I picked up doomfist to try out after his recent adjustments, just for fun. He is super fun to play. However I have found him to be…pretty bad.
I’ve been weighing this out after putting about 10 hours in on him in FFA and a few in comp. I recognize that this doesn’t make me a pro or anything and i have seen him do work in OWL and in high level streams. Never the less his pickrate is very low and no one likes having one on their team. He very rarely does enough to be worth it.
Here are my thoughts on why, but I don’t have any real solutions.
1. Bugs. He still has quite a few and unfortunately the worst offenders are abilities not activating properly and people sliding off impacts without taking damage.
2. long cool downs. Depending on the situation it can be really nasty to be fighting with more than one hero as you can burn all your cooldowns and ammo supply and just be a useless sitting duck with no weapons or mobility. Despite being a hero who was ostensibly a brawler he can’t actually do this, he’s more of a flanking assassin.
3. Big hitbox, iffy HP pool. This makes him extremely weak to snipers, middle range heroes, tracer, whatever
4. Stuns that don’t stun. If you uppercut or slam your enemy, assuming they are looking at you, nothing at all stops them from just shooting you into pieces. You’re both at point blank range. Hanzo is especially nasty right now with his rapid arrow. And you’re huge, they’re not. Plus Hanzo can just leap right on out, tracer can recall
5. Highly telegraphed attacks. Punch forces you to just stand there and charge up, loudly, like a vacuum cleaner. Slam gets the most value out of longer strikes but allows enemies to move easily, even a McRee dodge roll is often enough to get away. Basically all of his abilities are so obviously telegraphed that anyone with mobility can just follow a nice flow chart of how to dodge until his cooldowns are spent and then he can be shot to pieces.
6. Dumb Fire. All his attacks are like dumb fire rockets. You fire them, and there is pretty much no adjustment that can be made after the fact. You either got it right or not. Slam can be rotated in mid flight but you’re landing where you aimed the first time. Dumb fire weapons with travel time are also very susceptible to high mobility heroes just dodging.
7. Highly susceptible to stuns. He’s huge, so its easy to hit him with skillshots (sleep/whipshot/Hook) and other things like flashbang etc.
8. Horizontal punches, allows heroes with vertical mobility to just leap over you.
9. Collisions often are surprising, like it looks like i should fit and I can run through it, but that archway just ate my punch.
This is my short list of heroes and explinations that are strong matchups against Doom Fist, and weak for him.
- Brigitte - Stuns, boops, shield
- Widowmaker - dares you to get close, stops you half way across the map.
- Hanzo - shoots you, cause you huge bro, dodges your punches (hits E, kills you, heh nothing personel kid)
- Gengi - more faster and jumpy than you
- Lucio - dodges all your stuff by being on a wall
- Sombra - Hacks you, guns you down
- Tracer - catch me if you can, lel recall. Even if slammed, i recall
- Phara - Above you except when you do funny tricks
- McRee - Flashbangs and fans that hams
- Ana - Sleeps you. Wombo combos or leaves
- Roadhog - Hooks you, oneshots
- Reaper - Shoots you in the face. Intangibles and chases you down
- Moira - Fades, out self-heals your middleish range left click, is stick thin
- Mei - Freezes you, becomes a block of ice, walls your punches, etc.
so of 27 heroes more than half of them are in an advantageous position against you. Most of these heroes are both popular and extremely meta.
Why? Either he doesn’t have the right kind of mobility, doesn’t have enough abilities to keep up with the faster heroes, or has to stick his stupid big hitbox into dangerous situations to do damage. He’s basically a shotgun character with hardly any shots in his gun.
I just thought I’d try to get a conversation going on what to do to fix him. One of the dangerous things about him is his 1HKO potential, it really makes him frustrating to play against when he is doing well but pointless when he is being countered. This kind of design, IMO, is bad. 1HKO’s are bad for MOBAs as they ruin the ability use experience for everyone and tend to lead to, what essentially is, dive comp. Where everyone just mobs the one guy with as much alpha strike as possible so they can’t use anything useful in their kit.
My first thought was maybe to give doomfist 3 shots of his RMB, but make them do a consistent range and damage, and knock back. This would be less than the 1HKO threshold but be able to be used in sequence with his other abilities.
