It remains to be seen if this patch will actually warrant being referred to as “balance”. Basically all of the changes are rather drastic, (I personally am predicting Reaper to frick everyone up right the heck up).
Balancing around pros is one thing, but this isn’t even about that, it’s about the bandaid-y, rushed, almost sledgehammer nature of the patch. That’s my impression of it, at least.
PS: Imagine if they adopted the same approach to symmetra’s teleporter bugs and railing interactions. Or the sugar skull above hacked enemies. Or Bastion. Etc. They would have been addressed months/years ago. Too bad those issues don’t have 22x20 million dollars of corporate interest behind them, amirite? Just, you know, the players who bought the game.
If I were blizzard, I’d want to try protect my multi million pound esports scene as well to be fair…
None of these changes were sledgehammer dramatic so far by the looks of it. Reaper needed something to make him a bit more viable, especially as a tank buster. Now he has that.
Armour change primarily benefits Orisa, Hog, Reaper, Sym & Tracer offensively, while giving minor nerfs to Rein/Orisa/Torb/Brig/Dva.
Brig change is pretty self explanatory. It should either drop off the armour, or Rally armour should stack above shields, not below.
Dva nerf is hardly a huge issue for those who play dva well. You just have to be a bit more sensible with it now. It just raises the skill ceiling with the character.
Personally I was expecting much more drastic changes, so was happy to see these.
But calling the D.Va nerf a raise in skill celling sound dumb to me. They just flat nerfed a hero that wasn’t meta relevant as other tanks this or last season. And they don’t give the players a “reward” for playing a medicore strong hero now, like they did with Zarya after they nerfed her Grav range.
All they did was to enable now a sniper/Mc Rightclick meta, because with the buffs to Reaper, nerf to armor and nerf to D.Va Winston isn’t a good pick anymore, when you can have Reinhardt.
The Reaper update is absolute bull. It’s basically impossible to play a tank at a lower level now, so gg anyone who focussed on playing tank to get up the ranks. He’s basically unkillable without at least two people on him now, at least at the lower levels. I’m genuinely considering just quitting because I can’t even hope of playing any of the heroes I love to play anymore, since Reaper will dominate every match & I’m a tank main.
Glad you asked. With the Reaper buffs, there’s really only a few counters. No tanks can outplay him anymore.
Rein can only charge him since Reaper now has enough healing to survive against a Rein that’s being supercharged or mercy damage boosted even while pinned in a corner, though a nano is a bit too much for him to power through.
Dva having matrix nerfed means she can no longer be relied on to defend anyone from Reaper and is thus food.
Hog’s entire survival before was entirely based on getting the hook, but rarely he could survive a Reaper if he was lucky with headshots. Now Hog has no chance to survive a Reaper at all.
Zarya is just food. Her bubble blocks 2 shotgun blasts. If she’s already sitting at 60+ charge, she can potentially survive against him, but if she’s lower than somewhere around 40, it would take aimbot level tracking to put him down.
Orisa already lost probably 90% of the time to Reaper. Now it goes up to 99%.
Hammond literally only had the ability to kill him by forcing him through mines or off ledges, so at least for Hammond it’s almost the same matchup.
Winston is like a health/ult battery for Reaper and previously could only deal 40 damage per second to Reaper while he healed 84 damage per second. Now that goes up to 140 healing per second and means that if a Winston ever meets a Reaper, the reaper goes into the next fight with Blossom and full health.
As well, this means that Reaper teleporting behind Bastion is basically instant death for a pocketed bastion while giving the Reaper full health.
Brig can’t fight him off now and the battle ends with a full health reaper walking away from a corpse.
Doomfist combo now is unable to kill Reaper and relies on him getting the initial punch to splatter him.
As for the rest of them? It changes the game so now Tracer and Gengi are the only ones who can reliably duel him without headshots. With headshots, Widow, Hanzo and Ashe are basically the only things that can do it. Pharah of course still beats him, but now even with direct impacts, her and a Rein can no longer kill a Reaper before the Rein dies.
Blossom is now a win condition. Reaper in the middle of a team now heals more than twice what Trance does. It’s now a requirement to stun the Reaper out of his ult or lose the fight. The problem is that every stun in the game together don’t do enough damage to break a Zarya bubble. Sleep Dart(5)+Shield Bash(5)+Rocket Punch(100)+Flashbang(25)+Hook(30). Meanwhile, you lose 4/5 members of your team before they can react. Oh. Excuse me. I forgot Charge. Charge can still stun and kill him. You just trade your main tank for a DPS, effectively losing the team fight anyways, but feeding a ton of ult to the enemy. Hope you remember the old Beyblade meta when Ana darts buffed speed because it WILL come back.
