This is not a Balance post.
This is a set of Qualitative fixes for these heroes design, would solve a lot of the frustration with the heroes, and make them way easier to solve their tier list issues across ELOs. And overall, just skyrocket how much fun people are having in Overwatch.
That said, these hero adjustments will still need some number tweaking on buffs and nerfs to be Balanced. Fine Tuning. But you’d be doing that anyways.
But it solves most the Gameplay design headaches in the game, in a way that makes the hero more “Balance-able”, and overall less frustrating to play against. With more knobs and dials for to fine tune the heroes.
Note, yes the formatting is messy.
- Tanks Passive - All CC and Status Effects reduced by 33% by duration and effect.
- Solves most the frustration Tanks have with CC spam.
Kiriko - Suzu: Instead of Immortality; All single instances of damage received above 75 damage, is reduced to 75 damage.
Baptiste - Immortality Field: Instead of Immortality; All single instances of damage received above 75 damage, is reduced to 75 damage.
-Problem: People really hate Invulnerabilities. But you want them to be there to block big single instances of damage. i.e. Suzu blocking Junkrat Tire.
-Solution: Make it so that it blocks single instances of damage, but does almost nothing to rapid fire weapons.
-Result: Content Creators will be losing their minds with this being the best patch ever.
• Hanzo: Primary arrows do less headshot modifier at longer ranges. “Headshot falloff at range”.
- -Problem: Most the complaints about Hanzo landing a oneshot was when it’s from a really long range, and he almost accidentally got a kill. But also kinda limited by “projectiles don’t have damagefalloff at range”.
- -Solution: Don’t change the base damage, change the heashot damage.
- -Result: Content creators have now officially started a religion to praise the devs.
Hanzo: StormArrow ammo reduced to 3, at 50 bodyshot damage each.
-Problem: It was always dumb to have an ability on a oneshot hero that rapidly did 300 bodyshot damage. Much less Hanzo stans acting like it’s the only ability in the entire game that can’t be comboed with primary fire. (i.e Hog hook is weak, it only does 30 damage…)
-Solution: Make it so he can’t deliver more raw bodyshot firepower than Reaper or Sentry Bastion… because Hanzo doesn’t have to literally kill a Tank to get away from one. Why do I even have to say this?
-Result: Hanzo is officially fixed, retains pretty much all of his intended gameplay loop, and he’s still fun, because mobility is almost always fun. You just gotta surgically trim out the bad parts.
- Widow: While using Grapple. If Widow takes 15 damage or more while using Grapple, it cancels the grapple and heavily reduces her horizontal momentum. Cut the cooldown on Grapple in Half.
- -Problem: Hey guys, we should dive the Widow. Okay cool. Well that didn’t work. And that’s assuming she’s not getting pocketed like crazy.
- -Solution: If Widow is getting shot at, she doesn’t get out of jail for free. For compensation, add a “for fun” buff. At worst put her back up to 200hp, so it doesn’t hit mid-low ELOs as hard.
- -Result: Grapple shots are badass, and you get more of them. But Widow has to play with her team more, and be more restricted in her positioning. Like literally everybody else has had to do against a Widow for the last 7 years.
- Junkrat: Indirect damage is reduced the further Junkrat is from the enemy player, when the explosion goes off. Direct hits are unaffected. Make the Tire have 75 health, but 50% faster movement speed vertically when climbing walls. (Possibly make it so the mine does 75 damage in the air, and 120 damage when deployed)
- -Problem: Solves the ranged spam issue, but doesn’t hurt pre-firing while rushing forward into combat. (This is a TF2 Soldier rocket mechanic, look it up). Also a LOT of people don’t like Riptire, qualitatively. Also it’s been kinda cheese that he could just spam two mines at people and get a “skillless” cheese kill.
- -Solution: Make it so spam isn’t that useful, usually meaning less RipTires, but direct hits aren’t affected. Make Tire Squishier, but have more fun skill expression.
- -Result: Content Creators will mention this, but your mid-low ELO players, and more casually involved Variety Content Creators will be popping off.
- Pharah: Indirect damage is reduced the further Pharah is from the enemy player. Direct hits are unaffected, when the explosion goes off. Much faster fuel regen on the ground, Much slower fuel regen in the air. Can side-dodge in the air on a small cooldown by pressing a direction and crouch.
- -Problem: Spam is bad. PharMercy damage boosted spam is worse. Permaflight gives a lot of mid-low ELO players migraines.
- -Solution: Reduce the effectiveness of spam, in a tried and true TF2 Soldier kind of way. (This is a TF2 Soldier rocket mechanic, look it up).
