u have no idea what u r talking and u r stubborn just like almost everyone here
so i am not talking anymore
just like i always say
plat players KNOW’S best for ow than owl players and people at a really high ratings right ?
funny
I just want to point out here that Win Rates have a lot of value as a metric, but only when combined with Pick Rate information.
Pharah’s win rate is so high because her pick-rate is astronomically low. This clearly puts her win rate into perspective: She only gets picked in situations where she offers an overwhelming advantage.
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Nice rhetoric. Glad to know I wasted my time on a hopeless case. 
Don’t care much about generalisations. 
Ofc. I’m not too surprised. Your argument was pretty awful in the first place if you want me to be blunt. 
I’m not Plat if that’s what you’re insinuating. I haven’t touched that rank since Season 2 lol.
Besides, I firmly believe the game should be balanced off of GM and High Masters stats with occasional references to the lower tiers. I also believe feedback from anyone can be taken into consideration; assuming it is logical and isn’t just some streamer whining like a baby. At this point a bronze player giving feedback is just as valid as a streamer’s player whining and spamming how x hero is broken without clarifying their position whatsoever.
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I think brig is very fun. Both to play as and to play against.
But my opinion doesn’t count, I guess.
Less than 1% of the player population. F the players in GM.
I’m average. My money built this game and my money keeps it going. So unless blizzard is charging them $6,000 per copy of the game the players in GM can shut their pie holes while the devs cater to me and players like me.
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Why is that a bad thing though
Read what I was responding to. It was about ana being stronger as a hero just because she has a higher GM pickrate.
Your opinion doesn’t affect GM pickrate so for that it doesn’t count. It is not factored in the pickrate statistics if you are not GM.
Objectively overpowered is very much a bad thing. 
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Fine I’ll settle for slightly more powerful.
It’s clearly not the case now tho. Zen is by far the most skillful support to play and lo and behold he is by far the worst.
Ahh yes, not overpowered but was the absolute must pick dps in literally every comp for 6 straight months? Ok? I couldn’t escape him no matter what game mode I played, it was awful.
He just feels cheap to me. I feel like his fire rate does sooo much work with compensating for bad aim. It’s so much easier to land shots when adjusting for movement, when realistically, the target hasn’t moved far from where your first shot was. Tack on a stun with an insta kill ability to follow up and you’ve got a cheap@$$ dps. Even the pros have said similar things about him. Ashe is my main dps and she didn’t need buffs. She just needed both mccree and widow to get nerfs (dumpstered) so that she could be considered a viable pick.
Because everything else gets nerf and you r left with 1 must pick support making 0 diversity in an already tiny list of supports.
At this point, even if Brig is nerfed to 20hp and her shield down to 10 hp, people would still complain her being too powerful
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Like all of your posts Titanium, this one is wonderful. There’s just one small thing.
Winrate alone is not a reliable measurement of power, for the reasons you’ve talked about. Winrate in the context of pickrate however, that’s more reliable.
Now while I agree that it’s far too soon to tell if Genji is OP using stats, something can be said about his powerlevel given his high pickrate and his high winrate. The pickrate could of course be caused by everyone trying out the shiny new toy. However, the high winrate when combined with that high pickrate (amongst 18 DPS) means that Genji is being picked a lot, and when you do he’s more likely to win. Mirrors do not effect this on a whole because the mirror match guarantees one winner and one loser, and those stats just cancel out.
In the same frame, we see McCree with a 3% pickrate and a 49% winrate. McCree is clearly not a bad hero, but something I’ve noticed is that McCree is usually run in a mirror match. I have no support to back this up other than what I’ve seen and his winrate, which is clearly bad for a character who’s allegedly so good.
And you’ve brought up heroes like pharah, Torb 1.0 and Sym 2.0 who are nearly universally recognized as bad having the top winrates, but the reason they have the top winrates is because of their niches. They are used exclusively where they can work and are swapped off the second they are countered, something you don’t see in Genji or McCree. This results in an extremely low pickrate with an extremely high winrate.
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It’s just logic. There are three “filters”, if you will, regulating who stays in GM and who drops out.
