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

General Discussion
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https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/owwc-2018-finals-stats-dva-98-pickrate/

Took a casual scroll through the longest Dva thread I know and no, I don’t see much of an irrational nerf Dva into the ground presence, nor do I see all that many names that particularly hate on Dva every chance they get. One thread isn’t much of a sample size but IME they all look like this.

Moira allows for a more suicidal playstyle; back then you actually had limited heals so you rushed or died. Zen tends to be more reserved to give time for his volleys and discord to take effect. That’s why goats teams reverted to Moira when facing DPS heavy comps.

That predated triple tank.

It never did. Rein was always the primary nano target unless Zarya was high charge.

Nanovisor sucks against tanks.

Beyblade was legitimately good, but predates the relevance of Dva. Nanovisor required tons of squishies standing out in the open and even then people were not stupid enough to do that outside very specific map points like when attacking Hanamura 2nd. Rein was always the preferred nano target over 76. Hell Rein was frequently nanoed during the speedboost era.

Nanovisor sucks so much that nano+primary fire was competitive in terms of output, but with half the ults used.

I literally said 1v1, where did 1v6 come from. As for “true teamfights” this just means anything that isn’t a tight deathball is completely unviable. S3 Dva nerfs were necessary for other comps to be able to spread out more.

As for Dva needing stupid crazy heals, that hasn’t changed at all, which is why I’m so against reverting Dva to anything resembling those days- it won’t actually fix the problem.

I’m in a lot of those threads. It’s nothing compared to most other characters.

Mobility is the worst possible answer to high damage win con ultimates as it wholely relies your team actually being in a better spot.

Being in a better spot is literally literally the whole point of mobility.

Nah, mobility sucked not because of damage ults, but because tanking options were good against mobility and you could stack that on top of the meta damage options. That’s why the tank meta came up next.

Visor has always been mediocre; people don’t notice because most DPS ults are low impact relative to supports and tanks. Spamming tanks has always been good. Even in the darkest parts of the dive meta, EU tendies was all quad tank and there’s a real chance that it would have overtaken dive if Brig was never introduced.

Back when the BenchMob site was still operational they looked into ult wincons in pro play circa the junk meta and it was supercharger by a significant margin. Nano wasn’t that high up. This makes sense, as nano is one of the most unreliable ults to begin with, at least pre health boost and post speed nerf. Now it’s only reliable when used defensively. It’s far better at denying wincons than it is at making them.

You could remove nano entirely and leave Ana ultless and the S3 tank meta would have been exactly the same.

Why bother wasting nano when Hog or Dva would get more done? They are the real reason that mobility wasn’t worth it. You dive them and you just get shot up.

It wasn’t a matter of damage. It was a matter of being to fly at people and simply facetank damage as you slowly ground them down, and win unless something interrupted the encounter.

Dva’s damage wasn’t an issue until post rework.

At the time, both were just about as useless. That’s why Genji fell out of the meta was subbed out for 76 and Widow >50% of the time post mid S5.

And how does this translate to baiting being their primary function? Dive tanks cannot win a sustain war.

And it was absolutely needed. Dva matchups back then were some of the most uninteractive and lopsided matchups in the history of the game. You more or less knew who would die the moment the boosters went off.

It’s been a running trend through most of Dva’s history honestly, just that now, instead of winning nearly all of them, she loses most of them. The former is a balance issue, the latter, a design issue.

Dva’s real issue is that she’s a massive heal sink. It was obvious in S3 during peak armor and peak Ana, which is why it’s absolutely bewildering that people want to revert things that don’t address that at all. A new ability is needed.

And they have the mobility to do so. That’s literally why the boop physics reworks happened.

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See this is what they meant when they said “dva haters”. If it’s a balance issue when she wins every single 1v1 (which is a lie and never happened), then it’s s balance issue when she loses every single 1v1 (except maybe pharah?).

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83

It’s more about perception really. She’s not that bad, but the whole team needs to play differently, and people generally dislike change.

84

Yeah, no, I think we’re done with that nonsense. She’s garbage. Let’s stop pretending that a tank that does less than half the damage and less than half the damage blocking of shield tanks while taking twice as much healing and dying twice as often is ok, please. I get people hate her, but please, it’s killing this game.

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85

A shift of more HP into armor wouldn’t make her OP or anything, but she’s not terrible, is my point.

