"Genji was so bad before"

Nah. Not really. Pretty sure the general consensus was that he was a mid tier pick, which is fine. Also even if he was, so? What about Sombra, Symmetra, Mei, Torbjorn (kinda), Bastion, Reaper, and even echo at the moment. “Oh those dps characters are just niche heroes” So? Why do they all have to be niche and Genji can’t?

What about D.va? What about Roadhog? If any role is going to be the one that has a character get 4 huge buffs, why not tanks? Tank player numbers are dwindling, and D.va/Roadhog are just ult fodder right now. Why can’t they get a ton of buffs and be, if not overpowered, at the very least viable with/against a decent amount of comps?

“Oh but Genji takes so much more skill than any other character” I know dude. It’s so hard to spam the space bar and right click. You only have a mobility move that damages people and resets when anyone you touch dies, 2 seconds of basically immortality against most people in the front (that you can cancel anytime you want), a shotgun, a mid-long range left click that can deal with torb turrets ez. The ability to climb walls and double jump, and a really good damage ultimate that pairs well with a ton of other ults in the game. It must be so hard for you.

Meanwhile, Tracer, who is another flanker character. Has a much smaller mobility move (while having 3 charges on a 3 second cooldown), no vertical mobility (the most she has is teleporting from highground to highground, the ability to reset herself 3 seconds, a left click that can be really unreliable if you’re not up in the enemies’ faces, and an ult that is hard to use and is hard to pair with things that aren’t grav, and is barely easier to get than Genji’s ult. She has to manage cooldowns much more than Genji does. She also has a lower pickrate (across all ranks on PC) than 11 other DPS characters (5th lowest pickrate in dps), and a negative winrate in every rank except diamond and gm.

I would argue that she is harder to play than Genji is and that Genji’s kit is much more forgiving than hers, but she definitely shouldn’t get 4 buffs at once. No character should get 4 buffs at once, it’s crazy. Everyone would have been much more open to buffing Genji if you introduced the buffs slower, now a lot of people in the community have the opinion that Genji is just a low-skill spam character that people abuse to get wins.

As a side thing, Blizzard was so excited to buff Genji to insane levels for OWL play they forgot to think about how the changes would affect him and the rest of the game. I don’t think Blizzard wanted Genji to be able to ult as often as he can now. Also I saw in the patch notes that they fixed a “bug” where Genji’s deflect sound effect didn’t last as long as deflect. Blizzard, be honest, that wasn’t a bug, you just forgot to change the sound effect and didn’t realize/waited 2 weeks to fix it.

Tldr: Genji didn’t really need that many buffs, if any at all, Tracer is harder and “deserves” more buffs than him (but she doesn’t need it at all) There’s many characters who should have been buffed instead. Blizzard got overexcited and didn’t think before they acted and now many people in the community are permanently turned off to ever buffing Genji in any way in the future

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In the grand scheme of things he was pretty bad. Until the release of Brig he was seen as one of if not the deadliest DPS, since then, he’s been below average. He needed buffs, just not quite as many as he got

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Genji was confirmed to be mid tier so idk why you think this.

But why? Unless you’re a utility dps… There’s no reason genji should be more deadly than any other

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I don’t agree with the first bit, but I agree that if he was going to get buffed, he definitely should not have gotten 4 big buffs at the same time

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He was an ult-bot in high ranks and was only playable with ana.

Most of those are low-skill heroes, except for sym, sombra and echo, and they’re not buffed because pretty much no one likes playing against those heroes.

If sombra became meta, you’d probably have a mass exodus of tanks.

Genji was overbuffed, but half the people here saying he’s a braindead hero would probably drop a couple ranks trying to play him.

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Not many people are enjoying playing against Genji now; does that mean we need to nerf him to the ground?

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Well, he definitely needs nerfs.

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The general consensus was that he was a low tier pick at pretty much every tier of play.

Getting Genji on your team used to feel like the more common version of getting a Junkrat. It was an obstacle to be overcome not a teammate to help with the game with.

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Is there a way to see his pick/winrate before his buffs? I know overbuff has an option for like the past year but I was wondering if it had something to go back in time and see where he was pre-buffs

People say this but I don’t really know why it matters. He was used and was the most effective as part of a synergy in a team game. Considering how many characters we have that can’t even function on that context, or require an entire team working with them, is needing only one other highly picked character to function actually a downside?

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I do not think so. I know you can look at 6 months to see the time comparison (and technically you could figure out the numbers from 5 months prior to the buff using that data and a bit of math), but without doing a bit of math not really.

From memory he was usually 9th or 10th in pickrate at around 1-1.5% (or about 1/7-1/10 of his current pickrate), which is not awful, but man it hurt having him around.

People thinking Genji was the worst hero in the game just shows how coddled the hero has been.

Ult bot? Maybe. That doesn’t change how successfully he could be used though. It’s just bad design and has nothing to do with viability.

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Ah okay, tbf that’s not too bad, def not enough to warrant 4 buffs, maybe just one slight buff to make him less of a bad pick for people who weren’t maining him. I had a friend who played him pre buffs and got a lot of value out of him, but he played Genji constantly, and it is kind of ridiculous that people have to practice that much just to get value out of a character

I am actually going to give you the formula if you wanted to calculate it yourself (I sadly do not have time to do hop on over to overbuff right now).

Basically you have a formula (use this for either win rate or pickrate):

x/6 +5y/6 =z where x is his 1-month win rate/pickrate, y is the unknown and z is his total 6 month win rate/pickrate. You know 2 of these unknowns (x and z) so solve for the 3rd.

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If I did the math correctly, his pickrate prebuff was 3.44% and his winrate was 48.032% which wasn’t that good, that would be 6th lowest winrate now. He would still be the 9th or 10th most picked character now.

by who???.. because when i played genji all ik i was getting toxicity all day everyday

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The devs?

It’s what got me to change my mind about the accuracy of overbuff. Evidently…it’s not very far off

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the devs??? pft serious genji was more like a c tier

why? let me explain

Double shield - was so hard to get a kill just to dive / flank to get someone but shield are still in the way to kill

cc - if you get stun with genji / automatic death… still can happen now

serious genji was a dead hero to play at the time

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Okay well if you wanna go about that sure. But not being the best doesn’t equal bad.

There’s 16 dps. Being number 6 is to be on the positive end

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Apparently, CC only works on Genji and he has no way to avoid it or play around it.

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