- Players want to win, so they play the best heroes and climb to or stay in GM.
- Players want to play [hero that just so happens to be good], so they climb to or stay in GM.
- Players want to play [hero that just so happens to be bad], so they do not climb to or fall out of GM.
Thus, the population in GM will be reflective of what heroes are viable and optimal.
There hasn’t really been a time where Lucio was bad. He’s been Meta more often than just about any other hero in the game, so this fits under the second “filter”.
I didn’t mean that as an absolute. Of course the “meta” characters are not going to have 16.67% GM pickrates while everyone else has 0%. You can certainly one-trick sub-optimal characters to GM if you put the time and effort in; I did so with Mercy back when she was hands-down the worst healer in the game prior to her rework. What matters is how difficult it is to reach and maintain GM with that given hero. The easier it is to reach GM as a certain hero, the higher that hero’s pickrate will be in GM. The harder it is to reach GM as a certain hero, the lower that hero’s pickrate will be in GM.
Of course, when working with a data set as large as this one, there are bound to be some outliers, but that doesn’t take away from the overall trends that can be observed from pickrates.
As an example, in season 4, Mercy had a 12% Quickplay pickrate (the highest in the game) and a 13% overall Competitive Play pickrate (also the highest in the game). Yet, when you sorted for GM, her pickrate was dead last of all healers at 3-4%. That’s because GM weeds out the influence raw popularity has over pickrates. Again, there were outliers; there were still Mercy players in GM, but every hero will see at least some playtime in every rank, regardless as to how bad they are in regards to viability.
…Except for Bastion. Fun fact: Bastion is the only character in the game to ever maintain a 0% pickrate in GM for a month.
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In reference to heroes like Pharah and Soldier:76? No, it’s because the other DPS heroes that were buffed introduced or buffed through the roof can do their job better.
Why run sustained damage when you can run burst damage that’s just as consistent and plentiful?
Healing creep isn’t really a thing. While Ana and Brigitte both saw increases in their healing output since season 4 (or release in Brigitte’s case), more healers have simultaneously seen significant reductions in their healing output over that same interval.
Mercy: 60 HPS then -> 55 HPS now.
Moira: 80 HPS then -> 65 HPS now.
Baptiste: 60 HP/shot -> 50 HP/shot.
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What does it say about tanks? Not much.
What it does say is that the enemy team can burn through 1200 HP in ~5 seconds.
It’s not a coincidence that D.Va also has an abysmal pickrate. If damage skyrockets, the tanks that will suffer the most are the ones that need to place themselves directly in front of the damage in a fundamentally disadvantageous position to do their job.
The only reason Wrecking Ball isn’t doing as poorly as Winston or D.Va is that he has the mobility to engage, do his job, and disengage in about one second. Winston and D.Va don’t have that luxury, so they are stuck face-tanking the powercrept damage until their cooldowns finish.
Moira was garbage until she suddenly became meta once, at which point she got a serious nerf to her healing output.
Baptiste was garbage until he suddenly became meta once, at which point he got a serious nerf to his healing output.
The one exception is Brigitte, who was insane upon release, got nerfed, got reworked to provide more healing and was garbage for a while, suddenly became meta and… Oh, would you look at that!
Meanwhile, McCree becomes meta… and rather than getting nerfed back in line, we see other DPS (Ashe and now Genji) getting buffed to his level.
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A character being effective against what is currently effective means that the character itself is effective. You know; the same kind of problem we have when the best counter to an enemy hero/composition is that same hero/composition on your own team.
It means we have a mirror match where that hero/composition is on both teams. That reflects itself statistically with higher pickrates.
If the game was well-balanced and this rock-paper-scissors mechanic worked as it should, then all heroes within a category would have much more similar pickrates than what we are currently seeing. We would see a symmetric bell curve of hero pickrates, not a skinny curve that is massively skewed to the right.
