So, by the numbers, we all should agree that Symmetra and Torbjörn are extremely overpowered because of their absurdly high winrate compared to everyone else? We know those two heroes aren’t overpowered, and there is solid arguments to explain their huge winrate.
In the same way, Tracer being strong don’t exactly reflect purely by having “huge stats”. Among those stats, especially the average stats, there is a bunch of people that can’t properly play Tracer, but pick her because they like her, or they want to get good with her. That brings her averages down.
But even when looking purely at stats, there are some outliners on Tracer, like her presence among top 500 players’ hero pools. Most Top 500 players main Tracer, or have her in their top 3 heroes. Just like Symmetra winrates, you can’t just take this and assume this means she is OP. But you need to ask yourself why she have such omnipresence at those tiers. And at least for me, the answer is “she have a very high skill ceiling”, and “that ceiling is above everyone else”.
That gives me the conclusio that she needs a nerf directed specifically to reduce her skill ceiling a bit, without affecting her average gameplay. And I know Blizzard can tinker something like that, because they did a superb job fixing that on Lúcio wallride speed multipliers.
If you want some statistics, you can get it watching 3 most played heroes of top500 players. And you will see there:
~190 Tracer players
~125 Genji players (where only ~40 do not have Tracer in 3 most played)
~63 Soldier76 players (where only ~15 do not have Tracer in 3 most played)
~27 Sombra players (where only ~10 do not have Tracer in 3 most played)
etc (other heroes may be even worse or same)
=> Which shows that in most cases when playing DPS you have to “boost yourself” and play Tracer.
And D.Va as example of second most popular and powerful hero in a game:
~155 D.Va players (where ~105 do not have Tracer in 3 most played)
=> Which shows that in most cases when playing powerful hero like D.Va you don’t need to “boost yourself” and play Tracer.
I can not understand why Tracer is called “high skill cap” hero. Almost half of top500 players are playing that “high skill cap” hero. And only some of top500 players (for example 10 Sombra players) are playing “not high skill cap” hero.
Maybe I’m retarded or something, but being in top500 playing Mei, Sombra, McCree, Doomfist, Torb, Orisa etc is way more honorable and much harder than playing Tracer. Which means that player is flexible or highly skilled on that hero and got that hero’s “high skill cap”, which most of players can’t get. In my mind “high skill cap” should mean that only best of all players can reach it and be on the same level of power with players on other heroes. It should not mean that the more skilled Tracer you are, the more enemies of same overall skill level you can kill in a row. Instead we have 190 Tracer players who “suddenly” love Tracer (and her not the best mechanic) the most and prefer to get better at her.
I am sure that 90% of Tracer players will stop playing her if she will be nerfed or easily countered as many other heroes. That is how meta and solo carry heroes work in online games. That’s not a hero love, that’s SR farming.
I do think she is high skill but… so are most other heroes, in reality, most heroes in the game are just different and require different kinds of skills, but a player can still improve and be better at one hero than other people if they practice a lot and have a lot of experience on them. Tracer is not special or unique in that sense as some people seem to think, if anything sometimes i feel heroes like Genji or Tracer have so much going on that their disadvantages are few, unlike others who have do deal with more issues and more disadvantages in order to be good because they might not have mobility, or defense mechanisms, or self sustain, or whatever.
They already said that they balance everything around Tracer . I don’t think she’ll be nerfed in the future.
Like many have said already , she can be useless if she’s in wrong hands. But if she’s in the hands of a tracer main or someone who has amazing aim she can be very annoying and seem OP
All I ever found even remotely close to this statement is that when they were creating the game, they used Tracer as a baseline for how powerful they wanted every hero to be. I have seen no statements post-launch that Tracer is the baseline for power in the game.
And if they do, that is a terrible baseline hero to do that. She is a glass cannon archetype, those kind of characters have some blatant weak points. Usually balance is done around a “mid-road” character, like Soldier.
As much as I’d like to see her nerfed (Because omg she is annoying and hard to deal with at times), how do you nerf her without causing a massive upset among the community? While I have always argued her damage fall off/spread at mid range should be worse even that I’m not sure would be a healthy change.
