To start off, I don’t believe that Torb is overpowered or game breaking right now. However, I do think that his health pool is too large for his style of play.
Torb’s primary fire is a high damage, fast traveling projectile that does not suffer from any falloff damage. This in combination with his 18 shots per clip and job to set up turrets makes Torb get a lot of value from sitting in the backline. He can safely set up and repair turrets and spam his gun down long sight-lines for easy shield break, damage, and kills. This brings up the question: does Torb really need a very large health pool as a DPS?
Torb has 200 base health and 50 base armor. He also has overload which lasts 5s and has a 10s cool down. Overload is already an amazing ability that acts like a mini nano increasing movement speed, fire rate, reload speed, and armor by 100 instantly. 100 armor is not a small amount of health. 100 armor is the maximum armor that can be applied to a character from Brigitte’s rally. When Torb uses overload at full health his health pool reaches levels of a tank with 200 health and 150 armor for a whopping 350 health with the benefit of damage reduction from all that armor. If used off cool down (I know it rarely is), Torb can have overload and all it’s benefits active for 33% of the time he is alive!
Now let’s compare Torb’s health pool to other DPS characters. The five DPS heroes with more than 200 health are as follows: Bastion, Doomfist, Mei, Reaper, and Torb. Bastion is the only one of those besides Torb who has armor, but Bastion gets shot so much because he cannot move when he is at his most dangerous so his health pool is understandable. Mei, Doomfist, and Reaper all have 250 health and no armor. What do all three of these heroes have in common in their play styles? They all want to play very close to the enemy and as a result take much more damage than other DPS so it makes sense that they would have bigger health pools and healing abilities (shield generation for DF). Does Torb really fit into this group? Does he play so close to the fight that he takes much more damage than other DPS do? You could say he is similar to Bastion, but Bastion can’t move at all when he is at his most powerful. When Torb is at his most powerful during overload he moves faster and still has a bigger health pool than Bastion.
The way I think this can best be fixed while keeping Torb viable is by reducing his base health to 150 health and 50 armor or by reducing the armor given by overload to 75 or 50.
I know this was a long post so if you read it thank you and please don’t come for me in the replies. I don’t hate Torb or want to see him be a bad character but I think with all the nerfs to sustain and damage recently Torb now stands out as far too tanky for a DPS.
tl;dr:
With all the nerfs to sustain and damage Torb now stands out as an extremely tanky DPS which doesn’t make sense considering how much value he gets out of playing safe in the backline. To compensate for this his base health should be reduced to 150 or the armor he gets from overload should be reduced to 75 or 50.