This assertion depends upon the assumption that Supports and Tanks are responding to what is effective and disregards that they comprise 2/3rds of what is and is not effective in a team. It assumes that they are not the driving force of the meta, which is a bold assumption when you physically cannot solidify a meta with just two hero selections unless those two characters just so happen to define the meta. There has only been one meta defined by only two characters, and that was the early Moth Meta, where you could run anything so long as you had Mercy and Zenyatta on your team.
This is only if the nerf is executed poorly so that it does not properly address the issue or if it is disproportionate to the action that was needed. Granted, that describes just about every balance change made by Blizzard ever, but I digress. If a hero is overperforming and is nerfed properly, they drop to a level where they encounter close competition from their alternatives, which means more heroes are viable, which means a healthier game.
Of course, but those interactions are easy to spot and explain. A hero receives no changes, but suddenly becomes good? That’s not the hero themselves being overpowered; that’s them fitting into a composition of five other heroes better than any other hero.
Moira was meta during the Double-Shield meta not because she received any buffs around that time; she just fit into that composition better than any of the other viable main healers.
So yes, you are correct in a few very specific cases that are easy to isolate and document. The vast majority of pickrate fluctuations do not fit that description.
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That’s intuitively appealing, but it falls apart when you scrutinize what “balance” actually is.
Balance is not a single-factor entity. It is influenced not just by the potential power of the hero, but by the power of that hero once limiters have been considered. Not just the hypothetical bang of the hero, but by the buck required to produce that bang. Heroes have high pickrates and can be classified as “overpowered” in GM because in that specific rank, they offer the most bang for their buck.
What’s the “bang”? Influence over the match outcome.
What’s the “buck”? Effort and skill.
Suppose you are a GM player with a finite amount of “buck” (effort and skill) to expend. Your goal is to maximize the amount of “bang” (match influence) to provide the highest chance of winning. Who do you pick?
- A hero with with a high bang/buck ratio?
- A hero with with a low bang/buck ratio?
Once you consider that, it becomes apparent that the most-picked hero in GM is the most-picked hero because to reach the maximum match influence, they are the easiest hero. They are the easiest hero to win with in GM.
That can be explained by this principle:
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Have you seen my other threads? This one is short and concise in comparison.
I don’t do TL:DRs.
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While I agree with everything prior, this statement is only true if we make the false assumption that every hero has the exact same skill ceiling in this game.
For example, there’s a reason why for the majority of the game’s life time Ana has been a much more prevalent and piwerfult Healer than Moira. In these specific ranks, as you also correctly said, the skill requirements of each hero aren’t a problem for any player, because they are all GMs for a reason… Therefore, it would be the wisest for Moira to actually be the top Healer in said skill level, as she can achieve the highest “bang” for the lowest “buck” according to your logic, right?
Well, we can see that’s not true, because Moira happens to have a significantly lower skill ceiling that Ana (AKA the max value can that can be outputted via this hero is significantly higher than that which can be outputted by Moira). This is another important factor, which also happens to be generally applicable to a lot of heroes with lower overall skill requirements in the game, until of course an unintentional META pops up that brings everything on its head.
Agreed 100%.
It says that there has been powercreep across all roles, in such a way that deserves mention and consideration.
That’s honestly not particularly short.
With the one tank ability that can theoretically absorb infinite damage? Nah, Dva sucks because the devs attempts to balance DM have led to a deliberately engineered oversaturation of abilities that go through it, as well as powercreep through Sigma, and many other balance issues. Dva desperately needs a second defensive ability but that’s best saved for another thread.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here, this is more or less my point. Dragging fights out forever is a problem, and they do nothing else, so they get nerfed. The real problem is that purgatory in the dumpster is a convenient solution for blizzard because they’re allergic to the idea of giving them proper offensive utility.
McCree was nerfed. Ashe and Genji were horrifically underpowered for a very long time when compared to DPS that haven’t really changed that much, such as Tracer or 76, who are underrated but certainly not amazing. DPS overall aren’t powercreeping any more than the other roles, there’s just more of them.
The difference is that they’re powercreeping more evenly, and part of that comes down to generally being both relatively meta independent(at least the viable ones) and also exerting such little pressure to the meta that what one picks is kinda inconsequential.