We just need more heroes that can hold their own against her and potentially limit mobility/CC.
The stability of balance surrounding Tracer is just as fragile as she is. I know it’s frustrating but believe me it would be better to get more counters to her and reduce her over all effectiveness rather than, nerf her very slightly and have all the Tracer players get used to and over the nerf and still stomp with her and continue to have people complain she’s OP because that’s probably what would happen if she received a tiny nerf.
Also keep “tiny nerf” in mind, if they EVER nerfed Tracee you better believe they’d do the smallest most unnoticeable change because they just don’t want her to be damaged. Even then I still highly doubt they will ever touch her. She is oddly the static character that never changes herself, but by how the meta does around her.
She needs a laser-focused nerf that will affect mostly the top of the chain, while keeping average players (ie, silver-platinum) mostly untouched. Kinda like what they did with Lúcio wallride speed multipliers. There are some suggestions around, but since I don’t play Tracer myself, I have no idea which ones of those ideas are “good”. From the top of my head…
Disclaimer: The list is not to implement them all together, just ideas I see floating around
Raise the requirement to earn Pulse Bomb. That is the most sensible, and would stop top tier Tracers from having a pulse bomb every fight.
Reduce her Blink stock to 2 blinks, but recharge both of them on Recall. This would make Tracer relies on Recall more as an escape ability than an emergency button, thus making her more risky to play.
Remove her ability to headshot. Her damage is already good enough, and because of her huge spread, she can’t really reliably headshot outside the very top tier. This would makes her fight at a closer range (thus, raising risk), and make her less effective against armored targets and HP blob targets, solidifying her role as a backline assassin and reducing her effectiveness as tank harasser.
Recall no longer heal her, but provides a short invincibility period after being used. This is another idea in the “use Recall as escape, not emergency” team.
Lol how are people still complaining about Tracer? Sigh There is so many more real discussions to have right now. Tracer is just fine, idk how people have these random experiences where Tracer is the bane of existence for eternity or something. Lol looking at the above suggested nerfs I can tell this is some sort of joke topic. The suggested nerfs above would make Tracer trash, which is what you guys want. It’s just not gonna happen, as the OWL said Tracer will always be meta. She works, she will always work. Sorry
ComfortablyNumb is correct. You didn’t answer anything. You go on for a paragraph about how statistical data proves nothing (and then saying they are important? what?) and then proceed to say that feelings matter. That opinions matter over raw, scientific data.
Then you wade into the obvious: it isn’t one thing, it is more than one thing, no side can dismiss the other, etc. The hilarious part is where you claim it is all subjective, except it isn’t. Number aren’t subjective. Facts don’t stop being facts because you ‘feel’ like they aren’t, or don’t agree with your perspective.
Are you trolling? I get the sense you are trolling. Well, points for being more subtle than most.
Yes because she is a problem, you might not agree, you might not like people expressing their opinions on the matter, but it is real.
There is a good reason why so many people are debating this issue, and expressing their opinions about it, just in this thread more than 500 people have agreed and i’m sure there are many more. If you want to just dismiss that and call it a witch hunt because you don’t like it or you don’t agree with the issue, thats on you.
This is not a joke topic, and just the fact that you call it that shows your own bias, you are dismissing and downplaying the opinions of hundreds and hundreds of players because you don’t like it. The suggested nerfs you might see are irrelevant, they are just opinions and suggestions of people on how they think Tracer could be balanced out, but in any case the point that is being made is that she is overtuned and needs to be addressed.
The numbers that you speak of are not “raw scientific data” in the slightest. They are statistical data that is subjected to interpretation and may or may not be reliable depending on the source and method of aquisition. If you go to different sites, they have different data, some is similar, but some isn’t, that is why no data can be taken as factual or 100% reliable. Also, what you call “feelings” is actually anecdotal evidence which is important just like in any real case scenario, and when the anecdotal evidence is a big as it is in this situation then it matters even more, if it were just a couple of people getting a couple of comments then it would not have much weight, but that isn’t the case, Tracer is the most debated hero and has been for a long time, and the number of people growing frustrated with her is growing more and more.
