Thanks for the feedback over the past few days about our most recent Experimental mode. If you haven’t seen the tested changes, patch notes can be found HERE. This experiment is currently scheduled to end tomorrow (Tuesday, July 28th) at 11:00 AM PDT, but we wanted to provide some insight into our next steps before then.
GENJI:
Genji’s recent buffs have increased his hero pick rate considerably. We’re excited to see the hero getting more playtime, but some of the changes pushed his power-level a bit too far. The tested changes to Shuriken are aimed at re-balancing of his burst potential. We believe these changes are the right direction for Genji and we’ll be patching these changes into live game modes soon.
MOIRA:
The team has been iterating on Moira’s kit over the past couple months and this is the second Experimental mode focused on these potential changes. We have a few main goals for Moira’s gameplay:
We want Moira to be fun to play.
We want Moira to have the opportunity make big game-impacting plays.
We want Moira’s gameplay to feel skillful and dynamic.
The current experiment is a glimpse into just one of the various iterations the team has been exploring to achieve these goals. For this test, it was important for the team to get feedback on the Fade ability test specifically – we wanted it to get used and feel powerful. Sometimes during earlier phases of development it’s more helpful to test abilities at their extremes and fine-tune with balancing after. It’s likely that if we wanted to pursue the Fade ability change further we would adjust the ability’s cooldown or its interaction with other hero ultimate abilities.
That being said, we’re not currently planning to move forward with the Moira changes being tested within the Experimental mode. The team has already been working on a few other tests aimed towards the goals listed above – we have more we’d like to try with her Damage Orb and Fade abilities. We’ll be testing internally over the next few weeks and expect to have another Experimental mode with Moira changes in the future.
We have more experiments coming soon. Game development is an iterative process and your feedback makes a difference. Thank you for your passion and being part of our awesome community.
I’m honestly really glad they didn’t decide to go through with the Moira changes. Like, if she received that buff, I can only imagine how gimped her kit would have to become to keep her balanced with it. The big one was her fade cooldown being increased which would dramatically kill her survivability.
So, all the Moira changes are gone? I found the orb and damage beam changes to be good and not controversial at all.
Also, the 0.75s recovery nerf for Genji adds in a delay after you right-click and animation cancel dash, which didn’t exist before. It makes him feel less fluid and he should maybe get another nerf. Well, let’s just wait and see
Not going through with Moira updates was correct choice. The team was trying to tweak and ability to turn it into something it wasn’t. Fade is an escape tool. using Fade to buff teammates with escape potential/immortality is a little too much for 6 seconds, but then increasing cooldown makes it less useful for Moira as escape. You would have to basically pick what you wanted Fade to end up being, to either keep it as purely escape or purely to buff team. It was an interesting idea, and ingame it was neat, but ultimately regarding future updates or patches it would definitely be over-tuned for better or worse.
