D.Va is playable, but still weak enough to be neither balanced nor fun in modern Overwatch

General Discussion
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So strong that yesterday EVERY SINGLE MATCH I saw was an Orisa Sigma mirror match, right? :joy: Also, you say she’s balanced but then admit she requires massive coordination and effort while barrier tanks just require you not to actively throw. That’s the literal definition of imbalance, lol, what do you think balance means if not equal effort for equal results?

Ok, if not straight up extra armour then remove her missiles, put that power back into fusion cannons, then replace missiles with a second, damage type agnostic tanking ability. Something like maybe powered armour, where every cooldown she can activate it to repair her armour maybe (even with low health). Torb talks about upgrading her mech, so upgrade her mech and give her a second tanking ability to work in modern Overwatch.

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62

Yeah no on all fronts. First off I don’t know where you get the idea that d.va needs more flak when no other hero except Mercy and now Brig gets as much people wanting her gone. It goes beyond the point of rational.

Second again dive is more on the state on damage and it being the most efficent way to kill then any one hero. Which is far far more dependent on how quick someone dies to the dps and how good the healers are at keeping them up over anything. Genji blade is much much more of a dive wincon than anything d.va brings to the plate.

Third triple tank again was all about Nano and the best nano targets of the time. Nano anything was and still is stupid and the only way you don’t die to it is cater your team around it. It also didn’t hurt Rein was and still is one of the best Nano targets in the entire game.

If sigma was in the game at the time I can promise you he would have taken the d.va spot. He can shut down alot of the nano targets of the time way easier than D.va can. Not d.va’s fault that the tank roster lacked 3 tanks it has now in a still in present day a painfully limited roster size and Zarya has a bad Soilder ultimate matchup. And when nano visor is the hot it kind of means that you have to cater your team towards it. D.va was a cater towards the meta pick (Ana heals incentivising fat hp pools/ Having a slightly better matchup versus her nano target specifically) nothing more.

Ana 10000% deserves all of the flack from that area as she was what made those comps be theorycrafted and then put into practice in the first place. Triple tank was a Rein (he was the best tank at the time), Ana, and the best nano target at the time comp. The rest of the team was just filler/Good alternative synergies with Ana. It was all about her ultimate enabling the best way to wipe teams and her ability to heal through stupid at the time.

As for Goats I feel like I have been down this road before maybe not with you but with others. But it was a product of the main dichotomy of the games metas through out the lifespan. Pick off comps vs not dying comps. The previous meta was an extreme example of pick offs so naturally it was going to swing back the other way. Dps don’t tend to be part of survival comps as surving isn’t what they do best (even still D.va was still swapped to dps with good success). Triple dps beat goats anyways. But no way would have beaten it if it was Sigma goats. That right there would have broken the game far beyond anything d.va has ever done.

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I’ve been around here for a while. I don’t see it. Genji and DF definitely receive more hate. Pharah too if you count all the people who come here, post their first topic on Pharmercy, then disappear forever. The tanks are also typically quite vocal about whatever CC character is doing well that month.

The tanks contributed a significant amount of the damage we saw in dive. Post rework Dva in particular.

Dva was never about bringing wincons, bar S5 where drowning your monkey in DM basically made tesla unblockable and uninterruptible. Rather she was so good at shutting wincons down that she brought too much value to be replaced. Until the devs deliberately saturated the game with things that go through DM, you could add DM to any meta comp to make it more meta with basically no downsides.

Did you even play that meta? It was about bionade, Hog being the best DPS in the game, and Dva being able to facetank squishies to death, in that order.

You really didn’t play that meta did you? People ran quad tank all the time.

??? I think you’re confusing it with the previous meta. The speed boost was removed by the time triple tank was entrenched.

Goats was only a not dying comp when mirrored. Otherwise it was a “we’ll run over your frontline and you can’t stop us” kinda comp. In other words, it was a pick off comp where the pick was on whoever was standing in front, typically the main tank.

As for Dva’s involvement, it was DM being used to shut down counters to goats, in a deathball meta she didn’t belong in.

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they should undo her first nerf shes got, (i think its her first nerf) and bring back 400armour/200HP

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Really you have been this long and you haven’t seen how any time any change ever happens to d.va the nerf her into a ground crowd gets out there pitchforks? Really?

goats was always a not die comp. Non-goats comps did exist but there problem was they were far far too weak to single damage sources (Widow/Hanzo in particular wrecked alot of the dps that deal with goats) as a result the goats comp needed to switch one piece (usually the d.va) for that one dps that wrecked the enemies counter goats comp and the counter goats comp loses far far more than the goats comp did. Goats comp very existence owes a lot to the overall damage ouput that dps put out and how bad dps are at fighting there own class.

The higher the damage gets the more you need to stack defenses just to live. Look at the after math comps once 2/2/2 got implemented they immediately went to the most survivable dps.

Dps dying to fast to other dps is a problem that is only getting worse and worse. It also is a big reason certain heroes never leave the gutter of unviability.