Again the numbers that you speak of are not facts, they are statistical data which is subject to interpretation. People like to use numbers to defend Tracer but they usually fail to consider the whole of the numbers instead of just what supports their view. If we are to take numbers, the whole of the numbers then there are many things that point towards unbalance, we could argue that certain things are one way when we know it isn’t. The numbers fail to take in consideration factors that are important, pick rates are influenced by things like player preference, efficiency, popularity, balance adjustments that Blizzard does which changes the “perception of balance”, etc. Win rates are influenced by things like compositions, the skill system that most people seem to hate, issues like toxicity and even potential unbalances.
All in all, the statistical data that we have available shows tendencies and it can be a decent indication of the overall behavior and evolution of the game, but it is not factual, nor is it the be all of what is going on. Which is why different things need to be taken into account such as anectodal evidence, the pro scene, and when it comes to balancing, Blizzard also uses their instinct as developers to make changes.
It is ok for them to not believe Tracer is OP, they have a right to their opinion, but all we are doing is expressing ours, and telling them that we don’t agree and there is a lot that supports that argument, enough to be taken seriously, whether or not you want to, that is up to you, but i promise, that the Tracer debate is not going anywhere until it is appropiately addressed. If Brigitte is the answer, we still don’t know as QP doesn’t count and we will have to wait and see how things evolve in comp, however, by the sound of things, it doesn’t seem like Brigitte is really making things better both in the Tracer argument and the game itself, but again, we have to wait and see.
And they even had to tune her back because she was effective against tracer.
They claimed Meis upgrade was to catch characters like Tracer that would escape her spray, but it doesnt help against tracer. Because of course it wouldnt. It helps if someone simply side steps from a spray, it doesnt help against a character than can instantly be out of range, and then instanly come back and 1 clip you in the face, or rewind when things get too hot for them. Her spray helps more against a deathball taht has no shields than it does against a tracer
Junkrat could catch tracer up close when trying to stall a point or a payload, and even then it was still in favor of tracer, but because junkrats pickrate in GM got above 4% they nerfed him. It had nothing to do with his effectiveness in lower tiers, because there’s always been a onesided pickrate/winrate in lower tiers. ANY negative against tracer, is basically seen as undesirable.
While i’m not sure this addresses the issues the community has with Tracer, is still a good thing (tanks seem to be in a bad place in general lately), just the fact that they actually, finally did something is good and i’m happy about it. I’m hopeful Brigitte will be a good answer to the other issues but i guess we will see when she comes to competitive.
At least they nerf her ability to kill tanks and bastion can survive while on sentry and tank mode. Sym ults too can survive so that’s a plus. I’m still having the feeling that complaints about her one clipping will still exist. Still that nerf is justified and well deserved. It shouldn’t affect Tracer players who tend to stick on squishies which is far more better than sticking a tank.
Yea sticking the bomb to supports is much more effective. Also dw about sym, she is being reworked so in s10 she proll wont even have tele or shield as an ult.
Literaly not the problem with tracer, and not who she kills the most with a pulse bomb, These kinds of changes are a distraction from the real issue. Tracer does too much damage with all the mobility that she has in her favor. The idea should be to scale things to make sense, They doubled down on damage and speed, wile only dropping her HP a fraction of what it should have been.
If the screenshot we got is any indication, I doubt Shield Gen will not still be her ult. One of the key aspects of her is being a strategic hero, and Shield Gen have a huge value on basically creating a secondary objective for the enemy team to attack.
One of Sym’s main issue with her ult was how easy for Tracer to simple blink, bomb and recall regardless of how many turrets you had protecting it. If she can’t destroy it with a single pulse bomb, that brings a lot of more opportunities to defend it.
It would make her a strong pick on second point Anubis because of the shield generator location being brutal. I’m not complaining, Sym needs to find her opportunity to be useful pick in some circumstances. At least she got some loves.