his shurikens the second biggest hitboxes in the game, or tweaking his hitboxes so he can deflect things that should have gone around or giving him free head protection).
TL;DR: Genji’s design is weird. A lot of it doesn’t make sense for what he is meant to do. And most of his abilities have qualities that add nothing to the mechanics or gameplay and serve only to decrease the skill it takes to use them. He does have a higher skill ceiling than most heroes, but so many shortcuts in his kit make him easier to play and thus his skill ceiling is not near as high as people like to think. He just moves really fast when he does stuff so it makes it look cool which makes it look more skill heavy than it is.