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86

I mean, I disagree and I’ve literally dropped from hours of daily play to logging in once a week as a result, but so long as we agree on her getting a buff it’s fine.

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87

I like it when the enemy team picks D.Va because it increases my scoped critical accuracy on Ashe.

D.Va has to be a viable tank in every single meta because quite simply, she’s the most fun to play.

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88

Overwatch patchnotes, 2021: DPS queuetimes have hit 90 minutes as we try to fit the last 50 tank players in the world into all the games the matchmaker tries to fill. We noticed 10 of these remaining tank players are still playing D.Va, so we’ve nerfed her DM to one second uptime to correct this. Hopefully this should help with the DPS queuetimes and make YourOverwatch happy.

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89

I don’t see the problem here. A character being overpowered is a balance issue. A character being unplayable if they’re not overpowered is a design issue. I probably should have been a bit more explicit with regard to factoring in the order of events though.

While I’m at it, nearly all =/= every single.

90

I continue to play, knowing that it requires significantly more effort and coordination to successfully play a comp with no barriers. I’m usually the shot caller, so it’s no big deal for me.

It doesn’t mean I want to play without barriers though…I just have enough experience to know how to do it.

And maybe that’s the concern I have with team comps featuring no barriers — inexperienced teams frequently pick tank pairs which lack barriers, yet plenty of experience is required to pull it off successfully unless it’s a fluke.

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But she’s not unplayable if she’s not overpowered. They just have no desire to allow her to be viable. They regret her ability to tank.

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She definitely is.

There’s two parts to this: one is that her matchups aren’t particularly nuanced or interactive, in that there isn’t much room for outplay on either side due to a kit that favors consistency and shutting down outplay, instead of enabling it or raising the stakes. This means that the current state of balance plays a large role in the matchup, so they become very onesided one way or another for a given SR, which translates into a tendency to not stay balanced as the meta shifts(not that she ever was).

The other is that she gets vastly different amounts of value in extremely high ranks that you don’t see anywhere else. By the time she’s not overpowered up there she’s actually unusable elsewhere.

To make matters worse, Blizz tries to balance her by making her a massive heal sink, which causes it’s own problems.

They regret DM, but they do actually make changes, even if they’re too lazy to actually try the novel solutions needed to address her systemic design issues.

She definitely doesn’t quite get the full Sombra/Sym/Bastion treatment.

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#MakeDVaGreatAgain

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MORE POWERCREEP YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

She’s bad because new heroes outperform her? How about we nerf the heroes in question? Isn’t there enough powercreep in this game?

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Dva was never the problem, she was just a scapegoat because DM could eat ults and made the life harder for the dps and that made playing against her “not fun”

So, in reaction, blizzard made sigma which does what dva did in her heyday but even better.

Brilliant.

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96

Nope. She can be balanced, this is the “DM is inherently op even if it’s 100 times weaker than barrier” biased nonsense that destroyed this game. She can and should be deleting damage closer to the numbers that shield tanks delete. If not, then she should be personally tankier to compensate. That’s it. It’s really that simple. The problem dva faced is they kept nerfing her when she was already balanced, as they did with the “piss off dva mains just because we can” goats nerf they gave her as they were banning goats and introducing 2-2-2. Or the “hammond is allowed infinite movement with no cooldowns but dva is not allowed 3 second movement” nerf this year. They do not want her viable, simple as that.

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97

Its like people want Dive to come back lmfao

Thank god she’s dead, Rip in pepperoni.

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Because her problems are just that with her. No amount of Sigma nerfs fix problems that he kit has.

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To be clear, I am pushing for a new ability for exactly this reason. We have evidence that DM has been a problem, that excessive hp/armor is a problem, and that excessive support resource drain has always problem that the other two cannot fix even if OP.

It’s not inherently OP, but if we balance it to be the bulk of Dva’s survivability then yes it is OP, because it’s far too valuable if used for doing other things.

Which nerf was this

Hammond can’t deal damage in such a mode without requiring a cooldown elsewhere, nor does he have DM, so he physically has to bodyblock things if he wants to interrupt them. Boops are supposed to be counterplay and 3 sec boosters completely removed that. What they should have done instead was remove the self slow.

I don’t think that’s a good metric for any tank. You get the highest numbers for that by sitting in a choke and not actually doing anything.

100

What’s wrong? Couldn’t hit two headshots on her Roadhog sized critbox to demech her before blowing your auto-aim ult load too early? :joy: Gitgud.

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