Brigitte was still immensely powerful at the top of the ladder. You have to realize just how much overlap there is between players & strategies in the highest rated ladder lobbies and professional lobbies. Every single professional player is a top ladder player aswell, if something was broken in OWL it’s probably broken on ladder, OW1 Sombra is the only real exception and that’s generally because she required alot more effort to get value on than running a non-Sombra variation of the composition.
The only reason I use “OWL” as my example there is because the statistics are easily accessible. It also applies to Contenders and the very top of ladder.
She wasn’t though. Brigitte was the single most played hero over the course of the 2021 Postseason, her usage rate is significantly higher than Tracer or Sombra’s
Holding off on nerfs and giving her a slap on the wrist at the start of Season 2 is not acceptable for a hero that centralizing. There was no shortage of suggestions on how to nerf her and a vast majority of them wouldn’t affect the low ranks to begin with but Blizzard instead chose to do nothing.
Balance issues don’t exist in low ranks. They won’t be broken because nobody is playing any of their characters to their full potential.
The thing those 3 heroes have in common is that they were all disgustingly broken even in high ranks, they were genuine balance problems and that’s the reason people could climb so easily on them.
Yet if you put a Grandmaster Brigitte player in a low ranked lobby, their impact would still be enough to win more than 90% games regardless of team skill.
The idea that heroes are strong in Top 500 because teammates enable them more is just flat out wrong, they’re stronger in Top 500 because the pilot is more capable.
Even Mercy, the most parasitic hero in the game has enough potential impact to carry low rated lobbies in the hands of a competent player regardless of how good their teammates are.
You’d think after hundreds of ‘Unranked 2 GM’ series made by various high ranked players & pros on various roles & heroes people would realize this.
Okay? That sounds like this confirms what I said about Brig being dominant at OWL and Top 500 and terrible everywhere else.
I’m literally looking at the stats right now, and Brig’s stats for the entire year were intrinsically linked to Tracer’s pickrate. If Tracer’s pickrate fell, so did Brig’s, even with other “flankers” like Echo, Sombra and Reaper being strong picks.
I’ve already addressed this elsewhere in this topic. I’m not covering that again.
…That is NOT how “balance” works.
Balance simply refers to what is the most effective tactic for winning games overall. You can absolutely have characters that are unbalanced at lower ranks simply because it’s nearly impossible to use their counters at that rank. Yes, if a player improves enough, they will be able to win and rank up with literally any character in the roster, but the entire POINT of an “unbalanced” character in low ranks is that that character becomes an easy crutch to rank up WITHOUT that improvement.
Nope. This happened even when those characters were NOT broken at high ranks. For example, Mercy has had this problem happen repeatedly, despite only being broken at high ranks once: during Moth Meta.
If you put a GM anything in low ranks, their winrate is going to be about 70% or more. The number of Bronze to GM streams, even for characters like Bastion, proves that. That is irrelevant to a discussion about how strong or weak the character is.
I said he’s B tier and I stand by that no matter how you percieve him because i go of stats. He can dominate low tier games still in the right hands but the top tier genjis have to switch. That puts him in B tier.
Genji should have his generous ability hitboxes toned down. His deflect has way too high of an effective angle and covers a ridiculous area compared to its visual animation, and his sword’s hitbox length is far too long and forgiving, they should make it so you have to actually have your crosshair over the opponent for it to hit.
I believe you’re referring to the June Joust, where Reinhardt, Tracer, Sombra & Zenyatta were all banned, leading to a Reaper-Echo deathball composition. This was the only time in all of 2021 where Brigitte was not the consensus strongest support in the game and that was the most limiting set of hero bans OWL possibly ever had.
You can go even further back and look at 2020, where Brigitte’s usage rate outside of the Regular Season (46.6%) was second only to Sigma (47.4%), while Tracer’s usage rate wasn’t even half as high (19%).
Which is only ever an issue when a hero is also overtuned in high ranks, if heroes were balanced exclusively for high ranks and around being played to their potential, then there would very rarely be heroes so strong that players could reach high ranks undeservedly.
When Reaper had 50% lifesteal he was a menace in low ranks, but very few, if any Reaper players actually managed to skyrocket into the top ranks the same way Brigitte, Symmetra & Mercy players were able to.
It was only widespread in moth meta. For the last 1-2 years the hero in the position of being too easy to climb on is Roadhog and even then the amount of SR inflated Roadhog players is nowhere near as high as the number of Brigitte, Mercy & Symmetra players when those heroes had the top spot.
The Mercy specific version of this problem can just be attributed to duo-boosting, it’s not the same as moth meta or any of the other examples.
Which top 5 DPS get used by the top 2% of players, out of 18 DPS heroes. Actually doesn’t matter that much.
When compared to “Is the game going to lose/gain 20-50% of the playerbase over bad matchmaking, slow queue times, and Supports that aren’t nearly as fun as other roles”.
But I guess a lot of people can’t really see or refuse to acknowledge how a lack of Support players leads to bad queue times, and bad matchmaker quality.
Also “My favorite hero is above average but no longer top tier, therefore game balance is entirely destroyed” drama is pretty dumb.
The devs really need to get over their “waiting for the perfect nerf or perfect buff”, and get more comfortable with “good enough for now” placeholder changes.
And especially now that OWL is on hiatus for at least 4.5 months. They really should be using this time to “aggressively” be fixing core undesirability issues with Supports.
Which means large scale changes, not trying to use a toothpick to slowly fine tune a core design issue in like a half year.
I didnt talk about that. I talked about his overall state in the game. I tried to reach a conclusion between the people who say he’s op and the people who think he’s weak af because i dont believe either side of that battle is right.
The point I’ve always tried to make is that balance changes do not truly affect hero viability in low ranks. When the overall skill level is lower, individual skill is the biggest decider in who wins.
If someone is good at a hero, it doesn’t matter if that hero is the worst hero in the game, they’ll still be able to dominate low ranked lobbies with that hero.
Only when you get well into Grandmaster does hero viability actually start to hinder someone’s ability to win games on their character regardless of skill.
It doesn’t matter how dominant a hero is in gold, the only thing that could possibly prevent someone from getting value on their hero of choice in Gold is a lack of individual skill.
This is why heroes need to be nerfed and buffed according to their viability in GM & professional play.
Balancing from the top down has historically proven to be the most effective way of balancing a competitive game.
This is something Blizzard has not done with Overwatch. It’s almost guaranteed that if they balanced almost entirely around the highest level with very minor tweaks targeted at extreme outliers in low ranks the game would be in a much better place.