- -Result: Content Creators will mention this, but your mid-low ELO players, and more casually involved Variety Content Creators will be popping off.
Cassidy - Magnetic Grenade: Hindered just lowers the horizontal range traveled by mobility abilities to 1/3rd the usual horizontal distance. Primary Fire Falloff range increased by 10m.
Cassidy - Homing Grenade: Alternatively, just keep it as-is, but it doesn’t affect currently active mobility skills, like Rein charge. It just blocks casting additional mobility skills. Primary Fire Falloff range increased by 10m.
Falloff range increased by 10m.-Problem: Hindered is really annoying. And my bad for suggesting it, but to be fair I never intended it would block active mobility skills, or do a lot of damage. Thought the focus was just make it a little easier for Cassidy to line up headshots.
-Solution: Make Hindered less annoying. People like focusing on the Revolver. So that.
-Result: White doves fly out of the patch notes.
Mercy - Damage Boost: Can’t boost headshots at long range
-Problem: It’s difficult to balance ranged burst damage, especially a pocketed Widow.
-Solution: Permanently solves that issue… Now range limits… are limits.
-Result: Most ELOs wouldn’t have even really been using this much, and the ones that do hate it. So they’d love that it’s gone.
Mercy - Rez: Literally the same OW1 PVE Rez, where it puts a bot on the player and it autorezzes. But just swap the bot out for a hologram of Mercy (i.e. Repurposed EchoMercy variant) or some other VFX Magic Spell. But the trick is the Hologram has 200hp, and it doesn’t move at all. And the autorez has a long deploy time. (i.e. 1.75sec or 2sec) Then just play around the with HP values and bot-deploy-cast time.
-Problem: A lot of people really don’t like Rez, and the tech to make it even somewhat legit is really glitchy. A lot of Mercy players really don’t like Rez, because they gotta stop doing the mobility thing, and stand still like a target practice dummy.
-Solution: Easy fix, just make it a deployable that can be destroyed. Throw some pretty VFX on it, and make skin-specific VFX, and you’d even make some extra money off of this.
-Result: Generally a lot less people will be aggro about Mercy. She’s way easier to balance across multiple ELOs, and this ability will be usually less useful at high ELO because people have better aim.
- Mercy - Guardian Angel: Just give them back their 1.5sec GA already sheesh. Heck, maybe even go wild and block the current GA mechanics, and allow for “Legacy GA” in the options menu as a different control scheme. I don’t really see the harm in that.
Bastion - 1.5x headshot multiplier. Lower base damage by 1/3rd. A little tighter spread.
-Problem: BRRRRRRRRRRRRRR spam can feel a bit cheesy.
-Solution: Make it so that he can still do it, he’s just gotta aim more.
-Result: I know most Tank mains would be happy about it.
- Orisa - Primary Fire: Higher headshot multiplier at closer ranges. Lower headshot multiplier at medium and long ranges.
- Orisa - Gallop Passive: Walking forward and not shooting or lessing go of the forward button, increases Orisa movement speed from +0% to +50% over 3 seconds. (Basically the Okami game’s Ameterasu run)
- -Problem: Orisa’s playstyle is maybe a bit too sedentary. And it’s literally a Horse, with no additional mobility besides SpinSpinSpin.
- -Solution: Headshot multiplier being stronger at close range is both good skill expression, and encourages a more aggressive frontline playstyle. And the mobility to actually close that gap and get into close range.
- -Result: Orisa is less boring, and a lot more fun. And a lot of people who hated Orisa, will now probably love Orisa.
- Symmetra - Secondary Fire damage also charges up Primary Fire and and boosts the charge speed on Secondary Fire. But Teleporter is on cooldown for 10sec at the start of the match. (Only in Comp)
- -Problem: She’s the only close range hero with a gap closer that is very easy to kite against. And she doesn’t even necessarily have firepower when she gets there. But generally a lot of her “power level” is limited by her Roll-Out cheese.
- -Solution: Any kind of weapon damage damage boosts up the charge speed, and all weapon damage is boosted by the charge level in some way.
- -Result: Well the gap closer is still highly telegraphed, but at least she doesn’t have to gap close necessarily. Focusing on secondary fire, is still very valid. Dunno if she will need to go back down to 200hp with this though.
- • LifeWeaver: Can’t use lifegrip through enemy barriers.
- • Brigitte: Can’t use repair packs through enemy barriers.
- -Problem: Poke has a lot of downtime. High durability comps also have a lot of downtime, before the FPS part of the game kicks in. You know what doesn’t? Dive. You know what the overall limit to your game design is. How difficult it is to kill overly durable compositions.