Guess what that doesn’t really matter as they still have more counterplay to there damage then the dps do. Its far far more easy to deal with Winston and D.va damage then it is dps damage. Much more than Tracer and Genji simply moving backwards can actually prevent more of there damage than doing the same against either of the dps I mentioned.

And guess what you don’t even need to be mobile to do it. Because both weapons aren’t exactly the best on the move. D.va still has a slowdown when shooting and Tesla cannon doesn’t always work that good while jumping. Nothing works 100% of the time of course but there is more counterplay in both there offensive stuff than either of the dive dps through basic mechanics that any hero can do.

This doesn’t even go into the fact that the dive tanks role isn’t actually much more than to bait the enemies into focusing on them while the rest of the team does the work.

What if I told you that tesla being unblockable and uninterupable doesn’t matter when you could be dead to a tracer or a genji individually in the same period of time? Tanks aren’t what make dive go the damage dealing heroes do since again its all about putting all the damage on a target.

Bionade was a huge factor and guess what it was on the same hero that had the other most broken ability of the game Nano boost. Ana was THE meta defining hero in multiple ways . Nano broke the game with how quickly you could wipe the enemy if there comp was not built to survive it and nade broke the game defensively with how much stupid it could heal through. As a result team comps were built around Ana and the best target to nano.

D.va was a follower in that meta as she wasn’t picked because of her own strength (which was greatly overrated) but because the meta wanted fat healthpools and ways to stall out nano on the best targets available. Ana broke the game so hard that it props other heroes up and incentivized other hero picks in both making sure you can utilize bionade and nano targets. Of course they are going to look in the limited tank category which need I remind you lacked Orissa, hammond, Sigma in the pool back then. There weren’t many options to run with the Ana, Rein, Soilder/Reaper (depending on before or after speed nerf to nano), Hog other than Zarya and D.va. Because not running them meant giving up some of the brokeness of nade while also leaving you less able to respond to Nano since dps don’t have an easy out to nano visor or nano blossom.

Even when speed boost was removed from nano that didn’t change the basic concept that it was still a set up the nano target to wipe the enemy team comp and do your best to survive when the enemy does the same to you comp. All it did was change slightly who the best nano targets were.

You are missing the point badly . My point in saying this is why Zarya was lesser played than d.va during that meta if the nano targets of the time were diffrent D.va would be less played than Zarya. Both were fundementally played because of Ana synergies nothing more.

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66

You speak the truth. Even if you can’t spell armor correctly. :wink:

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She needs to be what she was pre nerf, power creep is so real that current soldier that is significantly more deadly than original him that needed to be nerfed due to being OP is not OP. Old OP Dva wouldn’t be OP in today’s game.

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Armour is the Canadian, ie correct spelling :stuck_out_tongue:

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Maybe we should look at the heroes that ignore armor, 1-shot through healing, are undiveable, and play from high ground at range.

“More armor” is not the answer and exacerbates the problem above.

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I can delete the widow if my sides and back are a little more protected from getting beamed from 15 meters away on the lowground while I do it.

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Widows, Hanzos, and Ashes in diamond or above do not die to Winston or DVa period.

There’s always a peel nearby or themselves have an escape ability.

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Back when D.va was playable I was in diamond, and I always killed the widow. The problem is how quickly dva melts now, and how much beams there are in the game making her life impossible by peeling for widow from 15 meters away.

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Tbh I don’t really buy “op d.va” being op back then. The period that D.va got her first real changes were probably the worst time to evalute things for tanks in the entire history of the game. Bionade made every hero tanky and nano was clearly the best strategy. Even after the speed nerf it just moved to Soilder visor getting Nano boosted instead of Reaper and made Rein a slightly worse alternative target. The fact that she was nerfed right then destroyed all tracks for actual legitimate looks at what makes her tick and how to properly balance her.

Even if she did turn out op they should have evaluated her without Ana to see what makes her good or not.

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Nah that’s not the nerf Dva into the ground crowd, that’s the defend every single nerf the devs put out crowd. They completely disappear between patches.

The OG variant as invented by team GOATS was incredibly aggressive. That’s why they used Moira instead of Zen.

Huh? It took a while for Mei to be a thing.

This comes from the fact that tanks and supports right now gain far more value by playing for sustain instead of offense and utility.

Not really. Dive tanks can push into your space and don’t die from a double tap to the head.

A lot of Dva’s damage then came from booster impact+cannons+missiles, as her slowdown doesn’t impact her flight. It’s honestly quite mechanically demanding but it was enough that impact damage had to be nerfed.

A lot of Winston’s damage is actually from landing, from both a melee cancel and the actual impact damage itself.

That’s straight up user error. There are times when this is true, but most of the time it’s to make a singular enemy target very vulnerable to followup.

And said Tracer or Genji could die to you in the same period of time.