Brig’s ult is very simple to fix without having it be useless like it will be now. Make it so that if there is more than a certain threshold of armor from Inspire, Brig can no longer gain ult charge. It would work like when Hog uses his ult. He doesn’t get ult charge from using his ult to kill. I suggest 250 which is enough that Zen and Symetra can both keep their armor under their shields and still have a tiny bit of armor sticking around between the rest of the team. Having a Zen, Zarya and Symetra would basically negate her ult for the entire game, and having that player switch to someone else and having them use their ult wouldn’t work. Sure, it would screw over Mystery Heroes and No Limits, but the game isn’t balanced around either of those. While we are at it, revert the Brig bash nerf. With potential to literally never have an ult for an entire game, it’s a bit harsh to make her unable to deal with a Tracer.
Dva’s Defense Matrix nerf is incredibly bad. I’ll copy my reply from another thread to here.
What that means is that Dva is now useless. If she clicks her Matrix to defend against a Hanzo arrow and Reaper ults, her team gets melted and she gets staggered.
The armor nerf is a universal tank nerf. It makes all tanks worse and with as bad as it already was for tanks, we really didn’t need another nerf. In particular, it hits Rein and Orisa particularly bad. Against a Soldier, Rein currently requires roughly 30 bullets to kill. With the nerfs, Rein effectively loses 4 bullets worth of health at point blank range. It’s not that much, but it’s the difference between 1 melee and 2, which actually does matter if Rein has to put his shield down to raise the hammer.
Orisa is still a weak character with no ability to defend herself most of the time. She really doesn’t need another nerf. She has a great ult. Everything else basically boils down to teaming her up with a Bastion. Without a Bastion, she’s a crappy joke with a great ult.
Blizzard doesn’t want to have another GOATs meta, but the way they are shaping it up, the meta is going to be Rein, Ana, Reaper, Zarya, Widow and Lucio. Rein is to allow Reaper to pressure their Rein safely, Ana is almost the only thing that can shut down a Reaper, Reaper is the center piece, Zarya bubbles and Grab Surge, Widow to focus their Reaper down and Lucio to give Reaper some speed during his ult. This sounds like “Protect the King” which is fun to play, but terrible to watch.
No, a failing OWL S2 will just put OW next to HOTS, seeing what is happening with OW and blizzard I’m pretty sure the game is already on notice. Devs are trying to get at least some money for this IP because activision greed doesn’t have bounds and at some point they will just make a mobile OW because game failed to meet their increasing financial expectations. Activision is strongly considering making its business as China friendly as possible because this is where money is, not in casuals buying a game once and then even expecting a value for spent money.
If On low ranks you have a lot of opressive heros that are easy to play and hard to counter… The new players will get bored and we never will get more comunity.
I don’t mind playing Goats to be honest but haven’t played much of it during comp matches but the armoured part of the PTR notes makes armoured heroes a bit more useless now. How are they supposed to protect support players if the dps players aren’t able to do so from e.g. snipers? Guess shield tanks wont be played as much now hey? Guess DVA is useless now too?
Except it was a sledgehammer to GOATS. I don’t recall seeing back-to-back balance patches like this in the past. If someone has even a mild understanding of how GOATS comp works, you can look at the Heros “balanced” in this patch and understand this was done strictly because OWL S2 is right around the corner.
I find it hilariously ironic that the Devs constantly tout that METAs are “good” for the game and that if you don’t enjoy METAs, then you should play Mystery Heros.
Except when that META could impact OWL viewership, then suddenly this META is “bad” and they scramble to rip it down as fast as possible.
And they weren’t even slick about it. It’s a joke.
Except that it is. Blizzard knows that the OWL viewers don’t want to see GOATS vs GOATS, every single match, every single round. This patch was aimed at making sure that doesn’t happen.
I think believing that it’s anything other than that, is delusional.
According to Activi$ion, META is fine…but only when it doesn’t impact OWL viewership. If it does…then it’s not fine.
I’m not denying that there us an OWL influence in this decision, but it’s not the only influence. The playerbase were screaming here for months for these changes.
that’s the thing that bothers me.
How these forums have turned owl into this scapegoat where every single problem is caused by it.
Even tho i’m sure that without goats we would still have one patch every few months with very little changes.
I mean, what does this forum want?
Reaper buffs? Check
End goats? Check
More patches? Check
Patches that change more than numbers? Check
Yet these forums are still crying.
No wonder jeff at one point asks “What do you even want, people?”
lol, he’s allways been good in potato ranks, he’s just not popular because he’s bad at higher ranks, literally nothing changed for reaper except he’s going to be even easier in potato rank.
i mean if you can’t make reaper work now in potato rank you couldn’t probably even play brigitte.