- -Solution: Remove the "pocket a teammate even though they are in or behind an enemy Winston bubble.
- -Result: Top500/GM is generally more happy when Dive is dominant. So yeah. More happy people. More good influencer stuff for the game. Also might be easier to make people enjoy playing Brig/Weaver, if you don’t have to be so cautious about their design.
- Sombra: Hacking an enemy player from Stealth takes an extra half second of cast time. 20% faster movement speed while stealth.
- Now that she’s back to being much more of a DPS powerhouse, we can shave off some of the highly annoying aspects of the hero, and in trade, she gets “Fun by definition” mobility.
In case Hog doesn’t get that Tank Passive:
- Roadhog - Breather: “Healing” is initially received as Green Health. At full health, instead of increasing maximum health, it converts existing white health, into green health. Then as the Green Health decays, it heals Hog at the same rate as the decay.
- How to Fix Roadhog: Green Health
An extra I’ll put down here:
- Everybody gets regen, but with limitations, and overall midcombat bulk heals are reduced by some large fraction.
- -Problem: Generally, “make sure compositions don’t get too durable” is your upper limit for most things. And will all the heal spam flying around, it’s hard to avoid too much of it at high ELO, without making lower ELOs feel like there’s not enough healing.
- -Solution: Here’s how you could solve the “there’s too much healing”, while generally making everybody happier and less ragey aggro about it.
- Reduce big heals by 20%-ish. Hero specific, not a one-size fits all. Probably leave Supports that do 55hps or lower alone.
- Increase healing speed on teammates, where the teammate hasn’t received damage for 5sec, by 50%. (i.e. Team Fortress 2 “Crit Heals”)
- Here’s the tricky part. It takes 5 seconds of not taking damage for this TankDPS Regen Passive to kick in. And it heals 20% of the Hero’s MaxHP per second. So in 10 seconds, they are back to full.
- However the catch, is that benefit is split into 4 pieces.
- Each teammate you are nearby (within 20m range, through walls), give you 5% of that 20% regen speed.
- -Result: You’ve gained a ton of room away from the top end of “Too much durability” and “Teamfights last too long”. But in a way that most people will be happier with. Also it makes the game way more accessible to people coming from other FPS games, or games similar to Overwatch where this is a standard feature. Healing isn’t much fun, if there’s no danger. It’s just tedious boring downtime for everybody. So cut down on the mid-combat heals, and pump up on the out-of-combat heals.
- -I’m basically just ripping a mechanic out of DarkTide called their Coherency system. It works really well. But also Paladins and Gundam Evolution both had this.
- -Oh and one more result. Supports, with more “free time” get to actually participate more in the fun parts of the game. Imagine that.
Extra - Streamer buffs -
Doesn’t really do much, but it would generate a lot of free “word of mouth marketing”, because these sorts of changes would be rather sentimental.
• Genji: Shuriken Damage increased by +2 (For primary fire only, not alternate fire)
- -Problem: Literally he’s a really fun hero, and high ELO players want to play him more. And honestly, who the heck was reliably landing 3x headshot + melee combos below Masters, on a reliable basis?
- -Solution: Just put it back. It’s not gonna make the game dramatically worse for anybody, but a lot of people will be ridiculously happy about it.
- -Result: Content Creators will be losing their minds with this being the best patch ever.
• Reinhardt: Just give him back the 300 pin damage
- -Problem: I don’t know why this was ever a problem. It’s high risk, with high counterplay.
- -Solution: Put it back.
- -Result: Flats will certainly be happy about it, but he’s also one of the most popular Tanks in the game. So there’s a lot of people who would be hyped about this.
Mercy - Valkyrie: Any player Mercy has healed in the last 2 seconds, gets 25hp when casting Valk.
Because apparently it’s hard to code the beam not breaking, or the visuals are off. Who knows So just make it kinda like a really tiny/restricted aura heal. It’s 25hp, it’s not much, and it would usually only affect 1 player, but it would emotionally make a big different to Mercy mains. Just trust me on this.
- Doomfist: Just put him back to where he was in OW2 beta (as per GetQuakedOn), and fix bugs.
- I don’t really understand Doom that well, but I don’t see the problem with this.
- https://twitter.com/GetQuakedOn/status/1724510773970338080
- https://twitter.com/GetQuakedOn/status/1650562977769086999
Beyond that, if you’re still reading down this far. I got my other rant posted over here. Where I explain that “Balancing” based on winrates. Is both wrong for Overwatch qualitatively, financially, but even the math is incoherent gibberish, if you really look at it.
https://twitter.com/GreyFalcon_OW/status/1724194443727949956