But the dive tanks are excellent at doing damage. They’re doing borderline nothing to protect the DPS as they go in; they draw attention and enable followup through the damage they deal.

…? Nano wasn’t particularly overpowered at the time. It was no grav or shatter, and mostly came along as a side effect of needing Ana for bionade.

Dva could win nearly any 1v1 against a squishy by simply flying at them and facetanking the damage. She was absolutely busted.

DPS have most of the mobility the game has to offer, and nanovisor isn’t even that useful compared to nano Rein or nano 100% zarya, especially in a triple tank mirror, which is why we saw those two get the majority of the nanos. Visor itself wasn’t even that great during triple tank mirrors; it doesn’t boost damage beyond a faster reload, and robs you of headshots so all it really does is make aim against fast targets easier, and it’s not like you’re missing tanks.

…? Nano was used primarily to open up the fight on Rein and to help Zarya get grav faster. Nano wasn’t used for intended teamwipes in the same way that grav was. If it was we’d have seen more nanoblades in that era and we didn’t.

Dva was played because she was the second best DPS in the game at the time, after Roadhog.

Zarya was played for grav and her Rein synergy.

Nano synergy was almost an afterthought during this time, considering that most of them would be going to Reinhardt anyway.

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We’ve gotten more Winston Zarya than DVa lol.

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I’ve found D.Va to be very effective in open-queue comp (I’m 3415 SR right now and climbing). She’s great for eating up damage from 3+ DPS heroes, which barriers aren’t great for. There’s also more peel needed in that mode since there are flankers more often on the enemy team. I’m at 84% win with her right now. I know the game isn’t balanced for that mode, but it’s still my favorite.

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Open que is not good, for one reason, everyones stats are inflaited. Everyone gains 200+ sr, or even 500+.

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Not everyone. For every win, there’s an equal number of people who lose. Somebody has to be lower or nobody could be higher.

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Yeah I play DVA because its fun, but she is really weak.
Especially against Genji, she is his free kill and Genji is in every game nowadays.

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I can promise you that it is the nerf d.va into the ground crowd. I think you aren’t looking very hard if you don’t think the nerf d.va crowd is not one of the biggest if not the biggest nerf charcter x groups. Its always specifically about d.va too.

Zen is way more damage then moria though?

Then why did every fight involve teams going for Nano Deathblossom (the meta was called beyblade lol) or Nano visor after the nerf to speedboost. Rein was always the back up Nano target not the main target. Nano visor and Beyblade wiped out teams so hard that other team comps could not exist. It was the fastest and most effective killing method possible by far. Nano rein was only really used if something happened to your reaper or Soilder and he wasn’t ready yet it was always the secondary choice.

The mythical 1 vs 6 nonsense (and it was 100000% untrue nonsense) was never actually a 1vs 6. For starters OP Ana nade was always used to heal d.va in those situations. And second it was a actually a true teamfight scenario but people always left that out to make D.va look op. I think you are again greatly underestimating the amount of anti-d.va exgrations that are out there.

None of mobility matters as the whole point of using an ultimate combo is to use it when its best for the people using it not the people defending it. It doesn’t matter how many blinks you have as tracer if I dropdown and deathblossom you from a place you don’t see. Mobility is the worst possible answer to high damage win con ultimates as it wholely relies your team actually being in a better spot.

The better and more consistent answer is to go with things that those ultimates take time to kill so you have answer regardless of how you are set up. Both the mobility and tanking options will have moments of being punished its just that the mobilty option gets way harder punished against deathbloosom and visor when they are used effectively. Mobility is greatly overrated as an answer as always.

And you are hard underselling visor during that time and vastly overseelling the tanks.

To this day nano is still one of the most reliable wincons in the game. Nano has had more success as a wincon than any other ultimate other than maybe Grav or Shatter. And it was at absoulte peak with Ana’s release. Its not just nade that shaped the meta but the combination of nade and nano.

Ah yes it is the never the dps factor I forgot about that. The reason you didn’t see other heroes is because as I have said ealier that you can’t suvive nano boost on heroes with low hp pools. Nano anything kills you faster as that’s nano’s reason for existence in the first place. You don’t fight more damage output from enemies with mobility as mobility can always be beaten with setups but actual damage prevention mechanics that are found outside the dps class are less easy to answer.

D.va’s damage wasn’t even that great. Its just that it was rough playing other comps into the burst potential that nano brings. You can’t just speed your way out of everything. Mobilty doesn’t solve the problems nano brings. Objectives and points that you have to get to still exist.

The dive tanks damage is also way more dependent on getting in close than dive dps are. At range shurikens actually mean more than stray “sniper d.va” pellets do.

No its not user error. Its the fact you can’t ignore heroes doing map objective things and at some point that leaves one or two of you heroes vulnerable from other angles.

Just because a nerd happens doesn’t any shape or form means it was needed. Bad nerfs have happened to more than just d.va.

Also notice what all of these things you list have in common? You basically have to be in meele range to do them

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